A taking pictures at a U.S. presidential rally. A looming recession. And now, the return of one in all our nice artists after a yr out of the general public eye. Isn’t actual life starting to really feel increasingly like Nashville, Robert Altman’s 1975 portrait of America on the brink? The movie boasts a whopping 24 principal characters, shuffling them round in a shell sport across the unstable heart of Ronee Blakley’s Barbara Jean, whose songs of misplaced love and misplaced innocence come to face in for a nationwide reckoning. Altman later advised the critic David Thompson: “I simply wished to take the literature of nation music… and put it right into a panorama which mirrored America and its politics.”
Lana Del Rey and Altman have lots in frequent: former purveyors of pastiche (Born to Die, M*A*S*H*) who turned cultural barometers, avatars for our fears, fetishes, and fascinations. So do she and Barbara Jean, every a feat of self-mythmaking who’s without delay extra and fewer fragile than she first seems. With “Henry, come on,” the ostensible lead single from a forthcoming album referred to as The Proper Particular person Will Keep, Del Rey delivers what Pauline Kael, reviewing Nashville for The New Yorker, referred to as “a twang with longing in it.” It’s not the singer’s first foray into nation music—“Let Me Love You Like a Lady,” from 2021’s Chemtrails Over the Nation Membership, was virtually her “Angel from Montgomery”—however right here she absolutely embraces its iconography. The titular “Henry” is a lonesome cowboy who hangs his hat up on the wall, wears “gentle leather-based, blue denims,” and whose time has lastly come to “go on and giddy up.”
Essentially the most nation factor about “Henry, come on,” although, is Del Rey’s delicate interweaving of the divine and the mundane. “Yesterday, I heard God say, ‘You had been born to be the one/To carry thе hand of the person/Who flies too near thе solar,’” she sings, solely to instantly deadpan, “I’ll nonetheless be good to your mother.” When her voice breaks on the final syllable of “fly away,” I’m reminded of Barbara Jean, clad in frilly white lace, almost sobbing as she performs “Dues,” a tune Blakley herself wrote. The pageantry of nation music is a dressing up that reveals. And someplace between its beautiful, prairie-wide string preparations, iPhone screenshot cowl artwork, and Del Rey’s cowgirl persona, “Henry, come on” moseys its means into the chic.
