Rob Grant: daddy cool
He’s a 69-year-old retired businessman and debut recording artist who’s made the chillest album of the year. And all with a little help from his daughter Lana. Do put your father on the stage, Ms Del Rey…
by: Craig McLean
“I know I’m not Joni Mitchell, but I’ve got a dad who plays like Billy Joel” – Hollywood Bowl from Lost At Sea, 2023
In a backyard in Tuna Canyon, Los Angeles, between the miniature putting green and the miniature waterfall, underneath the miniature version of the real Hollywood sign 15 miles southeast from here, a woman in a $32 electric-lime beanie bearing the slogan INSUFFERABLE is instructing her old man.
“Dad, chin up, maybe a little tiny bit.”
From beneath a baseball cap that says LOST AT SEA, dad tilts his head a notch.
“You could do that point thing you were doing before – Blue Steel!” daughter says with a laugh, urging dad to get his Zoolander on. He jams his piano-playing hands further into a leather Prada mac and stares into the middle distance.
Insufferable, happy with her work, laughs. Inscrutable, happy to be directed in the way of the photo shoot (his daughter has some previous here), ploughs gamely on. Not many 69-year-olds, he’s thinking, get to do this kind of thing. And if he’s going to be parented by his kid in the art of looking good, of creating a mythos – think: silver fox at play in a Munchkinland version of Palm Springs – who better than the eldest of his three children?
Dad is Robert England Grant Jr: advertising copywriter, turned rustic furniture salesman, turned real estate (mini) magnate, turned internet domain name mogul, turned, in the summer of his 70th, debut album recording artist.
Daughter is Lana Del Rey: metaphysics and philosophy graduate Elizabeth “Lizzy” Woolridge Grant, turned musician and songwriter who, since 2010, has been responsible for nine studio albums and approximately 900 shades of obsession. This year, in the summer of her 38th birthday and her first headline slots at Glastonbury and BST in London’s Hyde Park, she’s released Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, her sixth UK number one and the album with 2023’s biggest first-week sales to date. And now she’s helped launch her dad’s next act.
Even by Del Rey’s vaultingly high standards of alchemical artistry and mystique magicking, to assist in the metamorphosis of a retired near-septuagenarian with serious Hawaiian-shirt and shark-fishing habits into the year’s most fascinating musical newcomer? That’s some metaphysical voodoo right there.
Even more brilliant: the fact that ocean-going Rob Grant’s album, Lost At Sea, a suite of gorgeous piano pieces, mostly instrumentals, with does-what-it- says-on-the-tin titles like The Mermaid’s Lullaby and The Poetry of Wind and Waves, is great in a spa-friendly, chill- out, present-for-your-mum way. Also the fact that he’s great, a slow-talking, shoe-eschewing, nakedly honest, utterly charming dude with a life richly lived, a family deeply loved and a wide-eyed wonder at the turn his life has taken. And, finally: very much brilliant is Del Rey’s pride in, and happiness for, her dad, not to mention that the Grants’ two hook-ups on Lost At Sea – the title track and the closing Hollywood Bowl, both of which feature her lyrics and vocal – are up there with the best of the Del Rey catalogue.
There is, then, only one thing that’s insufferable on the set of THE FACE’s shoot at a private home in Sun Valley, on the northern rim of Greater Los Angeles. And it’s Del Rey’s headgear, not the cat in the (other) hat. Rob Grant is just Cool AF.
Still, both agree that hymning her dad’s piano-playing, in that glorious, climactic collab Hollywood Bowl, as being up there with Billy Joel’s is stretching things. Grant shrugs sanguinely about this poetic licence. “Poor Billy Joel,” he says, chuckling. “But I’m sure he’s got a good sense of humour. [The line] came in the moment. We’d created this beautiful song and those were the lyrics that came to her. It raises a pretty high bar for me. But that’s fine. I’ll go for it.” Or, as Del Rey says: “The vibe was good. And he plays so well.”
