#136, “Tomorrow Never Came,” Lana Del Rey (feat. Sean Lennon) (2017)

150 Favorite Songs: #136, “Tomorrow Never Came,” Lana Del Rey (featuring Sean Lennon) (2017)

Some songs are just tied to a few good days. Here’s one of them.

2017 was a weird year for me. I had started the year the same way I had been living since 2013, under contract with both Texas Monthly and Fast Company, which was an enormous amount of work but which also paid enough that we were able to get by on my income alone while Kat was in grad school. Then, at the end of 2016, Texas Monthly got bought by a new owner, who brought in new leadership, and a few months later, someone at Fast Company went over their contracts, realized they were paying some guy in Texas for work they could probably squeeze out of people on staff, and struck that line item from the budget. And Donald Trump had just become president. It was a stressful time for me personally and also for everyone else, for different reasons.

I made a push to pick up more freelance work, and it paid off. That summer, while Kat was in Los Angeles on a fellowship with HBO, I was hired by a business magazine to profile a program called Defy Ventures that operated mostly in California prisons. It was a neat organization that taught incarcerated folks entrepreneurial skills they could apply upon release. The organization was graduating a class, which involved a ceremony, inside the Pelican Bay maximum security prison, in Crescent City.

Crescent City is at the very tip-top of California, and the closest airport is PDX in Portland, where my high school friend Jason lives. I hadn’t seen him in a decade, so I decided to make a week of it—I’d fly into Portland, spend the night and the next afternoon up there, then rent a car and drive down to Pelican Bay that evening, to report from the prison for a few days. From there, I’d drive the car down the coast to L.A. to spend a few days with Kat before flying home.

I spent a good eighteen hours in Portland, and then headed south. Pelican Bay was a very intense place to be, as you might imagine, but the glimpse of it, and of the people who were incarcerated there, was fascinating. The group I was part of consisted of entrepreneurs and business owners who served as mentors for the incarcerated members of the program (the language of the program was “EITs,” which stands for “entrepreneurs-in-training”), plus me and a reporter from BuzzFeed, there to observe. I don’t remember who most of the mentors were, but I do remember that Doctor Bronner—he of the famously wordy soap bottles—was one of them. (He looked like you probably think a guy famous for selling hippie soap looks.)

I’ll get off this tangent and onto the song in a minute, but first, because this has lingered with me for years now: One thing I appreciated about the program was that it emphasized that the distinction we so often prioritize between violent and non-violent offenders is often a fake one; on the first day, we played a “step to the line” game where the facilitator would read a sentence, and everyone would step toward the line if it was true for them. “I’ve never been in a fight,” for example, with the intention of reminding both groups that the only difference between the prisoners who stepped to the line and the mentors and reporters who did was that the prisoners got caught. It gave me a lot to think about, and I still keep an eye on some of the EITs I met in the program, to see if they built their businesses when they got out. A few of them have.

After I left Pelican Bay, I got on the road. I wasn’t in a hurry, so I decided to take the 1, the gorgeous Pacific Coast Highway that I hadn’t had time for the last time I’d driven up from Southern California to Oregon. Back then, more than a decade earlier, I was on tour, and time was of the essence—getting from Oakland to Eugene, Oregon will take you nine hours on the fastest route, and when you have a show at seven o’clock, there’s no time to sight-see, so I missed a lot of the beauty of the California coast.

But when you’re going to spend two days in the car either way, the difference between a 13-hour drive and a 17-hour drive is negligible. I got on the highway and put on a new record to keep me company. I always liked Lana Del Rey, more or less, but as a veteran of the online music criticism discourse wars of the early 2010s, I found her a bit exhausting, too. But her whole vibe is very “drive down the coast, just to do it,” and she’d just released an album called Lust For Life, so what the hell?

The album was classic Lana Del Rey (song titles include: “Summer Bummer,” “Coachella—Woodstock in my Mind,” and “God Bless America—And All the Beautiful Women In It”), and it didn’t really grip me until I hit “Tomorrow Never Came.” That song, though, with its slow, loping acoustic bass and gentle guitar flourishes, felt like the way you want driving by yourself down the length of the Pacific Coast Highway to sound. It’s nominally a breakup song, but also a little bit of a Beatles song, which is only accentuated by the fact that the second verse—the guy’s perspective on the breakup—is sung by Sean Lennon, doing an impressive impression of his dad. I built a little playlist around it, a short handful of songs that sounded right alongside it, just enough that I’d have some variety as it came back, over and over again, to “Tomorrow Never Came,” which I’d sing along to by myself before pulling over to look at giant redwoods or the Pacific Ocean crashing against cliffs.

Sometimes being alone is a bummer, but that week of getting from Portland down to Los Angeles, with stops in Crescent City and San Francisco along the way, wasn’t lonely at all—or maybe it was, but in a healthy, meaningful way, lonely in a way that aches the same way that Lana Del Rey and Sean Lennon’s voices ache when they sing “you said you’d meet me up there tomorrow / but tomorrow never came” in the chorus. Alone in a way that felt significant, that felt more like spending time with myself than despairing the fact that there was no one there to share it with.

Those are good moments, when you get them. There are so many different ways to feel, and they’re all valuable. There’s something really special about getting to feel the sadness of heartache without being heartbroken, just because you’re alone and in a new place and the scenery is so stunning that it’s a little heartbreaking just to know that the world contains that much beauty, and you’re not in a hurry, and you’ve got a new sad song to sing along with before you’re on to the next thing. I think about that week a lot, and when I do, “Tomorrow Never Came” is the song in my head. I’ll keep it.