Concluding my countdown of the songs on Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell.
2. ‘How to disappear’ – This is another track that was released, in a way, well before the album came out, when Del Rey and Jack Antonoff performed a piano-and-vocals version live at an Apple event. That recording is a thing of beauty, but the studio version is just as transcendent, adding ramshackle instrumentation that reminds me of the work Jon Brion did with Fiona Apple back in the 90s.
Whenever my wife sees a business that remains open despite improbable odds, she announces “that’s a drug front.”
You see a neighborhood mom-and-pop store that has somehow weathered the tough economy. She sees a drug front.
By her logic, there is no more obvious drug front than the Spec’s record store across from the University of Miami campus on US 1 in Coral Gables. That store has remained there for decades despite the collapse of every other brick-and-mortar record store in the world. It sits next to the Swensen’s sandwich and ice cream restaurant (itself a monument to perseverance through hard times), occupied by more employees than customers most days. Drug front.
