Oh gosh that was so special and made me realise how little of this behind the scenes day to day look we have ever seen of Lana and her personality. She looks even more strikingly beautiful off duty in the real world wtf... Very happy she agreed to do this and honestly shocked Chuck not only delivered but exceeded expectation (not a comment on the quality of her work–just that she never fucking shares it).
Amazing photoshoot, amazing interview I'm actually very glad she's pushing pause on the next album because the vibes around it have been off. We can now look forward to something completely fresh, something southern gothic inspired in 2025 and never utter that cursed L word again
“When I get married, I'lI do it with someone who, like me, will think that love is enough. I'll be enough for him and he'll be enough for me. Someone to have children with if there are any and who chooses to stay home with me. I want it to be simple, a love that doesn't respect time. Like saving each other.”
I do think it’s interesting how she ends the interview talking about marriage. She had to have been engaged by this point with how heavy on her mind it was
it’s interesting that she knew she had to leave Hollywood to find love/marriage. After wanting to leave since 2020 I’m glad she did and got what she wanted
GOOGLE TRANSLATED INTERVIEW
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
by Corinne Corci
October 29, 2024
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 one point in her youth, Elizabeth Grant watched the lights of Lake Placid, Essex County, flicker and darken through twinkling streamers for the last time. She would see them again, after moving to New York and then London, before returning and becoming Lana Del Rey to everyone. "I have a stolen video, made by a boy I used to date. It's evening and we're talking in the car, pretending to answer an interview, after I became famous. He was asking me what I would have done if I hadn't been a singer. That would be the only way I would start a film about my life ." In recent years, however, she hoped that no one would ever think of directing it. "There are a few reasons why I think that. There's a lot that people don't know, because there's so much I don't want to say."
I speak to Elizabeth, Lizzy to her father, Lana to the world, while she is at the airport in Los Angeles, a gray tank top and her hair blonde with the sun and salt of August, even if she is thinking of going back to brown by the end of the year. "I reached Charlie (Charles, her brother, ed. ) and his wife. It's a good moment for me , for him and for Chuck (Caroline, her sister, ed .), it's like everything has found the right fit. When the family is well, everything works accordingly." A few days later, Lana would fly to Paris and to the Reading & Leeds Festival in England, giving one of the performances described as among the most intense of the new tour , even when the microphone went off and she remained to watch the fireworks from the stage.
Praised artist, icon, cinnamon girl, sad girl, muse of Alessandro Michele for Gucci, forerunner of alternative pop as well as advocate of an “ old Hollywood ” iconography that has surrounded her since her debut in 2012 with Born to die . Lana Del Rey grew up close to stories that have become our history because in a certain sense she has elaborated them for others, and in this feeling of being the beating heart of her own vicissitudes she has found the inspiration to transform them into harmony, becoming the voice of a generation . She is also trying with Lasso , the new album born from a period spent between Mississippi and Arkansas, but which as we speak is still in progress, so much so that it could be released with a different title. «There was a lot of “American flair”, too much of that very American aesthetic. I stopped because I didn’t recognize myself . I would like this album to be a reflection of the person I am today. I might turn it into something more “ southern gothic ,” like it was supposed to be in the beginning, and less country.”
Lately, when she listens back to singles like “Ride” and “Video Games ,” whose lyrics inspired fans to build entire personalities around them, she feels a separation. “ I’m entering a new era . It has to do with living in Oklahoma and feeling different. My eyes have seen so much open space, I’ve felt the wind, and that’s the kind of energy I want to talk about now.”
“Beautiful, mysterious, tormented and inevitably fatal just like life.” This is the tag line that accompanied the release of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides in 1999 , one of Del Rey’s favorite films. She seems to have always shared the director’s vision with which she has told the story of the evolution of girls trying to get on with life. “We met one summer thanks to Gia Coppola. Gia is very good friends with my friends, they all have children, they play together. Sofia asked me to write a couple of songs for a film she was directing, Priscilla . I was very happy, but as always happens with deadlines, I got there at the last minute.” She didn’t manage to deliver them, but watching the film about the story of Mrs. Presley that inspired Del Rey from the very beginning – her hair and makeup at the 2013 Echo Music Awards, an indolent and dreamy way of accepting life – she saw a similarity with her work. “ I think of my songs as if they were films .” Flashback, cut, memory. Cinema was a family habit. I think back to certain Christmases, to all these people with giant video cameras filming us… my life is on videotape . And my sister became a photographer, she is the person behind the images that concern me».
