Lana Del Rey – “Blue Skies” (Irving Berlin Cover)
Lana Del Rey’s life is always eventful, but it’s especially eventful these days. Consider the events of the past couple of weeks. There was the announcement of Lasso, her forthcoming country album. There was the Grammy-night snub and the subsequent gun selfie. There was the Super Bowl, where Del Rey hung out with Taylor Swift and then got knocked to the ground during the victory celebration. That should be enough! It’s not. Today, we get Lana Del Rey’s new recording of an old Irving Berlin standard.
Lana Del Rey’s new song is really a song that’s almost a century old. Del Rey is one of the many artists taking part in her friend and collaborator Jack Antonoff’s soundtrack for the new Apple TV+ series The New Look, which features current artists singing songs from the World War II years. We’ve already heard Florence + The Machine’s “The White Cliffs Of Dover” and the 1975’s “Now Is The Hour.” Now, it’s Lana Del Rey with “Blue Skies,” on which she’s backed by Bleachers members Antonoff, Mikey Freedom Hart, and Evan Smith.
“Blue Skies” actually comes from long before World War II. Irving Berlin wrote “Blue Skies” in 1926, and it had its debut that year in the Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical Betsy. Legend has it that the opening-night audience demanded 24 encores of that song, and when Belle Baker forgot the words, Berlin, sitting in the front row, sang it instead. Charles Kaley’s Knickerbockers released “Blue Skies” as a single in 1927, and Al Jolson sang it in The Jazz Singer that same year. Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, Ella Fitzgerald, and Willie Nelson have all released famous versions of “Blue Skies,” and Data sang it in Star Trek: Nemesis. Lana Del Rey’s take on the song is considerably less jaunty than most of the past ones. Below, listen to the Lana Del Rey and Knickerbockers versions of “Blue Skies.”
The first three episodes of The New Look are now streaming on Apple TV+.