Stylistic influence is too elusory to be worth chasing, but there are a few instances at the word- or idea-level where I think the connection between them is clear. Here they are:
- In Emily, her use of the word "dolorous". This is only sure enough to list because she explicitly calls it out in a Guardian interview: "in the song Emily there's a reference to Lolita. Not directly to the character but to the heavy, languorous energy, that listlessness and decadence." The pretty well describes her phrase "dolorous with vines", and Dolores is Lolita's real name in the novel.
- In Only Skin, we get "But I can’t with certainty say we survived." In its phrasing and figurative context, I see a connection with Pale Fire's line "I'm reasonably sure that we survive".
- Of course, there's "waxwing", in the song Autumn. If you learn one word from reading Nabokov, it will be this one. The waxwing is a bird that appears throughout Pale Fire, including in the first line of the poem, and inhabits its central metaphor.
- As a Pitchfork writer points out, the word "etiolated" (used in No Provenance) is a gem likely gleaned from Lolita.
- In Baby Birch, the visual wordplay in "Do you remember staring,/up at the stars" reminded me of Pale Fire's "outstare the stars".
- This one's from a (we hope!) forthcoming song which the fanbase hive-mind has tentatively titled The Diver's Wife. The line is "tell me why is the pain of birth lighter borne than the pain of death?". If you're obsessed with Nabokov, you've probably tried to get through his autobiography at some point. And even if, like me, you didn't finish it, I bet you at least got through the first two sentences: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."
- Honorable mention: Pale Fire's "web of sense" vs Sawdust & Diamond's "system of strings". This one is really tenuous, but I feel it, so I'm listing it anyway.
Do you have any others to add? I think you can love music without caring about lyrics, and you can love reading without loving words, but Nabokov & Newsom are connected by their shared love of the words themselves.