Norman Fucking Rockwell! by Lana Del Rey
Norman Fucking Rockwell is the sixth studio album and fifth major-label record by American singer Lana Del Rey, released on August 30, 2019. The first singles from the album, "Mariners Apartment Complex" and "Venice Bitch", were released in September 2018, followed by "Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – but I Have It" and "Doin' Time" in 2019. The album title was announced in an interview with Zane Lowe for Beats 1 in September 2018. The album was primarily produced by Del Rey and Jack Antonoff, with additional contributions from Zach Dawes, Andrew Watt and longtime Del Rey collaborator Rick Nowels. Musically, Norman Fucking Rockwell is a psychedelic rock and trip hop record, with desert rock and classic rock influences. Background and release Del Rey first mentioned follow up material to 2017's Lust for Life during an interview with Pitchfork in January 2018, at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards. She said, "I’ve got a couple of other tracks. I’ve got this weird track called ‘Bartender’ that doesn’t belong to a record yet." The album's title was announced by Del Rey in September 2018, upon the premiere of the single "Venice Bitch" on Zane Lowe's Beats 1 show World Record. In her interview with Lowe, Del Rey revealed that the album was nearly complete, and that she had recorded eleven tracks for it. Throughout 2018, Del Rey shared snippets via social media of several songs intended for the album, including "Happiness Is a Butterfly", "How to Disappear", and "Cinnamon Girl". She performed "How to Disappear" on October 29 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, debuting the full song for the first time. In a June 2019 concert in Ireland, Del Rey announced that the album would be released in August. The album's cover art, release date, and track listing were revealed by Del Rey on July 31, 2019. The cover art features Del Rey and Duke Nicholson—actor Jack Nicholson's grandson—posing on a sailboat, with the album title and Del Rey's initials written in a comic-inspired style. The photo was taken by Del Rey's sister, photographer Chuck Grant. The following day, Del Rey released an album trailer. On August 2, 2019, Urban Outfitters announced an exclusive vinyl of the album featuring an alternative album artwork. The alternative cover was also shot by Chuck Grant. Promotion Singles "Mariners Apartment Complex" was released as the album's first single on September 12, 2018. The following week, on September 18, Del Rey released the second single "Venice Bitch" and revealed the album title. "Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – but I Have It" followed as the third single on January 9, 2019. Del Rey released a cover of Sublime's "Doin' Time" on May 17, 2019 for a documentary about the band. It also served as the fourth single from the album. On August 22, 2019 the singles "Fuck It, I Love You" and "The Greatest" were released with a double music video. The music video runs at 9:19 minutes long, with the same shoot as the album trailer. Tour Main article: The Norman Fucking Rockwell Tour On August 1, 2019, Del Rey announced two legs of a tour in promotion of Norman Fucking Rockwell. The first leg is set to take place in North America in the fall of 2019, and the second in Europe in early 2020. Album trailer A trailer for the album was released on August 1, 2019. It features three of the album's singles—"Doin' Time", "Mariners Apartment Complex", and "Venice Bitch"—as well as the title track.
<b>100 Best Albums</b> Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humour that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, <i>Norman F*****g Rockwell!</i> is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them.<br /> In a 2018 interview with Apple Music's Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so <i>funny</i>,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. "It's about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. "So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I'm like, 'Yeah, yeah.' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.”<br /> This paradox becomes a theme on <i>Rockwell</i>, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record”, she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it”, is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey's own life to make us question, again, what's real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me”, it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pin-up girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.
