Tough

No matter how fun it was for me to pick up the alternate cover for Lana Del Rey's Chemtrails Over The Country Club, the floodgates still haven't fully opened for me to chase down a bunch of her records. Still, I didn't hesitate to order her latest single.

I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about this latest song, Tough. It's a collaboration with some hip hop artist that I'd never heard of before, Quavo, and I kind of expected it to be a bit underwhelming. I mean, how far was I expected to push my musical boundaries, and how much could I take?

Fact is that after a couple of listen, I really liked this song. Maybe it was the timing of it, because I'd just started reading Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove book shortly after the song was released, and the opening song lyric of "Tough like a scuff on a pair of old leather boots" really set the mood for reading that 800 page epic. I ended up realy loving Lonesome Dove (one of my favorite books that I read this year), and Tough is my soundtrack to that reading experience. The two will forever be tied together in my mind.

I'm not sure if this song is going to appear anywhere else, or if it is considered a Lana song featuring Quavo, or a Quavo song featuring Lana...whatever... I'm just happy to own this song on vinyl and it didn't end up as a digital only release.