Lana Del Rey and the Vogue Italia interview
“ I felt like a car crash, with people who couldn't help but stop to spy on what had happened”
After a series of perfectly successful albums and a career that has consecrated her as an icon of these years, Lana Del Rey is ready to enter a new era. She talks about it in this interview, between an upcoming album, the mystical winds of the West Coast and love as a symbol of hope.
Lana Del Rey opens up about herself in an interview with Vogue Italia: “People used to think my lyrics were a problem, but now all singers “peel” their hearts like they were an apple” At a certain point in her youth, Elizabeth Grant watched the lights of Lake Placid in Essex County flicker and fade through shimmering streamers for the last time. She would see them again, after moving to New York and then London, before returning to become known to everyone as Lana Del Rey. “I have this old video of a boyfriend talking to me in the car, from a long time ago. He was just pretending I’m doing an interview after I’ve become famous. I remember I was very myself in that moment, not defensive. He asks me what I would have done if I hadn’t become a singer. This is the way I’d ever open a movie about my life.” But in recent years, she’s been hoping no one would ever get the idea to make it. “There are so many reasons why. I feel like those movies are made for people that want they’re made. And there’s so much people don’t know, because there’s so much of my life I don’t want to say. Maybe I’ll make it on my own”.
I’m talking to Elizabeth – Lizzy to her father, Lana to the world that worships her like a saint – while she’s at LAX in a gray tank top, her hair blonde from the August sun and salt air, though she’s thinking of going “back to dark” again by the end of the year. “I just caught up with Charlie (her brother, Charles) and his wife. It’s a good time for me, he’s good, and my sister’s good too. It’s easier to be positive when the family's doing well”. A few days later, Lana would fly out to Paris and the Reading & Leeds Festival in England, delivering one of the most intense performances of the new tour, including the part when her mic cut out and she stayed on stage, quietly watching the fireworks.
Celebrated artist, icon, cinnamon girl, sad girl, Alessandro Michele’s muse for Gucci, trailblazer of alternative pop, and creator of a distinct “Old Hollywood” aesthetic that has surrounded her since her debut in 2012 at the age of 27 with Born to Die. Lana Del Rey has grown up with stories that have become our stories because, in a sense, she’s shaped them for us. By putting herself at the heart of her own experiences, she found the inspiration to turn them into harmony, becoming the voice of a generation. She’s aiming to do it again with Lasso, her new album born from the time she spent between Mississippi and Arkansas, although, as we speak, it’s still in the making and might even end up with a different name. “It had too much ‘American storytelling flair’. I put it on hold because I didn’t recognize myself in it. Originally, me and the label were excited because the energy of the music of the album was meant to reflect my new life. Now, I’m not so sure, but I’m usually pretty good with my own timing. I might turn it into something more ‘Southern gothic,’ like it was meant to be from the start, and less country.” Recently, when she listens to singles like Ride and Video Games, tracks that gave her fans enough to build entire personalities around, she feels a certain disconnect. “I’m entering a new era. It happened also with Chemtrails Ovet the Country Club and Blue Banisters, I made these albums by myself. It has a lot to do with living in Oklahoma and feeling different. My eyes have seen so many open spaces, I’ve felt the wind, and that’s the kind of energy I want to talk about now.”
“Beautiful, mysterious, haunting, invariably fatal. Just like life.” That was the tagline for The Virgin Suicides, released in 1999 by Sofia Coppola, one of Del Rey’s favorite films. She seems to have always shared the same lens through which Coppola portrays young women trying to stay alive. “We met one summer through Gia Coppola, her cousin. Gia’s good friends with my friends, they all have kids who play together. Sofia asked me to write a couple of songs for a film she was directing, Priscilla. I was thrilled, but like always, when I’ve got a deadline, I waited until the last minute.” She couldn’t make the deadline, but watching the film about Mrs. Presley, who has been a source of inspiration for Del Rey since the beginning – her hair and makeup at the 2013 Echo Music Awards, her languid and dreamy approach to life – she saw a parallel with her own work. “I think of my songs as if they were films. Flashbacks, cuts, memories, with a monologue that’s running. Cinema was always a family thing. I think back to childhood, all these people with giant cameras filming me, my sister and my brother. They captured all my every single Christmas. And my sister became a talented photographer. She’s the one behind most of the images you see of me.”
The images in this spread, though, were shot by Steven Meisel in New York and inspired by a shoot he did with Sofia Coppola for Vogue Italia in 2014. It’s safe to say this represents a personal milestone for Del Rey, because ever since she was a teenager, she’d find any way to get to the biggest city beyond Lake Placid just to buy a copy of our magazine: “My friends and I used to call it Vogue Italy, and we’d pin the photos up on our bedroom walls. I remember thinking: if something happened and I ever became somebody, I’d want to be photographed by Meisel, because he follows his intuition like I do, when he’s ready you need to be ready too. And I waited, and waited and waited. On set, we listened to Giorgio Moroder’s soundtrack for Paul Schrader’s Cat People.”
This is her second Vogue cover, following her first shot by Steven Klein in 2019. “Back then, I wondered if those photos would have been approved by Franca Sozzani and Francesco (Carrozzini, whom she dated from 2014 to 2015, ed.).” She smiles.
