yourboy

I’ll be your summertime Baby, you can call me May I can be your champagne wine You can love me in my gold lamé There wasn't a solo thread so I made one

"Pretty" version right? lmaoo ugly version tag was so funny

Isn't the I don't wanna fight line different from the full version and that old snippet from June? The full one doesn't have the high pitched background vocals unlike the snippet

It would have been such a lot of work!!!! Thank you so much<3333 for doing this!!! @@Elle well I was so passionate till like 60% and I literally pressed random stuff after that so I got a SHITTY result hahahahahahahahaha I am sooo lifeless 1 Next to Me 1 My Momma 1 Bad Disease 1 Out With a Bang 1 Peace (All You Need) 1 How Do You Know Me So Well? (I'm Indebted to You) 1 Pretty Baby 1 Aviation 1 Move (Find My Own Way) 1 Junky Pride 11 Ultraviolence 11 Shades of Cool 11 Brooklyn Baby 11 West Coast 11 Sad Girl 11 Flipside 11 Honeymoon 11 Music To Watch Boys To 11 Terrence Loves You 20 Once Upon a Dream 20 I Can Fly 22 Born to Die 23 Salvatore 23 The Blackest Day 23 Kill Kill 26 Dear Elliot (Westbound) 26 Try Tonight 28 Gramma 28 Jump 30 Swan Song 31 Without You 32 Freak 33 Fucked My Way Up To The Top 34 Summertime Sadness 35 Blue Jeans 35 Radio 37 Ride 37 American 37 Body Electric 37 Blue Velvet 41 God Knows I Tried 41 High By The Beach 43 Smarty 44 Gods & Monsters 44 Bel Air 44 Burning Desire 44 Cruel World 48 Cola 49 Raise Me Up 49 Brite Lites 51 Million Dollar Man 52 Black Beauty 52 Guns and Roses 54 This Is What Makes Us Girls 55 Chelsea Hotel No. 2 56 Lucky Ones 57 Video Games 57 Diet Mountain Dew 59 Art Deco 60 National Anthem 60 Dark Paradise 62 Carmen 63 Young & Beautiful 63 Some Things Last a Long Time 65 Florida Kilos 66 Pawn Shop Blues 66 Put Me in a Movie 66 Yayo (LDRAKALG) 69 Yayo (Paradise) 70 Lolita 71 Pretty When You Cry 72 Money Power Glory 72 Old Money 74 The Other Woman 75 Religion 76 A Star for Nick 76 You, Mister 76 There's Nothing to be Sorry About 76 More Mountains 76 In Wendy 76 Off to the Races 82 Is This Happiness 83 Queen of the Gas Station 83 Oh Say Can You See 83 For K Part II 83 Mermaid Motel 87 24 87 Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood 89 Birds of a Feather 89 Drive By (For K) 89 Wait 89 For You 89 Blizzard This is crazy cause honestly I don't like Sirens AT ALL. NONE. oooop

phew!

Hollywood's Dead baby! Our love was a once in a lifetime What was to stay forever, was Halka since time immemorial But you're the magnificence of the fifties In suede boots blue But it was a cover for all the problems that occurred with Always I fell in love with the wrong person Bad things have always been good taste That's what girls like me, they do Akhsirnik Do not tell me it was too late Do not tell me it was too late Hollywood is dead Alves cry Feaches ignites Roland dying In the spotlight You are beautiful nurse Say goodbye, you are a beautiful nurse but sickeningly beautiful is beautiful nurse google oh..

please tell me it's not you

A songbook from Hal Leonard! It is on iTunes too so you can check it out )

Hey yall I'm here with official lyrics. You guys hear well though! Don't say you need me when you leave and you leave again. I'm stronger than all my men, except for you. Don't say you need me if you leave last, you're leaving I can't do it, I can't do it, but you do it well. This is from the official and original UV songbook. Got plenty of receipts so please don't attack me!

I actually didn't do anything because I don't know what to do ;_; I had done one or two transcriptions and idk if I should post it or not!

WTF is #crybabiesrespecttheartist wow they act like they are never gonna listen to the snippets probably writing that listening to it lol

I didn't even know the show started XD Hope she didn't get cut out from the whole show If she is on screen for like 2 secs I might die

smh the crowd https://twitter.com/LanaDelReyPage/status/751846703918092288

What I hate about festivals: People usually go for one or two artists they like (in this case probs Bruce) The other artists are literally left with audiences who know nothing about Lana. I mean the audiences were just too quiet. Personally, I just don't like Lana being around festivals :/ Of course, it's her choice and if she likes I would support her in any way, but concert is more "Lana" +the back dancers... meh for me

Never. When was the last time you watched Tropico full in one take?

I hate TOSTB and Noir bam

Agreed. This is why I am quite negative about combining the old thread. We should have a clear discussion of the interview itself. It might be formal and boring but I think this is what people want to see when they are trying to get real information. Not all these meaningless opinions :/ But it would be impossible to prevent stuff like that so what about just making new threads for interviews and we can quote some good discussion on it? It might be hard but to keep our hardwork from million YAS's, but I am sure it will be a big archive of pure information and appropriate discussion. Just read the whole thread and got an idea. I am on my way to search for old threads

203. Lana is a good girl so she doesn't deserve all the hate from the press. from an interview not made up at all lell

That single South Korean person yay

This just 100% my opinion, but as a person who is working on the interview it takes plenty of effort on making an interview post by itself, and it is way too hard to check every single stuff from like 2012. It is just hard to keep up with everything (not meaning to offend anybody) My point is: We just update our interview section to the highest level, and if there are duplicates from the past, I think we can sort those out little later :/ Post deleting can be done actually anytime (I am not perfectly aware about post moving/deleting but just assuming) There are lots of remaining interviews, so it will probably delay the "growth" of pure interview section just looking for the older posts. Well if it is needed right now I will probably do it but it is just my thought so I hope nobody is annoyed/bothered by my thought!

So what is actually going on?! I read all the stuff but I just couldn't understand. Anybody willing to give me a little summary for all these new posts ;_;