Equally, certainly, no one’s under any illusion about how, well, weird all this is. To have a white-haired dad write a bunch of tunes (out of nowhere). Make an album with producer Jack Antonoff (Del Rey, Taylor Swift, Lorde). Sign a record contract with Decca (the near 100-year- old, classical-leaning label). And appear in high-end, high-discernment style magazines (um, this one)? It’s a colourful yarn worthy of the character-rich, old-Hollywood Americana of Del Rey’s earliest songs. Only this story happens to be true.
As she watches Grant pick out another Hawaiian shirt, Del Rey stands talking with her sister, 35-year-old Caroline “Chuck” Grant. A well-regarded photographer, the middle sibling is also here to lend moral support. (Their little brother Charlie, 30, an LA-based filmmaker whose main hustle is real estate, isn’t on set. Nor is their mum Patricia – she’s back on the East Coast, where the elder Grants have homes in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and on Anna Maria Island on Florida’s Gulf Coast.) Both girls marvel, affectionately, at their dad’s fashion moment. To Lana, he’s just a “rando”. To Chuck, this is akin to “a glitch in the Matrix” – an observation, drawls Rob, “which is fabulous!”
Lana, Chuck: how confusing is all this, your dad embarking on a music career at his age and stage of life?
Lana: “Not confusing at all. I would expect nothing less. I don’t think anything could surprise me now, just in general in life. If a pig flew by, I’d be like: check that out! I think our first thought was: great.”
And not concerning?
Chuck: “No, it’s not concerning. It’s a glitch in the Matrix just because it’s usually me shooting my sister. Or just me taking the photos. And I haven’t seen my dad wear a sweatshirt ever in my entire life.”
Lana: “Or a suit.”
Chuck: “Or a suit. So it’s just like: damn, we’re doing this now. But I feel like he’s very [comfortable]. It makes sense to me.”
Rob, how do you feel about being music’s first proper Nepo Daddy?
Rob: “Well! I went out and registered the domain nepo dad dy .com. And we’re going to come out with a whole line of merch that’s Nepo Daddy-branded. I can show it to you. It’s really cool stuff.”
So where other artists trying to make their own way might be like, “having famous relatives has nothing to do with my career, I’m not that, that’s a bad look”, you’re saying, “fuck it, let’s have some fun with it – and make some money while we’re at it”?
Rob: “Oh, totally. No, I’m all for Nepo Daddy. And I also registered nepomommy. com. You know, I’ll listen to what the kids are saying… in the comments on Instagram or Twitter. I just crack up. Another one is ‘Robert Fucking Grant!’, after Norman Fucking Rockwell! [Del Rey’s 2019 album]. So I went and registered that name, too.”
How did we get here?
Firstly, Rob Grant is no fool and all heart. He’s aware that being the “father of…” lands him music industry attention and opportunity that any other retired entrepreneur could only dream of. He’s managed by his daughter’s London-based team and his first co-write was Sweet Carolina, the closing track on Del Rey’s last album, 2021’s Blue Banisters. That song began life when he was in LA, staying with Del Rey in her Hancock Park home. “He was playing in the living room – he likes my red piano – and I really liked the melody,” she recalls. “I put my VoiceNotes on and started singing.” Simple as.
Also, his family’s support and encouragement have been priceless.
“I couldn’t have done any of this without them,” begins this barefooted first-time interviewee, softly, when we sit down to talk after the shoot. “What’s so interesting is how artistic the entire family is,” he continues, mentioning that cousins, aunts and uncles along the Grant bloodline can also play music and sing. “But that is obviously late blooming with me.”
And, you might say, pioneering. As he rightly points out, the “typical story” in terms of musical generations is the case of someone such as Billy Ray Cyrus, “who was an established artist. And then, of course, Miley grew up in an environment of music and became a pop star in her own right. Here, we’ve got an upside-down world.
“I think the whole experience is really fascinating. There aren’t a lot of parallels right now in the music industry,” he continues with some understatement, “where you’ve got a 69-year-old father coming out with an album the same year his daughter has released a big album. There isn’t any script that you can follow here. So for all of us, we are just going day by day.”
Grant has played piano for most of his life. “But I never had a piano lesson. I can’t read sheet music. I’ve never had any kind of formal training at all. I play intuitively. And when I sit down to play, I can play for hours.” He’d do that when Lizzy and Caroline were young, and remembers how “the girls would stand there by the piano and they’d sing” to the chords and melodies that flowed straight from his brain and through his fingers. “They would just hum or make up their own words.”
