With its song titles borrowed from Neil Young and its lyrical nods to Joni Mitchell, Norman Fucking Rockwell! is an album immersed in Laurel Canyon’s late 60s singer-songwriter scene, an inspiration that finds its fullest expression on Mariners Apartment Complex, a beautifully sullen, icy update of said scene’s folk-based style. Lana Del Rey at the 2016 Outside Lands Music and Arts festival in San Francisco in 2016. The height of Lana Del Rey in Stepford-Wife-as-pop-star mode, National Anthem pitches her blank vocal delivering satirical sex-and-materialism lyrics – “Money is the reason we exist, everybody knows it” – against jarring musical euphoria: a skyscraping chorus, a string arrangement with a hint of Bitter Sweet Symphony about it.
But it’s hard to be cynical while it’s playing – just a piano and voice, it’s the model of elegant simplicity. Hope is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – But I Have It (2019)Ī cynic might suggest that, from its title to its lyrics (“24/7 Sylvia Plath”, “spilling my guts with the Bowery bums is the only love I’ve ever known”), this is a song that teeters on the verge of self-parody. Like Dory Previn’s Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign, Lust for Life is haunted by the 1932 suicide of failed actor Peg Entwhistle: like the relentless pulsing synthesiser in the background, the allusions to it add a dark undertow to what initially sound like bullish assertions of strength from Del Rey and Abel Tesfaye: “We’re masters of our own fate.” 13. It’s jazzy in the sense that a torch song is jazzy, but – beyond the parched, reverb-heavy guitars that recall Mazzy Star – the most obvious influence is John Barry’s Theme From Midnight Cowboy, echoed in the lovely descending vocal melody. Lana Del Rey’s favourite song from Honeymoon, apparently because it was “jazzy”.
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