Rolling Stone July 31st - Interviewer: Brian Hiatt Spoiler She goes to a dark place, in the end, and won't come out of it. "I'm not sure if they should run this story," Lana Del Rey will say, sprawled out on a soft brown couch in tiny denim cut-offs and a white V-neck tee, blowing pensive little gum bubbles. She has, by this point, spent a good seven hours talking with me. At times, it even seemed like it was going well. "I feel like maybe we should wait until there's something good to talk about," she continues, in an airy tone that turns pleading. "You know? I just wish you could write about something else. There has to be someone else to be the cover story. Like, there has to be. anybody." Maybe it shouldn't have been a shock, landing here. Del Rey's brand of pop stardom is self-thwarting, ambivalent, precarious: at her clouded core, beneath the considerable glamour, she is more Cat Power or Kurt Cobain than Rihanna or Katy Perry, complete with a mysterious, Kurt-like stomach ailment that plagues her on tour. And then there's the tattoo on the side of her right hand, just below the pinkie, inked in neat black cursive: Trust No One. (On the same spot on the other hand: Paradise.) 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, Ultraviolence, she answers the green wooden door of the Greenwich Village town-house where she's staying. "I'm Lana, nice to see you," she says, offering a soft handshake and a big, white, hopeful smile, one that instantly suggests everything you think you know about her is wrong; that you've read too much into the consecutive placement of songs called "Sad Girl" and "Pretty When You Cry" on the new album; that you've taken certain recent interview quotes (mainly, "I wish I was dead already," which earned her a Twitter scolding from Frances Bean Cobain) too seriously; that it's a mistake to assume her aloof stage manner has anything to do with her actual personality. Her laugh, fizzy and girlish, is coming easily. She's all but giddy over having her album out, uncompromising, spooky, guitar-laden, hitless thing that it is: "It's what I wanted." Today's V-neck tee is powder blue, nearly matching the self-applied pastel polish on her longish nails, over pale, strategically shredded jeans, cuffed just below the calves, that are familiar from another magazine's photo shoot. She's wearing false eyelashes, but not much noticeable make-up. Del Rey is four days away from her 29th birthday (for reasons she can't explain, she's usually reported to be a year younger), but looks, at the moment, like a college junior home for the summer. She seems so carefree — bubbly, even — that within 10 minutes, it seems safe to break the ice: "So, on a scale of one to 10, how much do you wish you were dead right now?" Her big, brownish-green eyes widen even further. Then she lets out a delicate snort of amusement. "Ten being dead?" she says. "You're funny! Today is a good day." Today she chooses life? "Yeah, today I choose life." So, like a one? "Ten. Ten!" she says, in a daffy sing-song, not unlike Diane Keaton murmuring, 'la di da' in Annie Hall. "Seven. 12!" She throws back her head and laughs, possibly beginning to enjoy herself. But when it comes to Lana Del Rey, who can tell anything for sure? She's a baffling bundle of contradictory signifiers, a mystery that 10,000 tortured think-pieces have failed to solve. David Nichtern, who signed her to his small indie label when she was still in college, saw her as "the outer aspect of Marilyn Monroe with the inner aspect of Leonard Cohen": She may look a bit like Nico, but she's her own Lou Reed. She's nervous and self-conscious onstage, but fearless in her lyrics ("My pussy tastes like Pepsi-Cola"; "I was an angel looking to get fucked hard"). Her consistently viral videos are id-infested pageants of creepy-nostalgic Americana, good-girl/bad-girl dichotomies and the occasional make-out sesh with an old dude. Just try to figure out what's going on in her 2012 clip for "National Anthem," where she plays both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, dares to riff on the Zapruder footage of JFK's assassination, and casts rapper A$AP Rocky as JFK. 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. (Among other complaints, music bloggers felt somehow duped when her online hit "Video Games" led to a near-instant major-label deal.) Her shaky, slightly dead-eyed Saturday Night Live debut was treated like a national emergency, inspiring weeks of debate. She had her change of name from Lizzy Grant presented as evidence of deception rather than showbiz-as-usual. She had to deny surgically enhancing her lips' poutiness (up close, for what it's worth, they look pretty much like lips). Released in the wake of the SNL performance, her 2012 debut on Interscope Records, Born to Die, got skeptical reviews. The songs, and her mannered, multi-layered vocals, seemed to be drowning in lush, trip-hop-y production. But with the help of strong, cinematic new tracks on the bonus EP Paradise, it all turned around. The album sold more than one million copies in the US (and more than seven million worldwide); her Great Gatsby soundtrack single, "Young and Beautiful" went platinum. Kanye West, who takes matters of taste seriously, enlisted her 
to play at his wedding to Kim Kardashian. "It was beautiful, just being there," Del Rey says. "They seemed very happy." Earlier, over lunch, West had told her "he really liked where I was coming from, visually and sonically." Del Rey isn't inclined to celebrate any of this stuff, however. "It doesn't feel like success," she says. "Because with everything that could have felt 
like something really sweet, there's always been something out of the periphery of my world, beyond my control, to kind of disrupt whatever was happening. I've never felt like, 'Oh, this is great.'" The town house Del Rey is staying in belongs to someone she calls "a friend": 31-year-old Francesco Carrozzini, a dashing Italian photographer who's shot her for various European magazines. He obviously does well for himself — "better than us," Del Rey jokes, as she shows me around. His four-story house is a seriously amazing bit of Manhattan real estate, a movie-star-worthy bachelor pad, its dark-wood walls covered with art photos and his shots of celebrities like Keith Richards. The house is on the same block where Bob Dylan moved with his family in 1969; Anna Wintour lives nearby, as does Baz Luhrmann. On the second-floor, on a coffee table, near a Serge Gainsbourg box set, there's a book called The Boudoir Bible. "No shame," Del Rey says with a grin. She's sitting on the brown couch, smoking Carrozzini's American Spirit cigarettes in her languid way, below a huge black-and-white photo of a bunch of slim, naked people, piled on top of one another. The midday sun is blazing through an open window, and her brown hair and fair skin are glowing in its haze — an Instagram filter or cinematographer couldn't do better. "I quit sometimes," she says, of the cigarettes. "And then stop quitting." She smokes onstage, too — it's pure craving, not an image thing. "I find, sometimes, halfway through the set, I definitely need to have a cigarette." 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 (she's partial to Baez's paean to that romance, "Diamonds and Rust," even quoting it on "Ultraviolence"). "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. Which is sad, because it was truly circumstantial, the reasons for us not being together." Ultraviolence feels, at times, like a break-up album, though Del Rey says all of the songs were actually about previous relationships. Either way, it answers a lot of questions about her, even as it raises some new ones. If she were the corporate puppet or calculated fraud some of her detractors imagined her to be, this is not an album she would ever make. The main producer was Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach, who's gifted at summoning vintage-y atmosphere and Morricone-ish grandeur, but is in little danger of being confused with Dr Luke or Max Martin. They recorded much of it live, with his Nashville crew of rock musicians playing while Del Rey sang into a $100 hand-held microphone, her vocals newly raw, jazzy and powerful. There are a bunch of guitar solos. But not one track seems even vaguely suited for pop radio. Even before Auerbach got involved, Del Rey knew that she wanted something very different this time around. "This record was, 'I'm going to do it my way,'" says her friend Lee Foster, who runs Electric Lady Studios in New York, and co-produced some of the album there. Foster told her that Bruce Springsteen had followed up Born in the USA with the 
stark Nebraska (Foster had the order reversed, but close enough). "We talked about taking that stance, like Springsteen shifting gears and saying, 'I'm gonna do exactly what you don't expect me to do'." Auerbach ran into Del Rey at Electric Lady, where he was mixing Ray LaMontagne's new LP. "Honestly, we both benefited from really not knowing anything about each other," he says. After she played him some of the demos she was working on, he became a fan, lobbying to produce her. But he was taken aback by the major-label hassles he experienced — Del Rey is signed to two of them, Interscope and the UK's Polydor. "There was a lot of bullshit I'm not used to," Auerbach says. "The label says, 'We're not going to give you the budget to extend this session unless we hear something.' And we send them the rough mix and they fucking hate it and they hate the way it's mixed. And it's like, 'Thanks, asshole.' "The story I got told," he continues, "is that they played it for her label person and they said, 'We're not putting out this record that you and Dan made unless you meet with the Adele producer'. And she said, 'Fine, whatever'. And she was late to the meeting, so while they were waiting, the label guy played what we recorded for the Adele producer and he said, 'This is amazing — I wouldn't do anything to change this.' And here's the kicker: Then all of a sudden, the label guy said, 'Well, yeah, I think it's great, too.'" "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'." "On this album, in my opinion, you didn't want her to try to do something," says Janick's predecessor at Interscope, Jimmy Iovine. "I felt she hit a bullseye. Everybody's saying to me, 'We need a single,' calling me from Europe. I said, 'You don't need anything.' It's a very coherent body of work, and I thought any other conversation was a distraction. Lana, more than most, reminds me of artists that I produced" — he's thinking of Patti Smith and Stevie Nicks in particular — "which are slightly different than the majority of artists that are on Interscope. Because you can't find those artists every day. She's one of the rare things that come along in life, which is a lyricist. You know how rare they are today, outside rap?" Del Rey's co-manager, Ben Mawson, warned her that she'd have to answer for some of the new album's lyrics, particularly the title track, which quotes the old girl-group line, "He hit me and it felt like a kiss," then adds, "He hurt me but it felt like true love," just in case she hadn't made her point. She's vague on whether this theme might be autobiographical. "I guess I would say, like, I'm definitely drawn to people with a strong physicality," she says with a shrug, "with more of a dominant personality." She's not worried about any message those lines might send. "It's not meant to be popular," she says, sitting in the backyard of the town house, which opens on to a shared garden, where Dylan had angered his neighbours decades ago by trying to put up a fence. She's sipping hot coffee through a straw, a long-standing habit she acknowledges is both "weird" and "nerdy". "It's not pop music," she says. "The only thing I have to do is whatever I want, and I want to write whatever I want. I just hope people don't ask me about it. So I don't feel a responsibility at all. I mean, I just don't. I feel responsible in other ways, community-wise — to be a good citizen, abide by the law." 