Three decades on it’s this methodology, if you can call it that, which has brought us to this point. In June 2021, Grant and Del Rey were in Hollywood’s Conway Recording Studios taping Sweet Carolina, the unbidden Grant composition to which Del Rey had, again, made up her own words on the spot. One day he turned up early and she was running late. Parking himself at the in-house Steinway concert grand, a piano previously used by the New York Philharmonic, he asked someone to press “record” and he began playing. Seventy-five minutes later, he stopped. A brief, worrying silence from the assembled engineers and producers quickly gave way to relief: no one could believe what he’d just played, off-the-cuff and unrehearsed.
Encouraged, Grant spent more time in Hancock Park, creating further instrumental pieces. Only a few months later, in early 2022, by the time the ceaselessly prolific Del Rey was working on the album that would become …Ocean Blvd, her dad had created a dozen or so compositions. He played them to Antonoff, who was instantly mesmerised. “Any time I play for anyone, you lose them, they kind of go into a trance,” says Grant. “Which is cool, because that’s what it does to me.”
Del Rey’s management at TaP Music in the UK were equally smitten. The team, who also shepherd the UK’s Eurovision entries, could see potential for Grant’s music, not in what we might call the “classical lite” field but in the booming “wellness” space. As Grant puts it: “This is literally music for a troubled world. And that’s why the wellness space has grown.” He says that, according to Decca, who signed him in London in early summer 2022, “the wellness space now is bigger than the classical and jazz [worlds] combined. And it’s getting bigger, because the whole world is on edge now – I mean, with good reason. So hopefully, when people hear this music, it’s going to transport them. Relax them. And they’re going to feel good.”
Does he wish that he’d done this 30, 40, even 50 years ago?
“It’s a good question. I don’t know if I would have been ready back then. I was busy raising a family and running the businesses and all of that. There really wasn’t much room for playing the piano.”
Lana, Chuck: When you were kids, was your dad a cool dad?
Lana: “He was definitely cool. He was so easygoing. I never heard him yell one time. I thought of him like playtime… I haven’t seen anything ever affect him.”
Chuck: “Well, once though…” [Leans in, whispers to Lana, both sisters cackle]
Lana: “She accidentally hit him with a toy when she was young.”
Chuck: “Crocky is my crocodile that my grandma crocheted. He’s so long and so cool. I was spinning him around one time and I whacked him right in the nuts. That’s the only time I saw [him] go off. I was like, woah, I haven’t seen this!”
As well as being a cool dad, Rob Grant was a busy dad, one blessed with a keen eye for a business opportunity. In his twenties, in the 1970s, he was a Don Draper-type on Madison Avenue, working as a copywriter for advertising agency Grey Group. But after Lizzy was born in 1985, he and Pat realised Manhattan was too expensive to raise a family. So they moved upstate to Lake Placid, “which is beautiful, but very, very remote.” That made commuting unthinkable, so career options had to be reassessed.
At various points, Grant has owned a boat-building company, a restaurant in Newport, Rhode Island, and a rustic furniture business. The latter did well enough to be featured in the Christmas window displays at Saks Fifth Avenue. “But I wasn’t into it. I just didn’t care. So I closed that. Now, I did love real estate.”
Buying and selling properties, he became a licensed real-estate broker with his own “small, boutique firm… I own commercial buildings, self-storage and stuff like that. So that’s this other, alternate reality, which is how [many] people know me.”
And as any good realtor knows: location, location, location. “One of the reasons I got into the internet was that it allowed me to expand geographically and not be trapped by where I was.”
Grant “got into” the internet in 1996 when, as he puts it, “no one cared, it was too young”. But with his Madison Avenue experience, he could divine a “huge opportunity” with domain names.
“I thought to myself: these IP addresses – which essentially create brands like cars .com – may eventually have value as the internet grows. I began to buy them.” Flexing his real-estate experience, too, he realised that people looking for property would search “intuitively” for the geographic region. “If you were interested in Miami Beach real estate, that’s what you type in. And this was long before we had Google or any of the mature search engines. I had this profound revelation that if I could acquire all of these generic descriptive domains, I could literally create a franchise.”
