Norman Fucking Rockwell!

This is the sound of California running out of myths to believe in. The production is lush but unhurried — finger-picked guitar, pedal steel that bends like light through smog, drums so soft they feel like an afterthought to the sprawling, sun-damaged mood. At nearly nine minutes in its album form, the song has the patience of someone who has stopped trying to impress. Lana Del Rey sings about a man who is by turns infuriating and magnetic, a damaged American archetype — brilliant, self-involved, impossible to fully leave — and she does so with a weariness that contains no self-pity. Her voice here has a maturity that her earlier work reached for but didn't quite achieve; it's world-worn without being broken. The title itself is ironic and earnest simultaneously, invoking a painter of comfortable American idealism to describe something thoroughly messier. It became a landmark of 2019's critical reassessment of her entire catalog, the song that made people reconsider everything she'd done before. You listen to this on a long drive through somewhere flat and sun-bleached, or when you need a song that can hold a complicated feeling without resolving it.