Lana Del Rey is gearing up to release her highly anticipated album Norman F*cking Rockwell, but over the past few days, she has taken a bit of a break from pushing the record to tease some other projects. Earlier this week, she shared a snippet of “Season Of The Witch,” a cover of the 1966 Donovan song that she recorded for Guillermo del Toro’s Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, as well as “Looking For America,” a response to the recent US mass shootings. Both tracks were shared in incomplete or unofficial forms, but now Del Rey has released the full versions of both tracks.
Del Rey previously said of the inspiration behind “Looking For America,” “Came back early from Montecito with my brother this morning and asked Jack Antonoff to come into town because I had a song on my mind that I wanted to write. Now I know I’m not a politician and I’m not trying to be so excuse me for having an opinion- but in light of all of the mass shootings and the back to back shootings in the last couple of days which really affected me on a cellular level I just wanted to post this video that our engineer Laura took 20 minutes ago. I hope you like it. I’m singing love to the choruses I recorded this morning. I’m going to call it ‘Looking for America.'”
Meanwhile, del Toro previously said of Del Rey’s take on “Season Of The Witch,” “I have admired Lana’s music for a while now and felt in my gut that she would run with ‘Season Of The Witch’ — that she would use her alchemy to transform it. She is a great artist and has been an amazing partner with us in this adventure. It is an honor for me to have met her.”
Listen to “Season Of The Witch” and “Looking For America” below.
Norman F*cking Rockwell is out 8/30 via Interscope/Polydor.