Grant began “buying up all the major cities” to prefix their names to the domain name “realestate .com”. He turned his attention to Europe and did the same. Then Latin America. He went “essentially around the world, acquiring what became the largest privately held real estate [domain name] portfolio. To this day, I have this portfolio where I’ll selectively sell off domain names when the price is right. And I’ve been doing that now for the last 25 years.”
He gives me an example. He registered toron to re alestate .com for two years for $75. One year later, he was offered $5,000 for it. Intrigued by that sharp uptick, he gambled on holding. Two years later, he was offered $75,000. “Make a long story short, I sold that domain for $145,000. Now, that’s one domain from a collection. At one point, I owned 10,000 domain names.”
To this day, Grant is “sitting on a big catalogue of these really valuable generic domains like trop i cal fish .com. I go into a vertical and select what I feel is the best descriptive domain and acquire it.”
Hence Rob Grant having the foresight to register nepo dad dy .com. He’s not only having the last laugh. He’s having the first laugh, too.
Lana, Chuck: How will you feel if some people view your dad as the first musical Nepo Daddy?
Lana: “You know, he’s fucking trolling them half the time. And then the other half of it, I don’t know what [he’s doing]… But I’m a real go-with-it girl. You could tell me to jump into the LA river if it was full enough, and I’d be like, let’s [do] it.”
But you want him to be taken seriously as an artist on his own merits, not because of who you are?
Lana: “Doesn’t matter. Because look at what people say about me. If I believed [that], I would have jumped off the fucking bridge a long time ago.”
Chuck: “Yeah, I would have stopped doing photography if I thought that it mattered.”
As Del Rey says: look at what people have said about her. Early in her career, she was accused of all sorts of things. Of being fake. Of being an industry plant. Of being a rich girl whose daddy somehow purchased her a record deal.
“Our family, honestly, has been plagued with all of these allegations,” says Grant, sighing slightly. The slurs against his daughter are the only thing that even vaguely cloud his perennially sunny disposition. “She had to endure all of that conspiracy theory. It’s so hard for the public to understand that a young girl could actually have accomplished it all entirely on her own. I mean, yes, we were supportive. But the theories that were floated out there, that I bought her record label contract – absolutely absurd.
“It’s typical of our culture,” he goes on, “that people find it really hard to be able to give someone credit. And I’m already experiencing that. I had a friend, just 48 hours ago, who felt that the fact that I could produce music and make an album was something that happened because of her.” Grant throws up his palms, mildly.
“You just have to tough it out. I know we’re gonna get all kinds of pushback. But I do want to set the record straight for Lana: she did all of that on her own.”
The family, he adds, have become used to such snark. At the same time, though, he can now see at play what he describes as karma. “This persistent mythology that she was somehow helped by a rich father,” he begins, rightly pointing out that he doubts a man would have had to contend with such digs, now has an echo, in that “the Nepo Daddy is going to face the same criticism. But I love it!” he says, flashing a pearly smile. “Because that’s life, right? And while I listen to all those comments, I will be selling Nepo Daddy hoodies, crop tops and T‑shirts, ha ha!”
Are you ready for your close-up, Mr. Grant?
“Ha ha! I am! You saw me out there [during the shoot], right? I’ve just taken to it very naturally.” He mentions the video for Lost At Sea, directed by Chuck. “They had cameras in my face and we shot it on a 55-foot ketch [sail boat] off Marina del Rey. Gorgeous. Yeah, I’m totally ready. I’m having a ball.”
For this ineffably chill man, though, blessed with a lifetime of success and a high-achieving, talented family, there’s one thing about this late-life pivot that gives him pause.
“Oh, God, yeah, I’m on TikTok. You have to be. Have I taken to that readily? No! But I know it’s something you’ve got to do. I’m comfortable with Instagram and Twitter. But TikTok’s new and I’ll have to grow into that.
“Really, though, all of this is new – first interview, first main shoot. But I’ll tell you what: I’m going to approach all of this with a wicked sense of humour. And I’m just going to enjoy the hell out of it.”
