Cover albums tend to reveal more about the artist recording them than about the songs being covered. The choices (which songs, and crucially, how) are a kind of self-portrait. When Nuno Freitas chose four Lana Del Rey songs from three of her most celebrated records and ran them through a 1960s surf pop treatment, the pairing raised an immediate question. The songs come from Born to Die: The Paradise Edition, Ultraviolence, and Honeymoon, three records that together cover most of the emotional range Lana has staked out across her career.
And the genre he’s working in is The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, breezy harmonies, carefree spirit, the sound of postcard summers. On paper, these two worlds have little to say to each other. Born to Surf is Freitas‘s argument that they actually do. Lana Del Rey’s music runs on a very specific kind of gloom. Cinematic melancholy, Hollywood sadness, whatever label fits: the point is that the mood is structural, load-bearing rather than decorative.
The answer, across Born to Surf, is more interesting than a simple genre exercise would suggest. Rather than ignoring what Lana’s songs are about, Freitas runs them through a tonal shift that strips the melancholy from the instrumentation while leaving the melodic bones intact. And what you’re left with is a set of songs that sound like summer and feel, quietly, like something else. That gap, between the sunny surface and the undertow you can sense but struggle to touch, turns out to be the EP’s most compelling feature.
“Ride” opens with the unhurried momentum of an early-morning beach. The guitar work sets a pace that rewards patience; the vocal sits above the arrangement with a clarity that Lana’s original, cinematic and expansive as it is, rarely allows. In the Lana version, “Ride” is about dislocation, about being untethered and finding that beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. Here the dislocation is gentled into something closer to drift, pleasurable rather than unsettling. Which of those it ends up being depends on what you’re bringing to it. I lean toward discovery, though I’ve thought about it more than a four-minute surf pop track probably warrants.
“Brooklyn Baby” extends the morning into midday, the tempo loosening slightly, the harmonies doing the kind of layered work that makes the 60s vocal pop reference audible and earned. The Lana original has an irony to it, a slight self-awareness about its own nostalgia, and Freitas retains enough of the melodic structure that the irony echoes somewhere underneath the bright arrangement. This is the EP’s most purely pleasurable track, the one that asks the least of you and delivers the most immediately. It’s also the one where the cover concept clicks with the least resistance: “Brooklyn Baby” in Lana’s version already has a certain retro warmth, and the surf treatment feels less like a transformation and more like a natural extension.
“West Coast” shifts the temperature. The rhythm accelerates, the mood darkens slightly relative to its surrounding tracks, and the arrangement introduces a contrast that the earlier songs were carefully avoiding. This is the version of the project where the beach at sunset becomes the beach at dusk: still beautiful, differently charged. The backing vocals carry more weight here, and Freitas uses them to create the kind of tension that surf music at its best always contained under the cheerful surface. A significant portion of the great 60s beach records were about longing, about things that escape you, and “West Coast”” understands that. It’s the track where the project stops being just clever and starts being genuinely interesting.
“Music to Watch Boys To” is my favorite track on the EP, and it closes things at full tilt: the most energetic moment here, an ode to the afternoon hour of a beach day when the party is fully underway and the idea of leaving seems genuinely absurd. The original Honeymoon version of this song is slow and knowing and a little nihilistic, which makes Freitas’s choice to turn it into a breezy pop anthem something close to radical. It lands. The arrangement has momentum, the vocal commitment is complete, and if you’ve been sitting with the EP from the beginning, the closer functions as a genuine release of accumulated feeling.
Freitas describes Born to Surf as a dual homage (to Lana and to surf music as a genre), and fair enough. But the more I sit with it, the more the interesting thing seems to be something slightly different: how much these two traditions share once you strip the mood away. Both are obsessed with a certain imagined America. Both circle back to the same coastal geography, the same sense of something slipping away, the same nostalgia for summers that were probably less luminous in reality than they feel in retrospect. Freitas found the overlap and built four songs inside it. Some of the questions that raises, he answers. The ones he leaves open are the reason I’m curious about what comes next.
*This review was made possible by SubmitHub