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. It's none of their business!" But, um, isn't she selling people this music? "I'm not selling the record," she says. "I'm signed to a label who's selling the record. I don't need to make any money. I really could care less. But I do care about making music. I would do it either way. So that's why it has to be on my terms." Del Rey has never been in therapy. "There's nothing anyone could ever tell me that I don't already know," she says. "I know everything about myself. I know why I do what I do. All of my compulsions and interests and inspirations. I'm very in sync with that. It's the other stuff that I don't have any control over, just what's going to happen on a daily basis. My interactions." So what drives her? "Now? Nothing," she says. "I don't have any drive anymore. But I enjoy making records. Before, I felt drive, but now it just feels like an interest. With the first record having received so much analysis, there's no more room for ambition. It breaks that part down, just because you sort of know what to expect, and that nothing is going to work out the way you think anyway." She doesn't want to conquer the world? "No. What I'd love to do is — Francesco has a bike downstairs," she says. "I would love to take a motorcycle to Coney Island and have an amazing talk with you and jump in the water." Somehow, this plan never comes up again. Even as a small child, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was, by her own recollection, "obstinate, contrary". She was born in Manhattan to parents who both worked Mad Men-style jobs at the advertising giant Grey, but when she was one year old, they gave up those careers and moved to sleepy, upstate Lake Placid. Her dad would go on to start his own furniture company, get into real estate and then become a successful early investor in web domain names. But Lizzy just wished they had stayed in the city. "It was really, really quiet," says Del Rey, who has compared the town to Twin Peaks. "I was always waiting to get back to New York City. School was hard. The traditional educational system was not really working for me." 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 Thirteen. "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." "I'm a sad girl/I'm a bad girl," she sings on her new album — but the sad part didn't come until later. She "felt passionate" about drinking, sharing bottles of peach and cherry schnapps with her friends. "I felt like I had kind of arrived into my own life," she says, her voice turning dreamy. "I felt free. Even though I loved leaving town, by the time I was about 15, I knew I was probably going to stay there and have a life there. I mean, I had a vision for myself, definitely, at that point. I didn't see myself becoming a singer or anything. I just wanted to grow up and get married and have fun. Have my own life, my own place." Her parents, meanwhile, wanted her to become a nurse. Losing patience with her partying, they sent her away to Connecticut's Kent School. The move failed to curtail her drinking, and she was miserable. Her father's apparent success aside, she says she was on financial aid. "I was very quiet," she says, "just figuring things out. I didn't relate well with what was going on culturally." She wasn't into mean girls. "The ways people treated other people, I thought was kind of cruel. The high-school mentality I didn't really understand. I wasn't really, like, snarky or bitchy." In an early song called "Boarding School," she mentions being part of a "pro-ana nation" referring to anorexia, and sings, "Had to do drugs to stop the food cravings." But she insists that's fiction. "The mentality of the pro-ana community was just something that was interesting to me." A young English instructor introduced her to Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and Vladimir Nabokov (she has tattoos of the latter two names on her forearm), plus Tupac, the Notorious B.I.G. and old movies like The Big Sleep. Lines in "Boarding School" and another unreleased track, "Prom Song," led fans to question the precise nature of this relationship, but Del Rey says it was nothing inappropriate. "He was just my friend." 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." The summer after her senior year, back in Lake Placid, she woke up sick and hungover one morning, and suddenly realized something important was missing. "I lost my car," she says. "I couldn't find it. And . . . I don't know, I just lost it. And I was just really sick. It was just one of the many reasons why my life was unmanageable. I didn't want to keep fucking up. And at that point, if I was going to keep going, I wanted to have something that I really wanted to do." She says she hasn't had a drink or gotten high since that year, but won't clarify whether she considers herself an alcoholic, or if she ever went to rehab. "It's just you never really know what's going to happen," she says. "Things change every day." She had gotten into SUNY Geneseo, a college in New York's state-university system, but decided not to go. She took the year off, heading to her aunt and uncle's house on Long Island. She worked as a waitress, just as she'd done over various summers. "I loved it," she says, though her mom told one of her label execs that she had been a truly awful waitress. 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. The next fall, she enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx, where she majored in philosophy, but otherwise hardly participated in student life. She lived with boyfriends, crashed on couches. "I was writing, writing, for years," she says. "Trying to figure out what I really wanted to say and why I was consumed with this passion for writing, where it came from. It kept me up all night. So I was waiting to see why. That was a really whole separate world." She'd ride the subway late at night, composing lyrics in her head. "There were these nights that I enjoyed so much, just staying up and writing songs." She cites a sparse, Cat Power-ish tune called "Disco" ("I am my only god now," she sings, cheerily) and "Trash Magic" (sample lyric: "Boy, you want to come to the motel, honey/Boy, ya wanna hold me down, tell me that you love me?"). "I felt I was really capturing my life in song form, and it was such a pleasure. And that being my whole life, you know? And really being happy, because I was doing exactly what I loved." In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a songwriting competition in 2006 led her to 5 Points Records, a tiny label run by Nichtern, who had, years earlier, written the Maria Muldaur hit, "Midnight at the Oasis." "I knew immediately that she was gonna be a big star," says Nichtern. "And she herself knew, and not just by chutzpah or bravado. On some level she knew this was what her karma was." 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." Like, for instance, Lizzy's name. Lana Del Rey is, she says, the same person — the same artist, even — as Lizzy Grant. "There's not, like, a schism between people," she says. "It's actually just a different name, and that's sort of where it begins and ends. I just thought it was strange, being born into this geographic lockdown location, and a name that you didn't choose, and going to school for fucking 23 years. It was just unfathomable to me. So I think in choosing that name, it was just more becoming who I was, you know? It wasn't music-related. It was just part of my life." The other possible name was Cherry Galore, she says, probably joking: "You'd be sitting here calling me 'Cherry.'" By the time Lizzy became Lana for good, 5 Points had already released an EP from the Kahne sessions under the name Lizzy Grant — and iTunes had selected Lizzy as one of the best new artists of 2008. "As we're putting the album together, she says something like, 'I really want to change my name,' recalls Nichtern, who had been taking Lizzy and her album around the industry. "If we're making the movie, you'd see a spit take. We'd just gotten that far with Lizzy Grant." But Del Rey had found new management, dyed her hair from blonde to brown and was ready to move on. They ended up all but scrubbing the LP's existence from the internet, which made it look like they were trying to hide Del Rey's past, contributing to conspiracy-mongering later on. "We didn't want the old album to be available just as we were trying to launch a new thing," says Mawson, her co-manager. "And if that created suspicion in the eyes of weirdos on the internet, then fine." 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 ("Sometimes a girl's just gotta generalize"). 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. Even as she faced legal action for appropriating footage, people accused her of not actually making the "Video Games" clip herself — The New Yorker, of all places, called it "allegedly home-made". "I definitely wouldn't say I did if I didn't," she says with a sigh, showing me the software on her MacBook, which has a badly cracked screen. "That would be weird." It's a clairvoyant, appropriately enough, who gives the first hint that something will go wrong on the second day. "I was trying to think of shit we could do," Del Rey says, greeting me again at the town-house door. "The only thing I could think of is we could see a psychic together." In any case, she needs cigarettes, so we head out into the heat. She's wearing cheap, gold-framed sunglasses with peach-coloured lenses. "They're so ugly," she says, striding along Bleecker Street. "Rose-colored glasses. Just what the doctor ordered." Del Rey was raised Catholic, but she has a mystical bent. "I'm definitely a seeker," she says. While she was waiting for the Kahne album to come out, she got involved with an "East Village guru" who "had an ability to see into the past and read into the future." But she left his orbit after detecting something "sinister" about him. We end up paying a visit to a storefront psychic next to a bodega, in a creepy, red-walled room. The mystic turns out to be an unexpectedly fresh-faced woman in a matching red sundress, who enforces strict rules about "energy." Del Rey asks her to do our readings together, but the psychic demurs: "Can I talk to the young lady alone?" The outing is becoming comically pointless. Del Rey is laughing as we return to the house, though maybe slightly irritated. "Fuck," she says. "I should've thought that one out. I don't think she had the gift. It's always sort of a menacing vibe unless you go to somebody who's, like, world-renowned." The psychic told her that this is her year for love and happiness — Del Rey jokes that there's still six months left. She's amused to hear that the psychic told me that I'm spiritually sensitive. "She could probably tell that you thought she was being a fucking bitch." We go back to talking, with Del Rey blowing cigarette smoke out the window, into the light. We finally touch on Saturday Night Live, 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'." Iovine says they simply "got caught speeding" with the early performance, and that he spent time in the studio afterward, coaching Del Rey on using in-ear monitors. I ask her about Ride, a song where she sings about feeling "fucking crazy" — not an isolated sentiment in her catalogue. "Well, I feel fucking crazy," she says. "But I don't think I am. People make me feel crazy." We talk a little about the "I wish I were dead" thing, which she blames on leading questions. "I find that most people I meet figure I kind of want to kill myself anyway," she says. "So it comes up every time." Then, really without warning, her mood shifts. It's a powerful thing, palpable in the room, like a sudden mass of threatening clouds. Her eyes seem to turn a shade darker: Trust no one. I ask, perversely, about "Fucked my Way up to the Top," one of Ultraviolence's best songs, which attacks an unnamed imitator who didn't have to go through the gauntlet Del Rey did. It may be about Lorde, who criticised Del Rey's lyrics but has a not-dissimilar vocal style. She just released the song, but she doesn't want to talk about it. "Now you are annoying me," she says, half-trying to sound like she's kidding. She lights a cigarette, looking miserable. We begin an agonizing, endless meta-conversation about our interview and her relationship with the press. "I find the nature of the questions difficult," she says. "Cause it's not like I'm a rock band and you're asking how everything got made and what it's like touring in arenas and what are the girls like. It's about my father. It's about my mental health. It's fucking personal. And these questions all have negative inferences: It's just like, 'SNL; Do you actually want to kill yourself?'...Maybe I'm sensitive. Do you think?" That's when she says she doesn't want to be on the cover of Rolling Stone anymore. She also says, "What you write won't matter" — meaning that nothing will change her detractors' minds about her. It goes on and on. "You hit all my more sensitive weaknesses, all my Achilles heels. You're asking all the right questions. I just really don't want to answer them." Every attempt to talk her off this rhetorical ledge seems to make it worse. Del Rey stands up, in a distinct "time to go" gesture. "I definitely presented myself well, and that's all I've ever done," she says, walking me downstairs. "And that's never really got me anywhere. I'm just uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with you." Stepping out, I try to convince her that her crisis of confidence over the interview is no big deal. It is, again, the wrong thing to say. "It's not a crisis of confidence, it's not," she says, standing in the doorway. "I am confident." Her eyes are ablaze with hurt and pride. "I am." She says goodbye, and shuts the door. Source