In the car, when that guy asked her in that short video she still keeps, she replied that she couldn’t imagine doing anything other than singing. “I was the leader of my church choir from the time I was 12. I lived in this tiny town with 700 people. We moved there when I was a year old, and I went to school with the same people. At 15, I had the craziest and most wonderful time. It was the first time I was allowed to go out alone, to make mistakes, to dream. I started taking on those jobs you do when you’re still a kid, waitressing, hostessing. I was so excited that I could even see my whole life in Lake Placid. But I wanted a life as a singer.” Then she ended up at a new private school in Duluth, Minnesota, “the coldest city in America”. Elizabeth Grant didn’t know anyone, and it was the worst time of her life. So she escaped to New York, where the indie rock of Phosphorescent and Edward Sharpe, The Strokes, and Tv on the Radio ruled the club scene that she was also performing in, without anyone paying attention. From age 19 to 25, she lived in the Bronx and Brooklyn, “one of my darkest periods”, until, after a series of managers – “two more young and two more famous and old” – she met Ben Mawson and moved to London. “My aesthetic, my desider, nothing of that had changed from the years in New York. I was still calling myself Lizzy Grant, but I could feel something different was happening.” Because Lana Del Rey wasn’t born as a defense mechanism against the world. She emerged instead from a love of the atmospheres of New Orleans and the West Coast, where she now drives for hours, surrendering to the same Western skies captured by Wim Wenders, singing about her body like it’s a map of the Sierra Madre (Arcadia, 2021). “When I was a kid, I didn’t know much about music, but I knew a lot about actresses. And I wanted the name of an actress.” Ergo, Lana, as in Lana Turner. And Del Rey, as in Delray Beach, Florida. “It was as if the ocean were already built into my name.”
After nine incredible albums, a poetry collection, and a definitive consecration on TikTok by a new generation of fans who have devoured her latest release (Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd), at 39 Lana Del Rey no longer feels any pressure. She speaks in a calm, assured voice, fully aware that everything that has led her this far has led her back to herself. “People used to think my lyrics were problematic, but now every singer is spilling away their hearts. I think that’s a good thing. Maybe if I’d started now instead of 12 years ago, I’d be a real poet of pain and wouldn’t have suffered so much.” There’s always been an air of mystery around her and, in others, a dark need to dig for its source. “It’s awful when someone wants to see in your shadows trying to find something. Most people must know I’m connecting with my shadows, and it’s ok, but for some people it’s almost like an obsession. And I got caught up in it. A bit like Ophelia or Juliet. It’s like a car crash that people couldn’t help but stop and stare at. Maybe it was Freud who said that 30 percent of what you think about yourself is really just what you’ve heard others say about you. That’s why I’ve been very careful, and mindful especially in recent years. I didn’t want to end up like that car. I didn’t want to become Ophelia. All I ever wanted from her were the flowers.”
Lana Del Rey, Elizabeth Grant, has changed day by day, shedding parts of herself like petals. The same ones her fans bring to concerts and then scatter on the streets outside the arenas and suburban venues like spells of enchantment. It’s a phenomenon of extreme devotion and magic, much like what happened with artists like Stevie Nicks, for those who sought a mystical experience through them. “The spelling of a word, breaking it down into letters, comes from the same root as ‘spell’.” She tells me she thinks about it often. “It’s like casting a spell, instilling a sort of magic in others. I want my whole life, and everything I sing, to be the positive result of something. I believe in magic because, to me, it means being optimistic, having hope, and being able to share it.” Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have, but I Have It, says one of her most famous song titles. “Hope is power. Anyone who’s ever been religious has done what we now call ‘manifesting’ because they had faith. They saw heaven where there was none.” That’s what love is, like the scene from Cat People in which the actress says something like it’s just you and me, and as long as we’re here, there’s hope. “Most of the people I met wanted Hollywood to be the third part in our relationship. When I get married, it’ll be to someone who, like me, believes that love is enough. I’ll be enough for him, and he’ll be enough for me. Someone to have children with if that happens, or just friends. I want it to be simple, I need to be with someone who wants to plan to stay home with me. Love is to be saved and that’s magic.”
One month after this conversation, Lana Del Rey married nature guide Jeremy Dufrene. It took place on a quiet Thursday in September, on the banks of a Louisiana swamp, with only a few close friends present. On social media, we saw the footage, stolen from yet another camera, and read the comments from her fans: “Lana has always been this. She’s so real.”
Lana Del Rey and her interview for Vogue Italia can be found in the November issue on newsstands from October 31st.
Nobody's worried about getting challenged. It's just that there are 400 victims on the one side, and more than 40,000 dead on the other with another 1 million waiting to starve do death.
What are we supposed to get out of watching that documentary? Some understanding? A justification? An excuse? Puh-lease.
Am I the only one who is not getting “secret project” from what she said? The “other good stuff going on” sounds like go listen to other artists until it’s ready. I’m really starting to believe those tough remixes were the other 2 singles.
listened to the back third of this album for the first time in so long today. that run from tomorrow never came to get free is actually insane. the whole album is good though i do feel it is a bit all over the place. however, i’m kinda obsessed with Change. why does no one ever mention that song in conversation about her best ballads? the melody on it is just absolutely gorgeous like… HONEST!!! CAPABLE!!! OFHOLDINGYOUINMYARMSWITHOUT- LETTING YOU FALLWHENIDONTFEEL BEAUTIFUL!!! OR STABLE!!!
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