timing.” Though artists like Billie Eilish and
Ariana Grande have taken the creation of
pop music to a more informal and impulsive
place — Eilish recorded her debut album with
her producer brother Finneas O’Connell in his
childhood bedroom, while Grande wrote most
of Thank U, Next in a weeklong blitz — Del Rey’s
approach seems even more casual. “She doesn’t
follow any kind of plan beyond what she feels is
right, and it works every time,” says Millett.
That includes the cover of Sublime’s sleazy
1996 hit “Doin’ Time” — essentially the
“Summertime Sadness” of the Long Beach,
Calif., ska band’s discography — recorded
out of pure fandom, yet somehow a perfect
complement to the album’s beach bum vibe.
“We were involved in executive-producing
the [recent] Sublime documentary because
their catalog is through Interscope, and Lana
was talking about how big a fan she was,” says
Janick. As it happened, her earliest producer
was David Kahne, who had worked with
Sublime in the ’90s. “So she ended up doing
that cover, which turned out amazing. But then
she felt like it fit the aesthetic of the album.”
The album title was just something she
came up with when she randomly harmonized
the name of the American illustrator while
recording “Venice Bitch,” though she
recognizes that she and Rockwell — an idealist
whose cozy depictions of Boy Scouts and
Thanksgiving turkeys graced magazine covers
for half the 20th century — have both explored
big questions about the American dream in
their work. And then there’s the artwork she
has been using for the record’s singles: bizarrely
casual iPhone photos that feel a bit tossed-off
because, well, they are.
“Every time my managers write me,
‘Album art?,’ I’m just like, send!” she cackles,
pantomiming taking a selfie. “And they just send
the middle-finger emoji back to me.”
THE WEEK OF OUR INTERVIEW, JUST
a few days after two consecutive mass shootings
took place in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio,
Del Rey recorded a song called “Looking for
America.” She hadn’t planned to write it, but the
shootings affected her on a “cellular level,” as she
phrased it in an Instagram preview, which also
included a sharp disclaimer: “Now I know I’m
not a politician and I’m not trying to be so excuse
me for having an opinion.” Over Antonoff ’s
acoustic guitar, she sings softly, “I’m still looking
for my own version of America/One without the
gun, where the flag can freely fly.”
The quiet protest song is a move you can
hardly imagine her making five years ago. It
wasn’t until Lust for Life, she acknowledges, that
she felt brave enough to have an overt political
opinion. “It is quite a critical world, where
people are like, ‘Stick to singing!’ ” she says.
“They don’t say that to everyone, but I heard
that a lot.”
With that sense of permission has come a kind
of peace and an acceptance that evaded Del
Rey in her early career; she has never indulged
her critics, but it’s nice to be understood.
“Sometimes with women, there was so much
criticism if you weren’t just one way that was
easily metabolized and decipherable — you were
a crazy person,” she marvels, noting a shift in the
perception of female pop stars that happened
only recently (one catalyzed in large part by her
own career arc). She recently recorded a song for
the soundtrack to the upcoming Charlie’s Angels
reboot with Grande and Miley Cyrus — stars who
also have faced criticism for the ways in which
they don’t conform to the expectations of women
in the spotlight.
Her newest songs are some of her most
personal, particularly the album closer, “hope is
a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have
— but i have it” (a title only Del Rey could pull
off ). It also hovers anxiously on the margins of
the #MeToo movement, though never in such
broad strokes. “It was staggered with references
from living in Hollywood and seeing so many
things that didn’t look right to me, things that I
never thought I’d have permission to talk about,
because everyone knew and no one ever said
anything,” she says in a tangle of sentences as
knotty as the lyrics themselves. “The culture
only changed in the last two years as to whether
people would believe you. And I’ve been in this
business now for 15 years!
“So I was writing a song to myself.” She
exhales deeply, sinking back into the sofa. “Hopetruly is a dangerous thing for a
woman like me to have, because
I know so much.” Del Rey
pauses. “But I have it.”
Del Rey has been thinking a
lot about hope and faith lately.
She has been going to church
every Wednesday and Sunday
with a group of her girlfriends;
they get coffee beforehand,
and it has become something
to look forward to. She likes
the idea of a network of people
you can talk to about wanting
something bigger — just another
extension of her fondness for
pondering the mysteries of the
universe. (Fittingly, she studied
metaphysics and philosophy
at Fordham University in New
York.) “I genuinely think the thing that has
transformed my life the most is knowing that
there’s magic in the concept of two heads are
better than one,” she says.
That has crept into her music, too. Del Rey
says she hadn’t realized until recently how
isolating her creative process had been for so
long. These days, studio sessions feel more like
cozy jam sessions, according to Laura Sisk, the
Grammy-winning engineer who worked closely
on the record with Del Rey and Antonoff.
“Something I love about Norman is how much
of the energy of the room we’re able to record,”
says Sisk. “We often don’t use a vocal booth,
so we’re sitting in a room together recording,
usually right after the song was written and the
feeling is still heavy in the room.”
Even the cover of Norman Fucking Rockwell,
Del Rey says, was designed to cultivate a sense of
community. For the first time in her discography,
she’s not pictured by herself. She’s on a boat
at sea, one arm wrapped around actor Duke
Nicholson (a family friend and grandson of Jack),
the other reaching out to pull the viewer aboard.
As she explains the idea, Del Rey rifles through
her sizable mental rolodex of quotations and
offers this one from Humphrey Bogart by way
of Ernest Hemingway: “ ‘The sea is the last free
place on earth.’ ” A place, in other words, where
you can finally just be you.
Del Rey says her album covers tend to be
self-fulfilling prophecies — whatever energy
she puts out tends to shape the next chapter of
her life. She’s eager to see how this one, with its
open arms and sense of adventure, manifests
itself. “We’re going somewhere,” she says with
a mysterious grin. “I don’t know where we’re
going. But wherever it is, my feet are going to be
on the ground.”“SOMETIMES WITH WOMEN,
THERE WAS SO MUCH
CRITICISM IF YOU WEREN’T
JUST ONE WAY THAT WAS
EASILY METABOLIZED AND
DECIPHERABLE — YOU
WERE A CRAZY PERSON.”
AUGUST 24, 2019 | WWW.BILLBOARD.COM 53PREVIEW 2019
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