Nylon November 28th - Interviewer: Melissa Giannini Spoiler There’s a lot we’re thankful for this year--just check out this list!--but one of the top things we’re grateful of is our November cover star, Lana Del Rey. While we await her role in Tropico, a movie she wrote, we’re going to catch up on our Del Rey obsession by re-reading her cover story from this month’s issue. That’s right, you can get your Lana fix right here, right now. So read on and have a great long weekend! “Where I’m at now...calls for a cigarette,” Lana Del Rey decides with a laugh, drawing a Pall Mall from a pack and lighting it. Casually dressed in faded jean shorts, a chambray shirt, and brown loafers, her dark auburn hair piled on top of her head and held with a clip, the sad-core soul singer of “Video Games” fame might pass for the prettiest girl from high school--the one everyone assumed was aloof but who was probably just shy, the one who, yep, Facebook confirms it, is still pretty--were it not for a pair of lush, red carpet-ready lashes casting shadows across her cheeks with each blink. Geographically speaking, she’s at the midcentury home in the Hollywood Hills that she’s rented for the past year, lounging on a mod patio chair on the circular back deck that overlooks a glinting turquoise pool, a back canyon to the Sunset Strip, another hill, and, on less smoggy days, the Pacific Ocean. Her lease is up at the end of the week, and just inside, her belongings are half-packed for an impending move across town to a historic house she recently bought. “Where I’m at now...calls for a cigarette,” Lana Del Rey decides with a laugh, drawing a Pall Mall from a pack and lighting it. Casually dressed in faded jean shorts, a chambray shirt, and brown loafers, her dark auburn hair piled on top of her head and held with a clip, the sad-core soul singer of “Video Games” fame might pass for the prettiest girl from high school--the one everyone assumed was aloof but who was probably just shy, the one who, yep, Facebook confirms it, is still pretty--were it not for a pair of lush, red carpet-ready lashes casting shadows across her cheeks with each blink. Geographically speaking, she’s at the midcentury home in the Hollywood Hills that she’s rented for the past year, lounging on a mod patio chair on the circular back deck that overlooks a glinting turquoise pool, a back canyon to the Sunset Strip, another hill, and, on less smoggy days, the Pacific Ocean. Her lease is up at the end of the week, and just inside, her belongings are half-packed for an impending move across town to a historic house she recently bought. “Where I’m at now...calls for a cigarette,” Lana Del Rey decides with a laugh, drawing a Pall Mall from a pack and lighting it. Casually dressed in faded jean shorts, a chambray shirt, and brown loafers, her dark auburn hair piled on top of her head and held with a clip, the sad-core soul singer of “Video Games” fame might pass for the prettiest girl from high school--the one everyone assumed was aloof but who was probably just shy, the one who, yep, Facebook confirms it, is still pretty--were it not for a pair of lush, red carpet-ready lashes casting shadows across her cheeks with each blink. Geographically speaking, she’s at the midcentury home in the Hollywood Hills that she’s rented for the past year, lounging on a mod patio chair on the circular back deck that overlooks a glinting turquoise pool, a back canyon to the Sunset Strip, another hill, and, on less smoggy days, the Pacific Ocean. Her lease is up at the end of the week, and just inside, her belongings are half-packed for an impending move across town to a historic house she recently bought. “I love to dance--just never thought I would to my music.” Professionally, Del Rey, 27, is at a bit of an in-between place as well. More than 20 months have passed since the release of her breakthrough album, Born to Die, almost 12 since her follow-up EP Paradise, and yet the amount of bandwidth devoted to the baroque-pop star continues to balloon. She’s served as a muse for Mulberry and modeled for H&M. The day of our interview, Cedric Gervais’s dance remix of “Summertime Sadness,” a song not originally intended for formal release, shot up the Billboard charts to No. 6. She’s been traveling, and heard the track for the first time yesterday on her way to pick up groceries. “It’s very dance-y,” she says, almost in disbelief. “I love to dance--just never thought I would to my music.” Her second-best-selling single in the U.S., “Young and Beautiful,” off this year’s The Great Gatsby soundtrack, just might be her most captivating to date, made for a film that complements her vintage aesthetic but, ironically, the one best suited to pure listening, lights off, tears streaming. This fall, the singer stars in a film of her own, Tropico, a short directed by Anthony Mandler. Meanwhile, demos from her hacked email accounts continue to surface online, including at least one she’d slated for her next full-length, tentatively scheduled for 2014. It’s no wonder she’s decided to chill out for a while and reboot. “Right now, I’m doing family and thinking about what I want to be doing,” she says. “I’m enjoying living easily, planting trees, things like that.” Del Rey’s gaze shifts to the window of a bedroom she shares with Barrie-James O’Neill, frontman of the Glaswegian alt-folk band Kassidy, and her boyfriend of a little more than two years. The two met after O’Neill’s manager sent him “Video Games” with the description: “Your future ex-wife.” He called asking to meet her, and they’ve been together ever since. The Pall Malls are his. “I’m just a little copycat,” she quips. “Plus, I don’t like to buy my own because I’m not a real smoker, you know?” She smiles, whispering that O’Neill and her younger brother, Charlie Grant, are inside, sleeping. “So if you see two six-foot-five, half-naked giants emerge, that is who they are.” Professionally, Del Rey, 27, is at a bit of an in-between place as well. More than 20 months have passed since the release of her breakthrough album, Born to Die, almost 12 since her follow-up EP Paradise, and yet the amount of bandwidth devoted to the baroque-pop star continues to balloon. She’s served as a muse for Mulberry and modeled for H&M. The day of our interview, Cedric Gervais’s dance remix of “Summertime Sadness,” a song not originally intended for formal release, shot up the Billboard charts to No. 6. She’s been traveling, and heard the track for the first time yesterday on her way to pick up groceries. “It’s very dance-y,” she says, almost in disbelief. “I love to dance--just never thought I would to my music.” Her second-best-selling single in the U.S., “Young and Beautiful,” off this year’s The Great Gatsby soundtrack, just might be her most captivating to date, made for a film that complements her vintage aesthetic but, ironically, the one best suited to pure listening, lights off, tears streaming. This fall, the singer stars in a film of her own, Tropico, a short directed by Anthony Mandler. Meanwhile, demos from her hacked email accounts continue to surface online, including at least one she’d slated for her next full-length, tentatively scheduled for 2014. It’s no wonder she’s decided to chill out for a while and reboot. “Right now, I’m doing family and thinking about what I want to be doing,” she says. “I’m enjoying living easily, planting trees, things like that.” Del Rey’s gaze shifts to the window of a bedroom she shares with Barrie-James O’Neill, frontman of the Glaswegian alt-folk band Kassidy, and her boyfriend of a little more than two years. The two met after O’Neill’s manager sent him “Video Games” with the description: “Your future ex-wife.” He called asking to meet her, and they’ve been together ever since. The Pall Malls are his. “I’m just a little copycat,” she quips. “Plus, I don’t like to buy my own because I’m not a real smoker, you know?” She smiles, whispering that O’Neill and her younger brother, Charlie Grant, are inside, sleeping. “So if you see two six-foot-five, half-naked giants emerge, that is who they are.” “I just thought Elvis was the most handsome person I had ever seen.” It’s almost a mystery in itself how Del Rey has managed to remain an enigma. The think-piece police have been out in full force, screen-grabbing her digital bread crumbs in an attempt to connect the dots between a blonde, open-mic-circuit singer named Lizzy Grant and the pin-curled indie pinup-turned-Interscope buzz act who barreled to stardom after a much-discussed Saturday Night Live performance. Google listed her in the top five performing artist searches of 2012, but the reviews for Born to Die were mixed, a response that matched the dichotomy of Del Rey’s persona--a mishmash of Priscilla and Ann-Margret, Jackie and Marilyn, Valencia-filtered to hazy perfection. Whether you were a critic, a member of the record-buying public, or Brian Williams, you had an opinion on her music. And you were also buying it: five million albums to date, 8.5 million singles. Almost two years later, the discourse appears to be shifting heavily in her favor--even some of the early critics have come around to acknowledge that Born to Die is unquestionably interesting and quite possibly a classic. With anticipation for her next album growing stronger by the minute, it