At that point, I had just got a LinnDrum [an early-’80s drum machine used on songs like Madonna’s “Lucky Star”]. I had this Binson tape-echo thing that I had just got also. I was running the LinnDrum through there and just fucking around, and made that beat. What’s cool about tape delay is, it’s not digital, so you’re just twisting knobs until you hear something that’s interesting, and then you can never re-create it.

Then we started playing guitar, we started singing at each other, and then I think the moment that it turned into a real song was [when] I had a vocoder plugged in. I think it was the same model that Laurie Anderson used on “O Superman.” What’s cool about a vocoder is, because it’s not you, you can say things that you wouldn’t normally say. I would never belt, “I want you in my room.” But through a vocoder, you’re playing a character.

Spencer Kornhaber: The song is so, in a good way, silly. How do you let yourself go there?

Antonoff: If I hear the right beat—if something sounds odd enough—it lets you feel yourself in a sillier light. If it sounds generic, then almost anything you put on it starts to be embarrassing. That’s what that Linn attached to the tape echo did: We already pointed the ship toward Mars. So then it was like, Why not put the vocoder in? Why not shout-talk the verses? Why not do this weird ’50s girl-group nod in the “Baby, don’t you want me too?” moment? If you start to support yourself with strange choices that are working, it inspires you to make more strange choices and not be scared that they won’t work.

Kornhaber: The fact that the saxophone comes in so late in the song is hilarious. You start to get this exciting solo, and then it fades out.

Antonoff: Yeah, that’s my saxophone player in Bleachers, Evan Smith. In pop, [sax] is dicey because it can be shticky. But he does it more in a “Young Americans,” dead-serious, joyous way. Once again, choices that could really swing the wrong way but land right in that pocket are really thrilling.

Obviously there’s a lot of pressure nowadays to grab people right away. But I don’t think that’s what people want the most. I’d prefer to have the song that, at the end, you want to play again, rather than you got all the exciting stuff at the top. Certain ’60s records, I would just crank the end as loud as possible so I could hear what is going on in the fade-out: What are they saying? The fade-out leaves the impression that the song goes on forever and that you were lucky enough to witness a piece of it. Maybe when you die you’ll find out the rest.

Lana Del Rey, “Norman Fucking Rockwell”



Antonoff: At this point, Lana and I have done quite a few songs together, and [“Norman Fucking Rockwell” has] always been my favorite. Because when we got together and started dreaming about the future, that song is the closest thing that sounds like what was in our heads together. It’s a Cliffs Notes for the whole album.