Friendly reminder that your lives are not exclusively dependent on a 30-something woman’s presence on Instagram and that you as an individual matter so go outside, purchase a soft ice cream cone, take a walk around a cute park and get on with your life! Lana will be back when she’s good and ready and we will celebrate when she does!
I've always felt like artists have a very strong, yet bizarre, parasocial relationship with their fans... I get that it's sad that she deactivated her only official social media platform and all its posts disappeared into the interweb trash can--but she's not dead and there is literally no clear indication that she's retiring. So all them eulogy tweets, Instagram posts or Tik Tok videos are very weird and concerning. This is the type of behaviour that normal people make fun of Swifties or the Beyhive for.
If there ever was a good occasion to go outside and touch grass, it's now.
1. Honeymoon
2. The Grants
3. White Dress
4. Cruel World
5. Born to Die
6. Ride
7. Love
8. Norman Fucking Rockwell
10. Textbook (I LOVE LOVE the instrumental, but the Lyrics are kind of clunky & a little cringe worthy 😭)
ETA: Imagine her opening the set with some old school song from a forgotten or iconic movie like she did in 2015, 2016 and 2018, and after that Byron would've started playing an extended piano intro to White Dress, she walks on stage, salutes the crowd and then "Sun staaaare...". I would've lost it.
It's understandable how she has little to sing about herself, probably says good about her mental health (which admittedly isn't that good seeing her unfortunately chaotic and too Rupikauresque poetry). She could've rescued herself from all that had she started writing songs from fictional characters' perspective, same way Kate Bush did.
I didn’t expect to click on this thread to see entire college admission essays written about this lady
Why don’t we all finally accept that she doesn’t make good music anymore and move on to better things? There’s no reason y’all should care this much about her and the poor career choices she’s made lmaooo
I don't know if I can see this take. I don't see Melanie giving into woke culture anywhere (although Portals is barf so we can handshake there) - I just see her as being emotionally stunted and immature and point blank stupid. She can fall into a hole.
Marina - I'll say that I think it's very possible that an artist can be moved by a perspective or movement (ex: Me Too), and really want to dive into that space and lend their voice to something, but it comes out as disingenuous or "fake" because they haven't been touched by the depth of the topic the same way, or their current lifestyle insulates them from certain nuances that really make the "heart" of the movement hit home. I think that's what may have happened here?
I don't know if it's really "give in to woke culture", so much as 'Hey, I'm a female artist and these topics have affected me as well. I'm engaged enough with the topic to want to pour my thoughts and emotions on the subject into my next body of work and lend my voice and support." Like I don't feel like there were fans or people pointing a gun to her head and saying "GIVE ME A FEMINIST ALBUM NOW" and her going "OKAY OKAY HERE'S MANS WORLD AND PTP OMG OMG PLEASE LET ME SLEEP BESTIES "
I just think she needed to put out a last album, the topics were of enough interest and importance to her, it was all relevant conversation in pop culture at that moment, and she has enough skill as an artist to coherently pull it together- she could, so she did. The flub is just that it feels slightly out of touch, but not in a fake woke try hard way, but in a "girl you haven't eaten this dog food in a minute though" way - there's not as much "soul" in the material. At least for me.
I'm probably being a bit inconsistent in this opinion if compared to any prior statements I've made on Marina and ADIAML, but I flex and bend over time, so...
It's very interesting to hear the discourse about Marina being political in her music because it feels like most people mark it as a distinction that happened somewhere later into her career, but I felt like one of the things that astounded me about her sound back in the early 2010s was her outspokenness. For me personally, I think what's changed is that her lyrics feel so on the nose nowadays. Electra Heart is an explicitly feminist album, and TFJ is very critical of popular culture in the West (and how that affected coming of age of a millennial woman). It feels almost as if her life has ran out of the drama that fueled EH/TFJ, and she has to now draw upon those impersonal experiences in her songwriting to make vague statements about the human race and far away countries. FROOT was a good album, and L+F was kind of faceless, but both albums feel like she held back as a means to prove (perhaps to herself?) that she's no longer that crazy girl wearing the blonde wig, masquerading as a Stepford wife. Ancient Dreams on the other hand felt like an attempt to recapture the drama of her earlier career, though that felt very transparent and it didn't quite meet those expectations. I think that the best thing for Marina to do is surround herself with interesting people and experience life at its fullest, and that's when we'll get music that reaches her early days. I truly believe that Marina's career could re-peak again, but that's up to her. She's seemed to have settled down, so I'm expecting the best we'll get is a cute bop on a mid album here and there. That's fine. After the pain she went through that fueled TFJ/EH, I don't blame her for safeguarding herself. Though sometimes I do fear her insecurities have burnt bridges (cc: familiar FROOT)...