may be time to ask: Has Lana Del Rey successfully transitioned from the most polarizing figure in popular music to the closest thing our contemporary culture has to an American icon? “Let’s go inside,” she says. As predicted, two giants emerge, though fully clothed. O’Neill wears a white T-shirt and Dark Side of the Moon-themed pajama pants, her brother: shorts and a tee. Del Rey jokes with them before giving a tour of the home under the watchful eye of a large pop-art rendering of Jackie Kennedy (a black-and-white photograph of Marilyn Monroe is wedged in the bottom right corner of the frame). She points to the pictures of Kurt Cobain and the Virgin Mary lining the baby grand’s music rack. It’s clear the singer has a thing for icons, but she says it’s a coincidence that her lifelong heroes happen to be the most famous people in the world. “I just thought Elvis was the most handsome person I had ever seen,” she says. “I thought I was the only one who knew.” It’s almost a mystery in itself how Del Rey has managed to remain an enigma. The think-piece police have been out in full force, screen-grabbing her digital bread crumbs in an attempt to connect the dots between a blonde, open-mic-circuit singer named Lizzy Grant and the pin-curled indie pinup-turned-Interscope buzz act who barreled to stardom after a much-discussed Saturday Night Live performance. Google listed her in the top five performing artist searches of 2012, but the reviews for Born to Die were mixed, a response that matched the dichotomy of Del Rey’s persona--a mishmash of Priscilla and Ann-Margret, Jackie and Marilyn, Valencia-filtered to hazy perfection. Whether you were a critic, a member of the record-buying public, or Brian Williams, you had an opinion on her music. And you were also buying it: five million albums to date, 8.5 million singles. Almost two years later, the discourse appears to be shifting heavily in her favor--even some of the early critics have come around to acknowledge that Born to Die is unquestionably interesting and quite possibly a classic. With anticipation for her next album growing stronger by the minute, it may be time to ask: Has Lana Del Rey successfully transitioned from the most polarizing figure in popular music to the closest thing our contemporary culture has to an American icon? “Let’s go inside,” she says. As predicted, two giants emerge, though fully clothed. O’Neill wears a white T-shirt and Dark Side of the Moon-themed pajama pants, her brother: shorts and a tee. Del Rey jokes with them before giving a tour of the home under the watchful eye of a large pop-art rendering of Jackie Kennedy (a black-and-white photograph of Marilyn Monroe is wedged in the bottom right corner of the frame). She points to the pictures of Kurt Cobain and the Virgin Mary lining the baby grand’s music rack. It’s clear the singer has a thing for icons, but she says it’s a coincidence that her lifelong heroes happen to be the most famous people in the world. “I just thought Elvis was the most handsome person I had ever seen,” she says. “I thought I was the only one who knew.” “I loved the mysticism, the idea of something bigger, the idea of a divine plan.” Del Rey lifts a chandelier out of a box. “I picked this up in Australia--once all of its crystals are back on, it’s going to be great,” she says. Her decor plan for the new house: “the ’70s in the South of France, lots of rattan, blue and gold, bamboo, and long curtains.” Del Rey is looking forward to the move--and not only for the house’s original wood detailing and natural light. “The neighborhood is really quiet,” she says. “The thing about being up here is that people can follow you; it’s harder to just be.” The constant attention has affected her writing process as well. “It’s harder to be an observer when people are watching you,” she says. “You have to go further inside because the outside world becomes a harder place to draw from.” She’s also not winning any “good neighbor” awards in her current home. “We leave the trash out, and we don’t put the bins in the friggin’ street,” she admits. “Everyone just hates us. They are going to have a party-- and so are we--when we leave.” Lana Del Rey’s parents met in advertising in New York City. In 1986, they gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, and moved to Lake Placid, where her father began investing in real estate and, later, online properties. “Where we lived in the Adirondacks was very small, like 1,100 people,” she says. Del Rey recalls family trips to Florida down the eastern seaboard. “I remember driving over all of the bridges and seeing all of the flashing lights and more and more people and being absolutely thrilled at the possibility of all these things I could do when I grew up,” she says. “Lake Placid is the coldest spot in the nation, other than Duluth.” She attended a Catholic elementary school called St. Agnes, and was the cantor of the church across the street. “I loved church,” says Del Rey. “I loved the mysticism, the idea of something bigger, the idea of a divine plan. For me, the concept of religion transitioned into a really healthy idea of God--I don’t have the traditional views of a conservative Catholic, but my imagination was opened within the big blue-and-gold cathedral walls. I liked the idea of being looked after.” Del Rey lifts a chandelier out of a box. “I picked this up in Australia--once all of its crystals are back on, it’s going to be great,” she says. Her decor plan for the new house: “the ’70s in the South of France, lots of rattan, blue and gold, bamboo, and long curtains.” Del Rey is looking forward to the move--and not only for the house’s original wood detailing and natural light. “The neighborhood is really quiet,” she says. “The thing about being up here is that people can follow you; it’s harder to just be.” The constant attention has affected her writing process as well. “It’s harder to be an observer when people are watching you,” she says. “You have to go further inside because the outside world becomes a harder place to draw from.” She’s also not winning any “good neighbor” awards in her current home. “We leave the trash out, and we don’t put the bins in the friggin’ street,” she admits. “Everyone just hates us. They are going to have a party-- and so are we--when we leave.” Lana Del Rey’s parents met in advertising in New York City. In 1986, they gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, and moved to Lake Placid, where her father began investing in real estate and, later, online properties. “Where we lived in the Adirondacks was very small, like 1,100 people,” she says. Del Rey recalls family trips to Florida down the eastern seaboard. “I remember driving over all of the bridges and seeing all of the flashing lights and more and more people and being absolutely thrilled at the possibility of all these things I could do when I grew up,” she says. “Lake Placid is the coldest spot in the nation, other than Duluth.” She attended a Catholic elementary school called St. Agnes, and was the cantor of the church across the street. “I loved church,” says Del Rey. “I loved the mysticism, the idea of something bigger, the idea of a divine plan. For me, the concept of religion transitioned into a really healthy idea of God--I don’t have the traditional views of a conservative Catholic, but my imagination was opened within the big blue-and-gold cathedral walls. I liked the idea of being looked after.” “Sometimes when I write about my feelings, about what sounds like a person, I’m actually writing about the way I felt when I was completely inebriated, which was really good--until it wasn’t working for me anymore.” She spent most of her school days looking out of windows and wishing she were somewhere else until a philosophy class she took at 15 changed the course of her life. “That was where I knew I’d find my people. I wanted to be around people who were asking, ’Why are we here?’” Around the same time, she’d also discovered alcohol--her teenage drink of choice: “anything fast and dark.” “Sometimes when I write about my feelings, about what sounds like a person, I’m actually writing about the way I felt when I was completely inebriated, which was really good--until it wasn’t working for me anymore,” she says. Her parents sent her to Kent, a strict boarding school in Connecticut, and by 18, she was sober. “Thinking about not drinking forever was very scary, but once I did it wasn’t hard anymore because I had all of these miracles happen that let me know I was on exactly the right path,” she says. She enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx to study philosophy and began volunteering at homeless and drug-and alcohol-rehabilitation programs. At one point, she took a road trip across the country to paint and rebuild houses on a Native American reservation. Around this time, she also began singing at Williamsburg and Lower East Side venues like Laila Lounge, Galapagos, The Living Room, and The Bitter End. Throughout school, she moved around between the apartments of friends and boyfriends. “My mom called me ’the couch queen,’” she says. She remembers spending long nights at a Chinese deli on 42nd Street. “They’d let me buy a banana and a coffee and stay there until midnight,” she says. “I would go over different rhymes in my