Lana Del Rey dropped a new song yesterday, but I’m not going to write about it, not yet anyway. I need to let her music settle in before I try to describe the feelings evoked. Instead, I want to go back to her “Norman Fucking Rockwell” album and the song “How to disappear.”
In many respects, it’s a typical LDR song … another series of stories about the men in her life who try (and usually fail) to pull off heroic acts and how she is irresistibly drawn to them. The second verse lays the song out pretty clearly:
Joe met me down at the training yardCuts on his face ’cause he fought too hardI know he’s in over his headBut I love that man like nobody canHe moves mountains and pounds them to ground againI watched the guys getting high as they fightFor the things that they hold dearTo forget the things they fearThis is how to disappear
I said I wouldn’t write about her new song, but “Henry, come on” echoes back to “How to disappear” with these lines:
Yesterday, I heard God say, “You were born to be the one
To hold thе hand of the man
Who flies too close to thе sun”
This I find fascinating, because Lana (Elizabeth Grant in real life) is embracing the traditional woman’s archetype of the supporting character, the woman behind the man, when in fact she is a creator of worlds. Doesn’t it all seem a bit low ambition for her? Why would she latch onto an ill-fated Icarus when she freely (and safely) soars into the stratosphere?
But all of this is not why I’m obsessed with this song. Every verse of “How to disappear” resolves to a G chord, which your ear expects, because that’s the key the song is written in. The chord progression features an A-minor resolving to a G. Every verse but the last one. In that verse, the A-minor arrives but never leaves, it hangs there, teasing a G that never arrives.
And lyrically, she pulls off the same trick. Every other verse of the song ends in a rhyme, with the final word of the verse being disappear. Yet, look at the closing lines of the song:
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