Lana Del Rey & Elton John cover “Rolling Stone” November 2019 issue (+ interview)

[Jared 3,128]

she needs to do a beyonce and stop giving interviews. they are doing her no favors. 

 

She's worse on twitter. 

[evilentity 13,303]

omg

 

Took me a while to get around to writing out my response to this interview, but what an unexpected delight.*

 

*(Although I'm interested in hearing perspectives on how he may be problematic.)

 

 

“Wait a minute, my notes!” she says. “I have 13 pages!

Me posting in interview threads.

 

 

Del Rey jumps out of her chair and heads outside to her pickup truck, a black Chevy Colorado with a broken headlight.

Man, between Lana and her interviewers they really seemed determined to out her dickmobile. Also LOL at the broken headlight. Goes perfectly with the smashed smartphone screen.

 

 

“I’ve been listening to your album all morning,” he tells her as they hug. “It’s really great. Number Three on Billboard, 108,000 copies sold. Way to go!” Del Rey erupts. “Oh, my God, you know my statistics,” she says, laughing. “Oh,” Elton says, “I know everything.”

Kudos to Elton John for doing his homework, but anybody else get the sense he's been cramming a bit right before the assignment was due (and Lana did too)?

 

I bet he liked the "Candle in the Wind" reference in MAC. I wonder if he knows about the "Tiny Dancer" references in TNC and FMWUTTT.

 

 

“Oh, you little cutie!” Del Rey says as he enters the kitchen. “Can I take a picture, just for my bedside table?” she asks. “Sure,” Elton says, sitting down, crossing his arms, and smirking for the camera. “I know it’s a little creepy,” Del Rey says, “but whatever.”

 

 

ELTON But listen, you survived. You came through that awful thing in that Saturday Night Live [in 2012]. Which was so distressing for someone like me to see someone so crucified. I’ve watched it, and it wasn’t that bad!

 

LANA It wasn’t terrible!

 

ELTON It wasn’t terrible at all. I don’t know what the agenda was there, but where was the #MeToo movement there?

 

LANA Oh, you said it, not me!

Yeah, I maintain to this day it wasn't terrible, and less so if you just listened to the audio and weren't looking at how awkward she looked. Definitely some misogyny involved in the criticism, but conflating that with #MeToo is kinda cringey... enough so that even Lana recognizes it.

 

 

LANA What’s weird is, it’s the one night in all my time performing that I wasn’t nervous.

Mmmm... I may be thinking of her Jools Holland performance before that, but I thought I remember her saying on Facebook that she was nervous. I know she said that about Jools Holland.

 

 

LANA What’s funny is, I was selling out arenas for a year before — that’s how the guy who runs it heard about me, because he thought, “This is strange. This girl is selling out arenas, and she has two songs.”

"Arenas" might be an exaggeration, and I'd have to go back and look at the timeline to be sure, but I'm not sure this is quite as inaccurate as people are saying. I don't know how many she'd actually played yet, but around this time she'd been cancelling shows at smaller venues to reschedule at larger venues, the hype was so intense.

 

 

ELTON Ironically, the music that you’ve created fits the image of a Norman Rockwell painting. You could have sung these songs in the Fifties. They’re kind of timeless songs. It’s the sort of record you could hear Sarah Vaughan singing, or Dinah Washington. They’re singer’s songs.

I mean, other than "Goddamn, manchild, you fucked me so good", "You don't half of the shit that you put me through", "Venice bitch", "I fucked up, I know that, but Jesus", "Do shit to keep me turned on", "Fuck it, I love you", "shit's even brighter you're gone", "And if it wasn't so fucked up I think I'd fuck you all the time", "I'm a fuckin' mess", "'70s in spirit, '90s in his frame of mind", "I want shit to feel just like it used to", "I've been tearing around in my fucking nightgown", "shaking my ass", a Sublime cover, references to Snoop Dogg, Zeppelin, Bowie, the Beatles, the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, Kokomo, Kanye West, live streams, logging off, GPS and or dating apps, iPads, text warnings about nukes, global warming... but yeah, other than that.

 

 

LANA Thank you so much. To the point where, being in rehearsals now, getting ready for these bigger shows, it’s almost a little stressful, because what I’ve written is so much of a different mood from what I’ve been playing live for, like, 10 years. I’m like, “I think I need to just do the whole show differently.”

So... do that?

 

 

ELTON You’re going to have to think about it. Because if you play a lot of these songs . . . Playing a live show, I always think, is a bit like having sex. You start quite raucous, and then you slow down, and then you build up to a climax.

 

 

LANA I start the opposite, for what it’s worth! [Laughs] Slow burn!

We still talking about music, Lana... or...?

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED... (fucking quote limits)

[evilentity 13,303]

ELTON It’s almost tempting to do the whole album from start to finish.

 

LANA That might work better than trying to fit it in with some of the songs from 10 years ago.

 

ELTON I think some of those songs will fit in if you do it right.

Listen to Elton, Lana.

 

 

ELTON The record is also very simple. There’s hardly any arrangements at all. Piano, drums, and guitar. And some synths, here and there? And there’s a beautiful brass arrangement.

 

 

LANA I think that might have been the Mellotron. It almost sounds like a Spanish horn, but it’s not. We call it “the Norman sound.”