head, like rhyming ‘disco’ with ‘go-go,’ writing about girls with blue mascara and black eyeliner, and about all of the men I had met who I just loved. It was a very liberating, penniless, hilarious, fun, fun time.” One of the apartments she stayed in was that of her then-boyfriend, Steven Mertens, a fixture in New York’s alt-rock and antifolk scenes. He wound up producing her first album, Lana Del Ray a.k.a. Lizzy Grant, which was eventually re-recorded by David Kahne for the independent label 5 Points Records. The “Ray” would change to “Rey” by her breakout sophomore release, of course, but the title of her debut spelled out in plain letters that a transformation was afoot. She spent most of her school days looking out of windows and wishing she were somewhere else until a philosophy class she took at 15 changed the course of her life. “That was where I knew I’d find my people. I wanted to be around people who were asking, ’Why are we here?’” Around the same time, she’d also discovered alcohol--her teenage drink of choice: “anything fast and dark.” “Sometimes when I write about my feelings, about what sounds like a person, I’m actually writing about the way I felt when I was completely inebriated, which was really good--until it wasn’t working for me anymore,” she says. Her parents sent her to Kent, a strict boarding school in Connecticut, and by 18, she was sober. “Thinking about not drinking forever was very scary, but once I did it wasn’t hard anymore because I had all of these miracles happen that let me know I was on exactly the right path,” she says. She enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx to study philosophy and began volunteering at homeless and drug-and alcohol-rehabilitation programs. At one point, she took a road trip across the country to paint and rebuild houses on a Native American reservation. Around this time, she also began singing at Williamsburg and Lower East Side venues like Laila Lounge, Galapagos, The Living Room, and The Bitter End. Throughout school, she moved around between the apartments of friends and boyfriends. “My mom called me ’the couch queen,’” she says. She remembers spending long nights at a Chinese deli on 42nd Street. “They’d let me buy a banana and a coffee and stay there until midnight,” she says. “I would go over different rhymes in my head, like rhyming ‘disco’ with ‘go-go,’ writing about girls with blue mascara and black eyeliner, and about all of the men I had met who I just loved. It was a very liberating, penniless, hilarious, fun, fun time.” One of the apartments she stayed in was that of her then-boyfriend, Steven Mertens, a fixture in New York’s alt-rock and antifolk scenes. He wound up producing her first album, Lana Del Ray a.k.a. Lizzy Grant, which was eventually re-recorded by David Kahne for the independent label 5 Points Records. The “Ray” would change to “Rey” by her breakout sophomore release, of course, but the title of her debut spelled out in plain letters that a transformation was afoot. “I would go over different rhymes in my head, like rhyming ‘disco’ with ‘go-go,’ writing about girls with blue mascara and black eyeliner, and about all of the men I had met who I just loved. It was a very liberating, penniless, hilarious, fun, fun time.” The record also helped her secure the first permanent address of her young adult life. “Obviously, when you’re 20, you don’t have too much money, but when I signed my first deal, I got a check for $10,000,” says Del Rey. She used the cash to rent a trailer in the Manhattan Mobile Home Park in North Bergen, New Jersey, and commuted on the Hudson-Bergen line for her final year at Fordham. “There were a lot of families and residents who had been there for 35 years,” she says of the community. “I liked the time by myself. I liked decorating it with streamers--but only on the inside--fish tanks, little pink speakers with a jack for my iPod Touch. I wasn’t partying, I was really serious at the time, and I liked the diverse environments--going from the Bronx to New Jersey, and then recording with David on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District. I loved taking cars from one place to another.” Her label shelved the recording for a couple of years before releasing it on iTunes in 2010. Three months later, Del Rey met a lawyer named Ben Mawson, who, along with Ed Millett, would become her manager. Del Rey was their first client. “When I met Ben and Ed, they helped me facilitate, but the tunes were a natural progression from where they began,” explains Del Rey. “Even the new videos, conceptually, are an extension of what I was exploring a while ago.” Mawson and Millett also helped her get out of her deal with 5 Points, where, she says, “nothing was happening.” Not too long after, she moved to London, where she crashed with Mawson for a few years. All the while she was uploading spliced YouTube videos to tunes of hazy young romance, songs like “Yayo” and “Mermaid Motel,” to little attention. “I loved what I was doing and had so much fun,” she says. “I loved the moods I was creating just for myself and by myself.” About fifth in line was a montage for “Video Games,” a song she’d written with Justin Parker about the simple pleasure of watching an old boyfriend play video games. The instrumentation was minimal and melancholic--an unfussy piano line, soft strings, occasional harp trills. For the video, she interspersed found footage of California landscapes and the Chateau Marmont with fuzzy shots of herself singing. The record also helped her secure the first permanent address of her young adult life. “Obviously, when you’re 20, you don’t have too much money, but when I signed my first deal, I got a check for $10,000,” says Del Rey. She used the cash to rent a trailer in the Manhattan Mobile Home Park in North Bergen, New Jersey, and commuted on the Hudson-Bergen line for her final year at Fordham. “There were a lot of families and residents who had been there for 35 years,” she says of the community. “I liked the time by myself. I liked decorating it with streamers--but only on the inside--fish tanks, little pink speakers with a jack for my iPod Touch. I wasn’t partying, I was really serious at the time, and I liked the diverse environments--going from the Bronx to New Jersey, and then recording with David on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District. I loved taking cars from one place to another.” Her label shelved the recording for a couple of years before releasing it on iTunes in 2010. Three months later, Del Rey met a lawyer named Ben Mawson, who, along with Ed Millett, would become her manager. Del Rey was their first client. “When I met Ben and Ed, they helped me facilitate, but the tunes were a natural progression from where they began,” explains Del Rey. “Even the new videos, conceptually, are an extension of what I was exploring a while ago.” Mawson and Millett also helped her get out of her deal with 5 Points, where, she says, “nothing was happening.” Not too long after, she moved to London, where she crashed with Mawson for a few years. All the while she was uploading spliced YouTube videos to tunes of hazy young romance, songs like “Yayo” and “Mermaid Motel,” to little attention. “I loved what I was doing and had so much fun,” she says. “I loved the moods I was creating just for myself and by myself.” About fifth in line was a montage for “Video Games,” a song she’d written with Justin Parker about the simple pleasure of watching an old boyfriend play video games. The instrumentation was minimal and melancholic--an unfussy piano line, soft strings, occasional harp trills. For the video, she interspersed found footage of California landscapes and the Chateau Marmont with fuzzy shots of herself singing. “I know when I wrote [“Video Games”], I was in love with it--I sent it to everyone, saying, ‘Look! This is me in song form.’” By then, she’d traded Lizzy Grant’s blonde bob for Lana Del Rey’s long, silky locks. A French manicure, off-the-shoulder sweater, and come-hither pale-pink pout completed the look. Del Rey’s younger sister, Caroline “Chuck” Grant, took many of Del Rey’s early promotional photos, and continues to help define her visual aesthetic. Grant says growing up in a resort town inspired the sisters’ mutual appreciation for visual representations of the American Dream. While the decadent camps on Lake Placid didn’t belong to them, they took comfort in their cinematic grandeur. “[During shoots,] we’ll talk about creating realities through creative and spiritual intention,” she says. “I think of the photographs as a series of postcards that represent the different worlds we’ve created or been to--worlds we’ve spent a lot of time in.” With the video for “Video Games,” Del Rey perfectly encapsulated a similar misty reverie--something the Internet generation craved near the tail end of the first decade of the new millennium. Plus, the mysterious, self-styled “gangster Nancy Sinatra” cooing to the camera was, to say the least, compelling. “Suddenly, well-known people were posting it, and I thought, ‘How did they get my video?’” she says. Among the video’s die-hards was actress Jaime King, who has become one of Del Rey’s closest friends. “Seeing all of those images put together, along with the songwriting, the melody, and just