Wild at Heart

Lana Del Rey at her most cinematically vast and emotionally contradictory: "Wild at Heart" drifts on a slow, unhurried arrangement of guitar and organ that feels like a highway stretching out forever under a late afternoon California sky. The production on "Norman Fucking Rockwell!" generally favors space and analog warmth, and this track epitomizes that — there's a looseness to it, almost like the song could keep going and no one would mind. Lana's voice carries its characteristic low glamour, the kind of delivery that suggests she's been through everything being described and has made a kind of peace with it that isn't quite peace. The song is about the people who live outside convention — romantics and dreamers and the slightly unhinged — and the way America simultaneously mythologizes and punishes that wildness. There's a deep tenderness here for broken people, for the beautiful losers who never quite fit. It's nostalgic in the Lana way that isn't really about the past but about a feeling that never existed quite as described and yet feels more real than anything. You'd put this on during a long drive through nowhere, windows down, when you feel like a character in someone else's movie and you're not sure if that's sad or magnificent.