This reminds me I really need to get back in touch with @Monicker. I'm really curious what he thinks of NFR, in particular the production. I love how stripped back the production is because I've always loved her voice so much; it really lets it shine. But I wonder if it's too sparse and simple for his taste.

 

 

I never understand people who fire their producers after one great record.

Robopop and Dan Auerbach say hi. Elton gonna fight the Nowels haterz.

 

 

LANA I’m the same way, thinking about them as children. If I know there’s an album that people don’t like, I don’t think of myself first. I think, “Oh, I feel bad for the music!”

MOM

 

 

I was in New York for eight years, but the Strokes were already gone.

LANA Do you think there could be another revival of that kind of real togetherness, and community, and something super-different, emerging out of rock right now?

I miss New York and I miss the music / Me and my friends, we miss rock and roll

 

I bet Lana rekindled her New York nostalgia by reading Lizzy Goodman's Meet Me in the Bathroom recently.

 

 

I think what Pro Tools and everything else did, they took the musicianship away from people, and people made records in their bedrooms instead of with each other in a bar. In Nashville, you don’t see that. You have people playing together all the time. And maybe here too. I do four radio shows a month; I sit down and I listen to all the new stuff they send me, and a lot of it is from people who are writing their first songs in a bedroom. Ninety percent of the time it’s horrible, 10 percent of the time it’s good.

This is a really interesting observation. It's not just a get-off-my-lawn old timer's argument. It's a substantive critique about what's been lost with modern production tools even while there are many benefits.

 

 

ELTON These are amazing girls. You, Billie Eilish, Kacey Musgraves — I mean, the girls are leading the way. They’re writing about their life. That’s what moves me. There are very few male singers that move me.

Same, Elton, same.

 

 

ELTON But I do like misery. All my favorite songs I’ve written are the saddest songs, probably. I could listen to Leonard Cohen on a loop. Your songs, they’re not miserable songs at all, but they evoke a pathos inside of you. There’s maybe a little sadness in there, a little melancholia, a little nostalgia. That’s what I love. I love to sit there and cry. If something makes me cry, I feel as if I’m having a good time. Does that sound as if I’m crazy?

Almost all the music I like is either angsty or sad and makes me feel good in a way that upbeat poppy major key stuff usually doesn't.

 

 

LANA When I was really young, I always thought I would do it. But then when I got to college, I definitely thought I would not do it. And then, after a year enrolled in business school [Del Rey went to Fordham], I went back to it.

 

INTERVIEWER What happened?

 

LANA After my freshman year, I read Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. It wasn’t necessarily about money. But he talked about burning every single bridge except for the only bridge that led to your greatest desire. And I thought, “My greatest desire is to sing.” So I switched out and became a philosophy major, because they told me I’d never get a job doing that [laughs].

I'd be curious if Lana ever applied to Fordham as a business major, or if she applied as a business major to SUNY Geneseo where she didn't end up attending and had that all straightened out by the time she went to Fordham.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED... (fucking quote limits)

[evilentity 13,303]

INTERVIEWER Still, there’s a lot of mystique around you. Unlike most pop stars, nobody knows anything about you.

Oh yeah?

 

 

LANA It’s just that my family is still around and close. There’s only so much I could put on the table, coming from where I come from. I’m limited in what I could say in terms of being open. Maybe in 10 years.

There it is again. It really seems like her family has some sort of dirty laundry that she's now emotionally ready to share, but doesn't want to until certain family members are gone. And apparently thinks that in 10 years they could be? Or at least that's the impression she wants to give.

 

Lana has done this sort of thing in interviews since the beginning: Hint at things that sound a little scandalous, but then not tell you. Honestly this is a big part of why she still retains some mystique even though we know a lot about her. She's a puzzle you can't quite figure out.

[slang 1,509]

So if you go Wikipedia on the topic Rollingstones 500 greatest albums, Elton supposedly has 6 (along with Bowie), although, I could only find 5 here:
https://musicbrainz.org/series/8668518f-4a1e-4802-8b0d-81703ced6418?page=1
and on google.

 

Tumbleweed Connection (458), Honky Chateau (359), Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (158), Elton's Greatest Hits (136), Goodbye Yellowbrick Road (91). I'll opine Madman Across the Water, just as a personal honorable mention. Bernie Taupin really gave Elton a huge range of song topics (some risqué for the time). They were also quite interested in Americana/nostalgia.

 

It's possible GYR (#91) is counted twice, because it's a "double" album, idk. GYR is the best one to check out if you like LDR's leaks/unreleased, imo. I have often thought one could put together a double album of her best leaks/unreleased to get something as inventive, diverse, and compulsively listenable as GYR. Captain Fantastic is also very good, comparable with NFR and BTD (as improbable as that seems). Anyway, hobnobbing with Elton John is definitely a career highwater mark in promo that postures LDR's pop icon-ness. If I seem to remember Pat Grant relishing the fact LDR was on the cover of Rollingstone for UV, this occurrence on RS must have really blown her mind.

 

ETA:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/447474912950438336/

[Nobody 21,298]

LANA I’m so ADHD, you’d never know, but I cannot stay still. But my favorite thing is to mix future tripping with inward seeking.

 

Wait if she actually has ADHD it explains why she's so forgetful