Every year in August, there’s a week when the heat breaks and cicada calls supplant the sounds of parties and outdoor barbecues, signaling the imminent departure of the sweaty, sultry dog days. Each year, when that week arrives, I slip on the Doors’ “Summer’s Almost Gone†to try and finish the job; to send the hot season packing once again. The song is a strange outlier in the Doors catalogue, a stuffy, starched-leg blues track that floats almost entirely thanks to an army of piano and organ overdubs from keyboard player Ray Manzarek. The temptation to read too deeply into the lyric “When summer’s gone, where will we be?†allures. Was Jim Morrison celebrating the coming of autumn, or lamenting the death of the Summer of Love, or predicting the end of his own life? Did he know more than he let on? Did he know nothing? The Passion of the Woodstock era, the grisly milieu of murder and war that snuffed the hope out of the ’60s, looms large as we now end another optimistic decade in cold sweats. Maybe everything we build is meant to break. Maybe stability is a carrot dangling on a stick, driving us forward while dancing enticingly out of reach.
Lana Del Rey is a fascinating character, a composite sketch of ill-fated Hollywood starlets and freaked-out rock stars. She weaponizes the imagery of Americana against itself. She embodies both glamour and danger, sometimes in the same frame. Del Rey might “fuck you the fuck up,†or she might implore you to be kind to your fellow humans. She makes lush music about love and sadness that has, incrementally with each album, come startlingly close to matching the effortlessness of her image, graduating from the languid pop of 2012’s Born to Die to the slowcore textures of Ultraviolence and the glacial trap pop of Lust for Life. With Norman Fucking Rockwell!, an hour of contemplative folk-rock tunes and lovelorn piano ballads coated in the flavors and the lore of the ’60s, Del Rey completes the tapestry she’s been sketching out since breaking through in 2011 with the ethereal, dour “Video Games.†It’s an achievement worthy of the constellation of classic rock gems it counts among its influences.
Rockwell contains a few withering rejoinders to the bad-idea crushes of “Video Games.†The title track is a headshot: “Goddamn manchild / You act like a kid even though you stand 6’2†/ Self-loathing poet, resident Laurel Canyon know-it-all / You talk to the walls when the party gets bored of you.†Lana lyrics used to wince about falling for hot idiots, but “Norman Fucking Rockwell†absolutely destroys an unnamed partner too in love with his own smarmy, intellectual shtick to gather that it drives people away. In these new songs, Lana switches from the passenger seat she occupied in “Video Games†to the role of the driver, using what she learned in years of rocky rides to steer toward a better, longer, stranger trip. This time, as “Love Song†coolly states it, she’s the star burning through you. Rockwell is a succession of gratifying pop-album inversions that work almost purely on the depth of imagination of Del Rey and producer Jack Antonoff, the latter of whom is finally starting to make good on the pop-industry clout his work on Lorde’s Melodrama brought about.
With Antonoff, Lana has created a song cycle that blends elegant melodies with instrumentation that swirls dizzyingly underneath her voice. Muted pianos and gorgeous strings evoke wind and water. The electric guitar in “Fuck It I Love You†lumbers about dramatically, like a drunk on a dance floor. “Venice Bitch†is a nearly ten-minute psychedelic rock workout that’s implausibly captivating all the way through, in the same way the old side-long jams like the Doors’ “When the Music’s Over†posit a simple idea, and then pile on juicy solos. “Doin’ Time†is a faithful cover of the Sublime hit and the closest thing to a single the album dares. Woozy pacing makes for more than just a bummer in the summer. Lana has arrived to plunge a knife into the heaving throat of August, mourning strained relationships and failing connections just in time for hot-weather fling season to fizzle out. “Mariners Apartment Complex†tells the story of a beau who isn’t trusting enough to open up. (The inversion of the “Norman Fucking Rockwell†chorus of “You’re just a man / It’s just what you do†in the “Mariners†refrain of “I’m your man†is absolutely delicious, and she also keeps the pronouns in “Doin’ Time.â€) Later, tumult transforms into longing on “California†and “The Greatest,†songs that pine for a person fading into the singer’s rearview.
Beneath the surface messaging, Rockwell is an encyclopedia of rock-and-roll legends, and often tragic ones. Comb the lyric sheet and you catch references to Mama Cass Elliot, whose famous cover of the jazz classic “Dream a Little Dream of Me†is flipped in “Fuck It I Love Youâ€; Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys in “The Greatestâ€; and John Lennon in the “War is over if you really choose†line in “California.†(Elsewhere, there are nods to Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?,†Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover,†and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House.â€) It’s not just fan service. These are artists who went looking for America and found the dream lacking. Dennis Wilson was a great songwriter also remembered as the Beach Boy who brought Charlie Manson around; John Lennon came to the U.S. believing he could help end the Vietnam War using star power and became an unwitting enemy of the ruthless, vindictive President Nixon. The memories of their stories threaded into the knitwork of Rockwell adds historicity to the ambient feeling of doom clouding the record. They were fucked then, as we are now.
Because Lana is a merciful hostess, Norman Fucking Rockwell sends us away with a glint of hope. “The Greatest†might advise that “Nobody warns you before the fall,†but “California†shows you how to avoid the cliff: “You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are / … You don’t ever have to act cooler than you think you should / You’re brighter than the brightest stars.†“How to Disappear†imagines a future for the singer as a writer hiding out in the quiet of the rural West Coast, like Joni’s free-spirited canyon ladies from 50 years ago. Our modern monsters may change, but our dreams don’t. Everybody wants to secure a place to find rest, and people to be at rest with. Norman Fucking Rockwell doesn’t ever locate the storybook American life it pines for, but the quest is a thrill ride of its own.