I’ve told this story a few times on this site but not fleshed out. I discovered Lana when I was working at my local library, (I was 16, this was in 11th grade around January 2013) as we had to have volunteer hours in order to graduate high school. At that moment I was learning to add music to my iPod/iTunes and wanted to expand my music experience (the only music I knew about was whatever played on the radio; I didn’t knew albums or artist discographies were a thing until 2010… I was a late bloomer in general) so I started to rent out CDs like crazy from the library. One day I’m organizing the CDs and see Born to Die and thought to myself “huh, I’ve been hearing about this woman a lot, let’s see what’s this is about”. So that night I popped the CD in a CD player and… nothing. I processed absolutely nothing. But something told me to burn the whole album to my computer and to give it a second chance. And I’m so glad I did. I took me weeks, but slowly song by song, I was loving the album. I think the last two songs that took me the longest to like was Born to Die and National Anthem because of how sonically dark they were compared to the stuff I’ve heard in my life to that point.
When I say Lana single-handedly opened the door for me to the world of music, no lies are told. I went into a vortex of new information; because of Lana I learned about demos and instrumentals. When I found her unreleased music on SoundCloud (I think Puppy Love was the first unreleased song I’ve heard of hers) I fell in love even more. Because of her I found Marina and Lorde and it just keep snowballing from there, learning about new artists and genres, and ultimately the beginning of my music collection. I joined this site sometime in 2013, and I remember already being here for a while when we were collectively freaking about about her announcement of Ultraviolence at the Tropico film premier (which I can’t believe I witnessed all of this in real time).
My interest in all honesty, as others here have mentioned, has dwindled. It’s a combination of the fact that I’m getting older and I don’t have as much time to invest in “stanning” as a 26 y.o., her lack of interest in keeping the hype up on every album cycle, or her ignorant, clueless-not-in-a-malicious-way behavior. Which is menial compared to many other artists, but I just don’t waste my time in “defending” her like a stan would anymore.
I still don’t like COCC, but now I’m connecting more with NFR and BB more than in the past. I don’t think we’ll ever get some of the clever lyrics and more upbeat music from the BTD to LFL time period, but this new record has me intrigued and hopeful that it won’t sound like the last 3 records (where I enjoy the majority of the songs, i just don’t find them to be cohesive records).
She will always be my #1 and I will always enjoy her songs , even the ones I don’t like (which are very few in total). She’s my comfort artist and I am very lucky to grow up alongside her music which has been there for me; especially Honeymoon, which I regard as my top favorite record of all time and click with the most on a “spiritual” level if you can call it that. I complain about the direction she goes as an artist, but two things for certain are that I am glad she has short periods in-between albums, and that she single-handedly shifted the music world.