her face, was something that captured me where I could barely breathe,” says King. When she heard the singer was performing a small show at the Chateau Marmont, she rushed over after shooting an episode of Hart of Dixie but got there too late. “She was walking out as I was walking in, and that’s how we met,” she says. The two ran into each other a few more times in L.A. over the next few months. “It was like the universe brought us together, and it makes sense because she’s like a sister to me,” says King. “I’m pregnant right now, and having her by my side through this process has been so important to me. There’s something very calming about her presence.” Del Rey isn’t sure why “Video Games,” a long song with no drums, was the one that took off. “I know when I wrote it, I was in love with it--I sent it to everyone, saying, ‘Look! This is me in song form,’ she recounts. “No one in my own circle had a very big reaction, but then Fearne Cotton on Radio 1 started spinning it every day, and that’s when things really started to change.” King, for one, was not surprised. “What’s really stunning to me about Lana is that everything she creates is completely from the depths of her heart and her soul,” she says. “Most artists these days, especially female pop artists, unfortunately, have a whole machine behind them. They choose from the same core of songs that are being written by the same five people, and then they have No. 1 hits, but it’s not something they conceptualized, or sat down with pen and paper and wrote. What’s astonishing is that she’s sort of a Jim Morrison. There’s nothing inauthentic about what she does. Every song, every look, every video, everything that she puts out into the world is all from her, and that’s so rare. The only person who created Lana Del Rey is her.” By then, she’d traded Lizzy Grant’s blonde bob for Lana Del Rey’s long, silky locks. A French manicure, off-the-shoulder sweater, and come-hither pale-pink pout completed the look. Del Rey’s younger sister, Caroline “Chuck” Grant, took many of Del Rey’s early promotional photos, and continues to help define her visual aesthetic. Grant says growing up in a resort town inspired the sisters’ mutual appreciation for visual representations of the American Dream. While the decadent camps on Lake Placid didn’t belong to them, they took comfort in their cinematic grandeur. “[During shoots,] we’ll talk about creating realities through creative and spiritual intention,” she says. “I think of the photographs as a series of postcards that represent the different worlds we’ve created or been to--worlds we’ve spent a lot of time in.” With the video for “Video Games,” Del Rey perfectly encapsulated a similar misty reverie--something the Internet generation craved near the tail end of the first decade of the new millennium. Plus, the mysterious, self-styled “gangster Nancy Sinatra” cooing to the camera was, to say the least, compelling. “Suddenly, well-known people were posting it, and I thought, ‘How did they get my video?’” she says. Among the video’s die-hards was actress Jaime King, who has become one of Del Rey’s closest friends. “Seeing all of those images put together, along with the songwriting, the melody, and just her face, was something that captured me where I could barely breathe,” says King. When she heard the singer was performing a small show at the Chateau Marmont, she rushed over after shooting an episode of Hart of Dixie but got there too late. “She was walking out as I was walking in, and that’s how we met,” she says. The two ran into each other a few more times in L.A. over the next few months. “It was like the universe brought us together, and it makes sense because she’s like a sister to me,” says King. “I’m pregnant right now, and having her by my side through this process has been so important to me. There’s something very calming about her presence.” Del Rey isn’t sure why “Video Games,” a long song with no drums, was the one that took off. “I know when I wrote it, I was in love with it--I sent it to everyone, saying, ‘Look! This is me in song form,’ she recounts. “No one in my own circle had a very big reaction, but then Fearne Cotton on Radio 1 started spinning it every day, and that’s when things really started to change.” King, for one, was not surprised. “What’s really stunning to me about Lana is that everything she creates is completely from the depths of her heart and her soul,” she says. “Most artists these days, especially female pop artists, unfortunately, have a whole machine behind them. They choose from the same core of songs that are being written by the same five people, and then they have No. 1 hits, but it’s not something they conceptualized, or sat down with pen and paper and wrote. What’s astonishing is that she’s sort of a Jim Morrison. There’s nothing inauthentic about what she does. Every song, every look, every video, everything that she puts out into the world is all from her, and that’s so rare. The only person who created Lana Del Rey is her.” “[Kurt Cobain is] a big part of our daily conversation. Jeff Buckley is another big inspiration. And Jim Morrison--I mean, we talk about these people like we know them. They’re a part of our relationship. We always say, ‘All of our friends are dead, and they never knew us.’ I’m lucky to have met someone who feels that way, too.” And the evolution is ongoing. After all, like many women in their 20s, she’s been seduced by the constant reinvention possibilities of persona-generating social-media outlets. Her family still calls her Lizzy, though sometimes they’ll switch to Lana. “It’s interchangeable for them, like a nickname or something,” she explains. These days, a typical afternoon involves waking up late, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette on her back porch with O’Neill, and then taking a drive, usually to Malibu and always with Del Rey behind the wheel. He’ll hum a song into his iPhone recorder; she’ll put in her two cents. Sometimes they’ll stop at Neptune’s Net, a biker bar at the end of the beach. Del Rey feels connected to motorcycle culture, the freedom of the open road, the nomadic lifestyle. “It’s about living for the day, which was my mindset for a long time,” she says. Other days, they’ll just drive to the ocean, stop on the side of the road, and watch the waves. “We talk about the future, what we want to do, and how we’re going to work out everything with timing, since I have a lot of shows coming up,” she says. “Driving is our thinking time. Then we’ll come back and write.” The two initially bonded over a mutual love of Kurt Cobain. “He’s a big part of our daily conversation. Jeff Buckley is another big inspiration. And Jim Morrison--I mean, we talk about these people like we know them. They’re a part of our relationship. We always say, ‘All of our friends are dead, and they never knew us.’ I’m lucky to have met someone who feels that way, too.” The couple have been recording some ’70s-style rock with producer Jonathan Wilson in Silver Lake for fun, but Del Rey characterizes her next release as a work-in-progress, done on her own terms and timetable. “When people ask me about it, I just have to be honest--I really don’t know,” she admits. “I don’t want to say, ‘Yeah, definitely--the next one’s better than this one,’ because I don’t really hear a next one. My muse is very fickle. She only comes to me sometimes, which is annoying.” Also bothersome: having your email hacked. “When ‘Black Beauty’ got leaked, I was a little bit discouraged, because I usually focus an entire record around one song, or one phrase, or one title, like...’Black Beauty,’” she says. In a time of contrived viral videos and choreographed twerking, the incident feels legitimately unplanned, unfortunate, and un-spinnable. The leak didn’t completely crush her creativity, “but it didn’t help,” she says. And the evolution is ongoing. After all, like many women in their 20s, she’s been seduced by the constant reinvention possibilities of persona-generating social-media outlets. Her family still calls her Lizzy, though sometimes they’ll switch to Lana. “It’s interchangeable for them, like a nickname or something,” she explains. These days, a typical afternoon involves waking up late, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette on her back porch with O’Neill, and then taking a drive, usually to Malibu and always with Del Rey behind the wheel. He’ll hum a song into his iPhone recorder; she’ll put in her two cents. Sometimes they’ll stop at Neptune’s Net, a biker bar at the end of the beach. Del Rey feels connected to motorcycle culture, the freedom of the open road, the nomadic lifestyle. “It’s about living for the day, which was my mindset for a long time,” she says. Other days, they’ll just drive to the ocean, stop on the side of the road, and watch the waves. “We talk about the future, what we want to do, and how we’re going to work out everything with timing, since I have a lot of shows coming up,” she says. “Driving is our thinking time. Then we’ll come back and write.” The two initially bonded over a mutual love of Kurt Cobain. “He’s a big part of our daily conversation. Jeff Buckley is another big inspiration. And Jim Morrison--I mean, we talk about these people like we know them. They’re a part of our relationship. We always say, ‘All of our friends are dead, and they never knew us.’ I’m lucky to have met someone who feels that way, too.” The couple have been recording some ’70s-style rock with producer Jonathan Wilson in Silver Lake for fun, but Del Rey characterizes her next release as a work-in-progress, done on her own terms and timetable. “When people ask me about it, I just have to be honest--I really don’t know,” she admits. “I don’t want to say, ‘Yeah, definitely--the next one’s better than this one,’ because I don’t really hear a next one. My muse is very fickle. She only comes to me sometimes, which is annoying.” Also bothersome: having your email hacked. “When ‘Black Beauty’ got leaked, I was a little bit discouraged, because I usually focus an entire record around one song, or one phrase, or one title, like...’Black Beauty,’” she says. In a time of contrived viral videos and choreographed twerking, the incident feels legitimately unplanned, unfortunate, and un-spinnable. The leak didn’t completely crush her creativity, “but it didn’t help,” she says. “My muse is very fickle. She only comes to me sometimes, which is annoying.” What fans do have to enjoy in the interim is Tropico, a short film featuring three songs off the singer’s Paradise EP. “It’s Elvis and Jesus and Marilyn and extra-terrestrials all in one,” she says, her eyes sparkling. Previously, she’d worked with Mandler on videos like “National Anthem,” in which she plays Jackie and Marilyn to A$AP Rocky’s John F. “I had story-boarded this idea of a modern-day Kennedy story,” she says. “I’ve been inspired by the footage I’ve seen of them, more than their story, just all of the colors in the film. And as far as the song, I’ve had a few relationships where there was complete devotion on behalf of the guy. I loved the idea of a girl telling her boyfriend, ‘Tell me I’m your national anthem, your star-spangled banner, salute to me and love me’--you know, in a good way, in a beautiful way. I wanted to show how modern-day romance could still have that classic feel.” She panicked the day before the shoot, worrying her fans might think it was weird that she’d decided to portray both the wife and the mistress. “But I just couldn’t choose between them. I wanted to do both,” she says. Back outside, Del Rey drops a burning cigarette into a glass jar half-filled with water and forms a steeple with her long fingers, extended by red-painted acrylic tips, a remnant of her NYLON photo shoot from a week earlier. A tiny cross of gems dots the nail of her left ring finger. Below it, a faint tan line marks the spot of a certain piece of “mystery bling” the paparazzi have been scoping since February. It’s clear that no matter what Del Rey decides to do next, she will continue to fascinate--and inspire more myth-making. “It’s important to have a good relationship with yourself when you become well known,” she says. “People will say a lot of things, and you’ll start to wonder if they’re true. But then you have to go back to all of those little truths and kernels you found along the way that remind you: You are where you’re supposed to be.” -- MELISSA GIANNINI What fans do have to enjoy in the interim is Tropico, a short film featuring three songs off the singer’s Paradise EP. “It’s Elvis and Jesus and Marilyn and extra-terrestrials all in one,” she says, her eyes sparkling. Previously, she’d worked with Mandler on videos like “National Anthem,” in which she plays Jackie and Marilyn to A$AP Rocky’s John F. “I had story-boarded this idea of a modern-day Kennedy story,” she says. “I’ve been inspired by the footage I’ve seen of them, more than their story, just all of the colors in the film. And as far as the song, I’ve had a few relationships where there was complete devotion on behalf of the guy. I loved the idea of a girl telling her boyfriend, ‘Tell me I’m your national anthem, your star-spangled banner, salute to me and love me’--you know, in a good way, in a beautiful way. I wanted to show how modern-day romance could still have that classic feel.” She panicked the day before the shoot, worrying her fans might think it was weird that she’d decided to portray both the wife and the mistress. “But I just couldn’t choose between them. I wanted to do both,” she says. Back outside, Del Rey drops a burning cigarette into a glass jar half-filled with water and forms a steeple with her long fingers, extended by red-painted acrylic tips, a remnant of her NYLON photo shoot from a week earlier. A tiny cross of gems dots the nail of her left ring finger. Below it, a faint tan line marks the spot of a certain piece of “mystery bling” the paparazzi have been scoping since February. It’s clear that no matter what Del Rey decides to do next, she will continue to fascinate--and inspire more myth-making. “It’s important to have a good relationship with yourself when you become well known,” she says. “People will say a lot of things, and you’ll start to wonder if they’re true. But then you have to go back to all of those little truths and kernels you found along the way that remind you: You are where you’re supposed to be.” -- MELISSA GIANNINI What fans do have to enjoy in the interim is Tropico, a short film featuring three songs off the singer’s Paradise EP. “It’s Elvis and Jesus and Marilyn and extra-terrestrials all in one,” she says, her eyes sparkling. Previously, she’d worked with Mandler on videos like “National Anthem,” in which she plays Jackie and Marilyn to A$AP Rocky’s John F. “I had story-boarded this idea of a modern-day Kennedy story,” she says. “I’ve been inspired by the footage I’ve seen of them, more than their story, just all of the colors in the film. And as far as the song, I’ve had a few relationships where there was complete devotion on behalf of the guy. I loved the idea of a girl telling her boyfriend, ‘Tell me I’m your national anthem, your star-spangled banner, salute to me and love me’--you know, in a good way, in a beautiful way. I wanted to show how modern-day romance could still have that classic feel.” She panicked the day before the shoot, worrying her fans might think it was weird that she’d decided to portray both the wife and the mistress. “But I just couldn’t choose between them. I wanted to do both,” she says. Back outside, Del Rey drops a burning cigarette into a glass jar half-filled with water and forms a steeple with her long fingers, extended by red-painted acrylic tips, a remnant of her NYLON photo shoot from a week earlier. A tiny cross of gems dots the nail of her left ring finger. Below it, a faint tan line marks the spot of a certain piece of “mystery bling” the paparazzi have been scoping since February. It’s clear that no matter what Del Rey decides to do next, she will continue to fascinate--and inspire more myth-making. “It’s important to have a good relationship with yourself when you become well known,” she says. “People will say a lot of things, and you’ll start to wonder if they’re true. But then you have to go back to all of those little truths and kernels you found along the way that remind you: You are where you’re supposed to be.” What fans do have to enjoy in the interim is Tropico, a short film featuring three songs off the singer’s Paradise EP. “It’s Elvis and Jesus and Marilyn and extra-terrestrials all in one,” she says, her eyes sparkling. Previously, she’d worked with Mandler on videos like “National Anthem,” in which she plays Jackie and Marilyn to A$AP Rocky’s John F. “I had story-boarded this idea of a modern-day Kennedy story,” she says. “I’ve been inspired by the footage I’ve seen of them, more than their story, just all of the colors in the film. And as far as the song, I’ve had a few relationships where there was complete devotion on behalf of the guy. I loved the idea of a girl telling her boyfriend, ‘Tell me I’m your national anthem, your star-spangled banner, salute to me and love me’--you know, in a good way, in a beautiful way. I wanted to show how modern-day romance could still have that classic feel.” She panicked the day before the shoot, worrying her fans might think it was weird that she’d decided to portray both the wife and the mistress. “But I just couldn’t choose between them. I wanted to do both,” she says. Back outside, Del Rey drops a burning cigarette into a glass jar half-filled with water and forms a steeple with her long fingers, extended by red-painted acrylic tips, a remnant of her NYLON photo shoot from a week earlier. A tiny cross of gems dots the nail of her left ring finger. Below it, a faint tan line marks the spot of a certain piece of “mystery bling” the paparazzi have been scoping since February. It’s clear that no matter what Del Rey decides to do next, she will continue to fascinate--and inspire more myth-making. “It’s important to have a good relationship with yourself when you become well known,” she says. “People will say a lot of things, and you’ll start to wonder if they’re true. But then you have to go back to all of those little truths and kernels you found along the way that remind you: You are where you’re supposed to be.” -- MELISSA GIANNINI Source

Aleko bought it and he confirmed that some instrumentals have better quality than what leaked.

Wanted to die on the last question My ass was burning between OUAD, Ride and Brooklyn Baby and West Coast ughhhhhhhhhhh