Cara Delevingne played ‘Crazy, Baby’ on ‘The Tonight Show’ and told Jimmy Fallon about the ring Stevie Nicks gave her
A few months ago, Cara Delevingne did not want “Crazy, Baby” released as a single. She thought it was too obvious. This week she played it on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, days before her debut album Not Normal arrives via Warner Music on Friday (Sept. 25), and the song did exactly what she suspected it would do. It landed like a hit.
That hesitation is worth sitting with, because it explains how Delevingne has approached this entire project. She is 34 and has spent more than fifteen years as one of the most photographed people alive, a Burberry face, a Suicide Squad lead, twice named Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards. None of that guarantees anyone will take her seriously holding a guitar. Her answer has been to make the least obvious version of a celebrity pop record she could, then reluctantly let the catchiest song on it become the single.
The Song She Didn’t Want to Release
“Crazy, Baby” arrived Aug. 21, written with Sarah Aarons (Tame Impala, Gracie Abrams), Sammy Witte (Harry Styles) and BJ Burton (Bon Iver, Charli xcx), and co-produced by Delevingne and Burton. That is a serious room. Burton in particular works in glitch and texture rather than polish, which is why the track lurches slightly even while behaving like a pop song.
She wrote it for her partner, British musician Minke, and by her own account partly to irritate her. Minke dislikes grand gestures and guards her privacy. A love song on network television is, by that standard, a provocation.
The video, directed by Bradley J. Calder, complicates it further. Delevingne and Samara Weaving play a couple drifting through a dishevelled house in fur coats, until the framing collapses and it becomes clear the romance is happening mostly inside one person’s head. A strange move for a love song. Also the most honest thing about it.
The Ring From Stevie Nicks
The Fallon interview produced the story that will travel. Delevingne described a show in Los Angeles where she spotted Stevie Nicks in the crowd and ended up performing the whole set to her. Afterward, the two sat down together. “I think I blacked out. But she was crying,” Delevingne said. Nicks then took a ring off her own finger and handed it over, explaining she had bought it on tour years earlier and that she had heard the pain in Delevingne’s songs.
She showed Fallon the ring. That detail will outlast any chart position. Nicks has spent five decades as the figure whose approval legitimizes a certain kind of confessional songwriting, and she does not give away jewelry casually.
Delevingne also discussed Club Kid, the film she has coming, and kept the segment loose, by some accounts of the taping talking Fallon into a headstand, her pre-performance ritual.
Not Normal runs 12 tracks and has been rolling out since spring, with “I Forgot,” “Out of My Head” and “Need It” preceding “Crazy, Baby.” Delevingne has been candid about getting sober and about how long she wrote before letting anyone hear a note, citing Fiona Apple as a reference point for the kind of record she wanted to make. That patience shows. This does not sound like a vanity project bolted onto a famous name. It sounds like somebody who waited until she could stand behind it.
The live proof comes fast. She plays All Things Go in Forest Hills, New York, on Friday, the same day the album lands, with Primavera Sound dates in Buenos Aires and São Paulo following in November.
She was right that “Crazy, Baby” was the obvious choice. She was wrong that obvious was a problem.