The images on these pages, however, were taken by Steven Meisel in New York and inspired by a shoot with Sofia Coppola for Vogue Italia in 2014. It can be said that they represent a new personal milestone for Del Rey, because since she was a teenager she tried by any means to reach the largest city beyond Lake Placid and buy a copy of this magazine: « My friends and I called it “Vogue Italy”, we put photos of the services on the walls . I remember thinking: if something happened and I became someone, I would have Meisel take my picture, because he lets himself be guided by intuition like me. On set we listened to the soundtrack of Paul Schrader's Cat People ». This is her second cover, after the first one taken by Steven Klein in 2019. « At the time I wondered if Franca Sozzani and Francesco (Carrozzini, with whom she was engaged from 2014 to 2015, ed .) would like those photos ». He smiles.
In the car, when that boy asked her, in the short clip of that video that she still has, she replied that she would never do anything else but sing . «I was the frontwoman of my church choir. I lived in a tiny place, 700 inhabitants. I moved there when I was one year old, I went to school with the same people, then at 15 I lived the most chaotic and beautiful period I could live. I was allowed to go out alone for the first time. I could make mistakes, I could dream . I started doing those small jobs you do when you are not yet an adult, the waitress, the hostess. I was so excited that I even imagined staying in Lake Placid for the rest of my life».
Then, a new private school in Duluth, Minnesota, "the coldest city in America, people's pastime was bonding in bars". Elizabeth Grant doesn't know anyone and the worst period arrives that convinces her to escape to New York , where the indie rock of Phosphorescent and the Magnetic Zeros monopolizes the club scenes where Grant also performs, without anyone listening to her. From 19 to 25 she lives in the Bronx and Brooklyn, "one of my darkest moments", until after a series of managers - "two young and unknown and two famous and old" - she meets Ben Mawson and flies to London. "I still called myself Lizzy Grant but I felt that something different was happening". Because Lana Del Rey was not born as a defense mechanism from the world. It comes rather as a result of a love for the atmospheres of New Orleans and for the West Coast where today she drives for hours abandoning herself to the same Western sky filmed by Wim Wenders, singing about her body as if it were a map of the Sierra Madre (Arcadia, 2021). «When I was little I didn't know much about music, but I knew a lot about actresses». Lana, then, like Lana Turner . Del Rey like Delray Beach, Florida . «It was as if my name had the ocean».
After nine albums, a collection of poems, the definitive consecration on TikTok by the new generations who have also consumed the latest album ( Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd ), and after a series of collaborations, at 39 years old Lana Del Rey no longer feels any pressure. She speaks with an exact and comforting voice, aware that everything has taken her far away, towards herself. «Once people thought that my lyrics were a problem, instead now all singers “peel” their heart like it was an apple . I think it's positive. Maybe if I had started with music now and not 12 years ago I would be a true poet of pain and I wouldn't have suffered so much». There has always been mystery in her, in others the dark need to examine the source. «It's terrible when people dig into your shadows to find something, it's like an obsession. And I ended up in it. A bit like Ophelia or Juliet . I felt like a car crash, with people who couldn't help but stop to spy on what had happened. Maybe Freud said it, 30 percent of what you think about yourself is actually what you've heard others say about you . That's why, especially in recent years, I've reconnected with my shadows, I've been very careful. I didn't want to end up like that car, I didn't want to become Ophelia. I only wanted her flowers."
Lana Del Rey. Elizabeth Grant has changed day after day, peeling off by herself like petals do. The same ones that fans bring her to concerts and that then decorate the asphalt of the streets in arenas and out-of-town structures like traces of enchantment. A phenomenon of extreme proselytism and magic that has already happened for artists like Stevie Nicks and for those who sought the experience of mysticism in them. «Spelling a word, dividing it into letters, has the same matrix as “to spell”, that is, to enchant, to instill a spell in others. I want my whole life and everything I sing to be the positive result of something . I believe in magic because for me it means being optimistic, having hope and being able to instill it».
Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have, but I have it , says the title of one of her most famous songs. «Hope is power. Any religious person has done what we now call manifesting , because they had faith. They saw heaven where there was none ». That's how love is, as they say in Cat People , it's just you and me and as long as we're there, there will be hope. «My problem is that in my relationships there have always been three of us. Me, him and Hollywood. When I get married, I'll do it with someone who, like me, will think that love is enough. I'll be enough for him and he'll be enough for me. Someone to have children with if there are any and who chooses to stay home with me. I want it to be simple, a love that doesn't respect time. Like saving each other ».
A month after this conversation, Lana Del Rey would have married the nature guide Jeremy Dufrene . It would have happened on a simple Thursday in September, on the banks of a river in Louisiana, in the presence of a few simple friends. On social media we would have seen the video stolen from a camera, another, and read the comments of her fans: « Lana has always been this. And it is so real ».
Lana Del Rey and her interview for Vogue Italia can be found in the November issue on newsstands from October 31st
trailerparkdream liked a post in a topic by taco truck in Lana Del Rey's Tour Diary filmed by Chuck for Vogue