100% agree!! she'll sing these songs but she won't speak out on any political opinions on her platform, and sorry for bringing this up again in the case of her going to the hotel in man's world, I think that really just cemented that she doesn't believe in what she's saying. she made money off that song, got positive attention for making it and using an all female team(!!), then brazenly went to it despite the boycott. if she had just... not posted pictures of herself there then no one would have known she'd gone, but she's gotten what she wanted by that point.
Couldn't agree more with that. Not only the UK, but European countries should share the blame for what they did/do.
America is far from perfect but so are other countries, and at that point, it just feels like an easy target. I mean, she risks nothing pointing out sexism and racism in there. Everyone does it and there are little to no repression thanks to freedom of speech. There are so many more worse countries, but it would be riskier to call them out and it seems she doesn't have the balls to do so. Which leads me to think she doesn't want to be controversial: she simply wants approval.
And, hey, I'm fine with that, not everyone can handle being authentic and divisive. What bothers me is how she seems to think she's actually doing something... When she's really going nowhere by being a people's pleaser.
She's always struck me as narcissistic, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes her sound out of touch everytime she attempts writing universal shit. The poems give me the feeling she's back on writing from past, personal experiences though. I'm genuinely excited for what's next.
i would've enjoyed purge the poison more if she called out the UK with their crazy history of colonization instead of praying for God to "forgive america for every single war". there's defo a LOT of things to say about the united kingdom and i wish she could focus a bit more on her country. i respect her penchant for america but i genuinely think she could do great things when it comes to calling out her homeland. maybe that'd be risky since the monarchy seems to still be this huge thing, but you know what that would make her work genuinely controversial and thought-provoking. i think that would be refreshing and i really need something new from marina. if we're gonna be political then let's just do that to be honest
“God forgive America for every single war” has got to be the most stupid pandering insincere lyric this genius woman ever recorded. There is so much wrong with it idek know where to start parsing it.
Marina was tongue in cheek and abrasive on her first three records. Her critiques are not picking sides but rather mediating. Look at Sex Yeah lol….. but yeah she kinda turned into the girls she was writing about
Unpopular opinion but I never understood the hate for ‘girls,’ it always came across to me as critique on society and gender roles rather than anything to do with actual gender… it’s sad to see marina herself turn on it too
edit. i see people say it’s the ultimate ‘I’m not like other girls’ song but I’m positive every girl in western world can relate to at least part of what she’s feeling in this song.
i really wish she would work with some brand new producers for the next album, maybe people who actually produce alternative music instead of pop music. that’d be a dream to hear her inventing some totally new specific sound in her discography, and something tells me that it might be possible if she feels more ambitious about the instrumental side of music instead of lyrical mostly. and look, she performed flipside last night, that song has very different instrumentation from her current sound and flipside isn’t even that popular, if she chose to perform it she has to like it very much
it's not easy for me to tallk about / a half-life in lost dreams
you put ur life out on the line / ur crazy all the time
no need to survive now / all we do is play
do u like where you've been, where you're going to?
let there be light / light up my life
Some of you are so miserable my god You don't need to be going on page long rants about Lana's voice or how you don't like the song or whatever. Sometimes we can walk away from our screens
im here once again to tell y’all how TFJ to FROOT she was great then sold her ass to LA and wokeness and lost al credibility.
For someone who tries so hard to be taken seriously she for sure is CAMP AS HELL… those memes, the feminist rants and now the poetry talking about toilets… the saddest part is that, like someone above said, she’s not in the joke. She’s givin Katy Perry “witness” era level cringe
Also, firing her manager during maternity leave (if that’s true) is not very females supporting females of her but I’m sure she will find a way to blame men for that too
