Like most of Lana Del Rey’s oeuvre, finding references to California is the name of the game. Well, not so much “finding” them as being bombarded with them. And there was perhaps no “peaker” album for that than 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell. Starting with the album cover. Although shot by Del Rey’s sister, Chuck Grant, as usual, this particular artwork remains her most standout, the image most unlike all the others. Arguably because it’s the only one that dares to make some kind of “statement” (her other records, instead, generally feature Del Rey looking bored, with the exception of 2017’s Lust for Life, where the expression of ennui is swapped out in exchange for a shit-eating grin). In it, she’s pictured with her hand outreached to the observer as she holds onto the waist of Duke Nicholson, grandson to Jack (another unprecedented departure for Del Rey, being that she’s not featured alone on the cover).
The two are on a boat with an American flag waving in the background (quintessential Del Rey). But that isn’t the part of the background that proves to be the most attention-grabbing. Oh no, instead it is the fires burning in the hills behind her. Eerily enough, Del Rey has said that the images she puts on her album covers do tend to become “fulfilled prophecies.” And indeed, Del Rey wasn’t the only one with wildfires on the brain in 2019. Billie Eilish (Del Rey’s protégée, of sorts) also alluded to them in her 2019 single, “all the good girls go to hell,” when she sang, “Hills burn in California/My turn to ignore ya/Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.” In both singers’ cases, it was a clear reaction to 2018, what was then the most catastrophic fire season on record (usurped by 2020 and 2021—and who knows, 2025 seems on track to usurp them all). And the year ended with the Woolsey Fire in L.A. and Ventura Counties. Famously mentioned by Miley Cyrus in “Flowers” with the line, “Built a home and watched it burn,” referring to the house she shared with Liam Hemsworth in Malibu. That year, the list of celebrities whose homes were burned to rubble included Cyrus, Neil Young, Gerard Butler, Shannen Doherty (RIP) and Robin Thicke.
At the time, the images appeared—and were—horrifying. But it seems Mother Earth was hellbent on outdoing herself for the beginning of 2025. Only in response, however, to humans constantly outdoing themselves vis-à-vis engaging in environmentally-decimating practices. And perhaps nowhere else does that happen as glaringly as it does in Los Angeles, where fossil fuel-emitting (read: driving) is the way of existence. But the latest rash of fires—deemed the most damaging in L.A. history (which is, needless to say, quite a feat)—was the result of several unfortunate confluences of events: the Santa Ana winds, dry conditions and plenty of brush on the ground to make for a fiery result. Even so, something—or someone—still needs to ignite that fire. Thus, as it rages on, the “authorities” have yet to determine the direct cause of each (particularly the Palisades and Eaton fires). Whatever it was, Del Rey’s imagery on Norman Fucking Rockwell has an unsettlingly prophetic quality in the present (even if it was speaking to things that were already happening then). Most notably on track eleven, “The Greatest,” during which, in the final moments of the song, Del Rey muses, “L.A. is in flames, it’s getting hot.” Del Rey, accustomed to being billed as a “witchy woman” by now, should know the power of such words, having previously stated, “I’m in line with Yoko and John and the belief that there’s a power to the vibration of a thought. Your thoughts are very powerful things and they become words, and words become actions, and actions lead to physical charges… I really do believe that words are one of the last forms of magic and I’m a bit of a mystic at heart.” In other words, a Californian at heart.
And with that haunting line, “L.A. is in flames, it’s getting hot,” Del Rey, in effect, summarizes what Joan Didion wrote in her 1960s essay, “The Santa Anas.” An essay that Del Rey herself dredged up after days of saying nothing about the fires that kicked off 2025 in the Golden State. Even though many were likely waiting for her, such a proponent for California, to make a comment about the apocalyptic goings-on right away. But that word, “apocalyptic,” is not as scary to Californians as it is to most others—those who live outside of it, who have never experienced what it is to exist within this state (literally and figuratively). As Didion puts it “The Santa Anas,” “The city burning is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself. Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.” But that’s the thing about an “apocalypse”: even though it’s “the end,” it also represents a new beginning. Maybe not for everyone (as Madonna said on her own 2019 album, Madame X, “Not everyone is coming to the future”), but for those who will continue to carry forth and rebuild. Because that’s what humans (and especially Californians) and programmed to do…even when all evidence suggests they should just give up.
In an interview with Barbara Isenberg “at the end of the twentieth century,” Didion summed up this unique form of California perseverance as follows: “I think people who grew up in California have more tolerance for apocalyptic notions. However, mixed up with this tolerance for apocalyptic notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is this belief that the world can’t help but get better and better. It’s really hard for me to believe that everything doesn’t improve, because thinking like that was just so much a part of being in California.”
There is no denying that Del Rey is of a similar mind, shrugging off “the end” with another line in “The Greatest” that goes, “The culture is lit/And if this is it/I had a ball.” With the Santa Anas being a seasonal phenomenon that tends to set everything in Southern California on fire, this kind of “end of the world” thinking becomes unavoidable. A yearly tradition. Another track from Norman called, what else, “California” touches on the Santa Anas directly in the verse, “You hate the heat, you’ve got the blues/Changin’ like the weather, oh, that’s so like you/The Santa Ana moves you.” Just as it moves the winds that help to ignite and fan the flames.
A year after Norman’s release, Del Rey also put out her poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, with select poems featured on a spoken word album of the same name. One of them being “LA Who Am I To Love You.” It is during this poem that Del Rey also references the Los Angeles tendency toward being constantly ablaze with the verse, “For now, though, what I do know/Is although I don’t deserve you/Not you at your best and your splendor/With towering eucalyptus trees that sway in my dominion/Not you at your worst/Totally on fire, unlivable, unbreathable, I need you.” Just as every Californian who has stayed—and even those (like Didion) who have left—does. For while it might be “The Land of 1,000 Fires” (the title of another Del Rey poem from Violet), it is the land that continues to embrace a sense of hope and possibility unlike anywhere else. Whether or not that’s simply a “myth” doesn’t matter, for it is always what something symbolizes that matters the most. In other words, a symbol can’t be torched.
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