Lana Del Rey has long been America’s most right-coded pop star. 

She herself is an anti-Trump liberal (or at least appeared to be as recently as 2021), but sometimes left-wing artists can’t help making right-wing art.

Del Rey waves American flags in her music videos. She posed with a gun after the 2024 Grammys. She eschews girlboss assertiveness in favor of a softer, feminine persona. She featured a pastor on one of her tracks. She sings lovingly about unglamorous parts of the country like West Virginia and Tulsa, and clearly aches with nostalgia for a midcentury America most radical leftists regard as a white supremacist, patriarchal, homophobic dystopia.

And, most importantly, she’s been married to the allegedly Trump-supporting bayou tour guide Jeremy Dufrene for almost a year.

I’m far from the first to point any of this out. Tributes to Del Rey have become something of a sub-genre in right-wing journalism. I’ve even contributed one of my own.

This April, though, Del Rey outdid herself, debuting her most reactionary song to date at the Stagecoach country music festival. The track, named “Stars Fell on Alabama” after a 1930s jazz tune, is an unapologetic, countercultural defense of traditional marriage. 

It might even be enough to convince some of Del Rey’s lefty boho fans to seek fulfillment not in career, hookups, or Instagrammable “experiences,” but in the arms of a loving husband.

Tears of Joy

“Stars Fell on Alabama” isn’t officially out yet, but clips of Del Rey performing it are already going viral. In one, the 40-year-old singer, whose real name is Elizabeth Grant, begins to cry as she wraps up the song, then rushes offstage to fling herself into Dufrene’s arms and kiss him.

It’s easy to see why. Del Rey’s always been able to croon declarations of love with a tenderness that melts men’s hearts and makes women yearn to feel the same. With this song’s “husband of mine” refrain, she’s perfected the art. Now, though, it’s not just the audience tearing up. Del Rey’s magic finally works on her too, because it’s not hypothetical anymore. All the love she longed to give finally has a soft place to land.

But romance is just the beginning. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “It is the nature of love to bind itself,” and it is to the nature of that matrimonial bond that Del Rey devotes most of the song’s lyrics.

Indissoluble

Dufrene is reportedly divorced, but Del Rey indicates in her song that she intends for this marriage to go the distance.

The last chorus begins, “Husband of mine / Don’t let them put all these papers between us,” which seems to suggest the two did not sign a prenuptial agreement. 

“What’s yours is mine,” she adds. “What’s mine is between you, me, and Jesus.” Theirs is to be a holy, mystical union in which two become one flesh. Marriage is primarily a vow before God and only secondarily a legal contract overseen by the state. Bringing in lawyers to construct an escape hatch from that vow can only diminish its significance.

Earlier in the song, the second line goes “don’t let them put all this paper” — as in “money” — “between us.” Journalists skeptical of her marriage to Dufrene have noted the likely substantial wealth gap between the two as a potential “red flag” in the relationship. Del Rey has an estimated net worth around $30 million or more, while Dufrene’s home with his first wife was reportedly valued at $340,000.

From any modern perspective, Del Rey would be crazy to marry Dufrene with no prenup. Celebrity marriages aren’t known for their longevity, and he could end up taking her for half of what she’s worth. But her song lyrics suggest Del Rey doesn’t care. That level of radical trust seems unthinkable today, but without it, we don’t really have marriage at all.

Fruitful

“Be fruitful and multiply” was God’s first commandment to humanity, but for a while, it was unclear how Del Rey felt about that. About a year before marrying Dufrene, who is 10 years her senior, Del Rey said in an interview that “God didn’t give me children yet” because she felt there was “more to explore” first.

That seems to have changed. If Del Rey isn’t pregnant already, she apparently wants to be. Feeling secure in a good man’s love can have that effect on a woman.

The key line in “Stars Fell on Alabama” comes in the first verse when she croons, “You got me singing ’bout Clementine.” On its own, the line is cryptic, but when you compare it to her 2021 lines, “Clementine’s not just a fruit / It’s my daughter’s chosen name,” the meaning becomes clearer. She always liked the name, but now it seems she may have baby fever.

If that sounds like too much of a stretch, look at verse two, in which Del Rey tells her husband, “No one talks to me like you do / Or takes care of us so good this way.”

Who’s “us,” Lana? Who’s “us”?

Companionate

For someone with Del Rey’s public profile and fan base, there must be a lot of pressure to distance herself from Dufrene’s alleged MAGA views — but Del Rey refuses to play that game. 

She doesn’t apologize for her husband’s politics, instead singing that she hopes “they’ll extend you a little grace.” And if they don’t? Del Rey thinks back on people who’ve wronged Dufrene in the past and insists, “If I had been there, there would’ve been fights.” It seems unlikely that she’d be more charitable toward those who mistreat him in the future. 

Del Rey seems to understand that a wife’s duty is to defend her husband (and vice versa), political disagreements be damned.

But perhaps they’ll do more than just agree to disagree. Spouses’ politics often converge over time. Dare we hope that, as I type, Dufrene is sitting on the couch with his pop star wife patiently explaining the side effects of puberty blockers and the downward pressure mass immigration exerts on working-class wages? 

Dare we hope for a fully red-pilled Lana Del Rey?