A shooting at a U.S. presidential rally. A looming recession. And now, the return of one of our great artists after a year out of the public eye. Isn’t real life beginning to feel more and more like Nashville, Robert Altman’s 1975 portrait of America on the brink? The film boasts a whopping 24 principal characters, shuffling them around in a shell game around the unstable center of Ronee Blakley’s Barbara Jean, whose songs of lost love and lost innocence come to stand in for a national reckoning. Altman later told the critic David Thompson: “I just wanted to take the literature of country music…and put it into a panorama which reflected America and its politics.”
Lana Del Rey and Altman have a lot in common: former purveyors of pastiche (Born to Die, M*A*S*H*) who became cultural barometers, avatars for our fears, fetishes, and fascinations. So do she and Barbara Jean, each a feat of self-mythmaking who is at once more and less fragile than she first appears. With “Henry, come on,” the ostensible lead single from a forthcoming album called The Right Person Will Stay, Del Rey delivers what Pauline Kael, reviewing Nashville for The New Yorker, called “a twang with longing in it.” It’s not the singer’s first foray into country music—“Let Me Love You Like a Woman,” from 2021’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club, was practically her “Angel from Montgomery”—but here she fully embraces its iconography. The titular “Henry” is a lonesome cowboy who hangs his hat up on the wall, wears “soft leather, blue jeans,” and whose time has finally come to “go on and giddy up.”
The most country thing about “Henry, come on,” though, is Del Rey’s delicate interweaving of the divine and the mundane. “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,’” she sings, only to immediately deadpan, “I’ll still be nice to your mom.” When her voice breaks on the last syllable of “fly away,” I’m reminded of Barbara Jean, clad in frilly white lace, nearly sobbing as she performs “Dues,” a song Blakley herself wrote. The pageantry of country music is a costume that reveals. And somewhere between its exquisite, prairie-wide string arrangements, iPhone screenshot cover art, and Del Rey’s cowgirl persona, “Henry, come on” moseys its way into the sublime.
