Lana Del Rey, who released her masterpiece 'Norman Fucking Rockwell' this week, gave her most revealing interview ever in our 2014 cover story. Read it here
Still, a day earlier, it all feels different. On a cloudless, offensively hot, mid-June afternoon in New York, the release day for Del Rey’s second major-label album,, she answers the green wooden door of the Greenwich Village town-house where she’s staying.
She’s an American pop superstar with hardly any actual radio hits in the US, just a remix of her song “Summertime Sadness” that she never even heard before its release. And, perhaps more than any other pop star of this century, she’s been misunderstood, even hated. She was the subject of a savage indie-nerd backlash — a pre-lash, really — before most people had ever heard of her. Her shaky, slightly dead-eyeddebut was treated like a national emergency, inspiring weeks of debate.
Within a few days, she’ll be photographed nuzzling with Carrozzini in Europe. But for now, she says, she’s single. Starting in December or so, Del Rey began a protracted break-up with Barrie-James O’Neill, her boyfriend of three years. He’s a songwriter, which allowed her to live out some Dylan/Joan Baez fantasies . “It’s all been hard,” Del Rey says. “Yeah, my life is just feeling really heavy on my shoulders, and his own neuroses just getting the best of him, I think, just made it untenable.
“I had heard about some back and forth regarding the music,” says Interscope chief John Janick. “But Lana knows her vision and her audience, and it’s up to us to follow her lead.” Del Rey acknowledges a six-week period this past spring when things were in limbo: “I mean, I think there were people they wanted me to work with,” she says. “I don’t know who they were. When I said I was ready, they were like, ‘Are you sure?'” She laughs. “‘Because I feel like you could go further’.
But precisely how does she want the public to hear those lines? “I just don’t want them to hear it at all,” she says, pouting a little. “I’m very selfish. I make everything for me, kind of. I mean, every little thing, down to the guitar and the drums. It’s just for me. I want to hear it, I want to drive to it, I want to swim in the ocean to it. I want to think about it, and then I want to write something new after it. You know? It’s just . . . I don’t want them to hear it and think about it.
At 14 or so, Lizzy started drinking and hanging out with older kids. The scenario, she recognises with a laugh, was not unlike the harrowing movie. “In small towns, you sort of grow up fast because there isn’t that much to do,” she says. “So you’re out with everybody else who’s already graduated, and that’s totally normal. But it just didn’t sit well with everyone in my family.”
She started to think that she might want to be a singer, but could hardly bring herself to say it out loud, especially to her family. “I just thought it was kind of a presumptuous thing to say, coming from a more traditional background. You wouldn’t say it unless you really meant it.” Her uncle taught her some guitar chords, and she started playing open mics in the city. Somewhere around that time, she read Anthony Scaduto’s pioneering Bob Dylan biography, which she saw as a “road map” toward becoming an artist.
Nichtern hooked her up with producer David Kahne, the guy behind Sublime and Sugar Ray hits, who recalls leading her to looped beats for the first time. Kahne was a well-connected industry veteran and she was an unknown kid, but he found her somewhat daunting. “She was mysterious,” Kahne says. “I was confused a lot of the time whether what I was doing was right or wrong, whether she liked it or didn’t. It felt, a lot of times, like everything could change all of a sudden.
Del Rey went off to London for months of writing sessions, one of which yielded an elegiac ode to a boyfriend who liked to play World of Warcraft, though she knew simply calling it “Video Games” was a lot more poetic . She had started making videos using iMovie, mixing self-shot webcam segments and YouTube clips — “Just putting things together, building a little world”. She perfected the approach with “Video Games,” creating a career-launching viral video.
We go back to talking, with Del Rey blowing cigarette smoke out the window, into the light. We finally touch on, still a dangerous subject. The performance, she maintains, “wasn’t dynamic, but it was true to form”. But the reaction was agonising. She felt music-business friends pulling away from her. “Everyone I knew suddenly wasn’t so sure about me,” she says. “They were like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be associated with her — not a great reputation’.
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