Lana Del Rey covers Rolling Stone August 2014

[drugmoney 117]

I think Lana's just really volatile when it comes to interviews. She so clearly just wants to be left alone but I think she definitely wants to get her story across but she just doesn't know how to phrase it and it makes her frustrated when journalists focus on the same shit.

 

Oh definitely. The questions are so invasive too like where do you get the right to ask her about some stupid theory that she was in a relationship with her teacher? I just don't get it. It's honestly disrespectful. People seem to think they're entitled to dig so deep into Lana's personal life and it's gross.

 

I love the part she said here which is so fucking true:

 

"I find the nature of the questions difficult. 'Cause it's not like I'm a rock band and you're asking how everything got made and what it's like touring in arenas and what are the girls like. It's about my father. It's about my mental health. It's fucking personal."

[Alicia 182]

Thank You for the scans

[Rebel 3,175]

 

"Del Rey is four days away from her 29th birthday (for reasons she can't explain, she's usually reported to be a year younger)..."

 

What's that sound? Is it @@evilentity sobbing tears of joy?

[Honeymooner 336]

I bought the magazine today ($4.99 on my iPad) and read the full article. The quote snippets we saw didn't really make a lot of sense out of context; they were much easier to interpret within the full article. I enjoyed reading it, although it's too bad the interview ended on kind of a bad note.

[rdp 1,240]

The bit about Paul Epworth makes me wonder if her encounters with Rick Rubin and Greg Kurstin were also arranged by Interscope. Well at least we got three great songs out of it.

[Dietjerseyqueen 4]

"on a scale from one to ten, how much do you wish you were dead right now?"

 

Oh my god -_-

[Chris Cuomo 3,315]

what is it with interviews and her sounding like a total b*tch. oh well.

[evilentity 13,303]

This is bound to be a controversial opinion, but I think this is a fantastically well-done profile, perhaps one of the best. I don't believe it's the job of a journalist, even in the fluffy realm of music journalism, to humor the people they cover. The job of a journalist is to portray their subjects accurately and in-depth. This article accomplished that in spades. It goes into great depth about her history and provides new details about unanswered questions, it demonstrates the author did his homework, confirms the recent NYT profile's angle that she's been misunderstood and the backlash was premised on bullshit, but pulls the curtain back on what it's like to interview Lana Del Rey and her mercurial nature.

 

That said, the one quibble I have is that I felt they removed all context from her comment about not wanting people to hear and think about her music when promoting this profile online.

 

Some specific thoughts:

 

 

"Del Rey is four days away from her 29th birthday (for reasons she can't explain, she's usually reported to be a year younger)..."

What's that sound? Is it @@evilentity sobbing tears of joy?

 

Like lemonade.

 

What'll really make me happy is if those fuckers on Wikipedia will change it permanently now without me having to make a case for it on BLPN.

 

And, perhaps more than any other pop star of this century, she's been misunderstood, even hated.

I can't say I am anywhere near as familiar with other pop stars to say if this is true, but it's nice to see even music journalists that aren't as fawning as the NYT's John Pareles say this. I also like that this article describes her name change as merely "showbiz-as-usual" and said this:

If she were the corporate puppet or calculated fraud some of her detractors imagined her to be, this is not an album she would ever make.

 

On the second-floor coffee table, near a Serge Gainsbourg box set, there's a book called The Boudoir Bible. "No shame," Del Rey says with a grin.

Get it girl 

 

Within a few days, she'll be photographed muzzling with Carrozzini in Europe. But for now, she says, she's single. Starting in December or so, Del Rey began a protracted breakup with Barrie-James O'Neill, her boyfriend of three years. He's a songwriter, which allowed her to live out some Dylan/Joan Baez fantasies (she's partial to Baez's paean to that romance, "Diamonds and Rust," even quoting it on "Ultraviolence"). "It's all been hard," del Rey says. "Yeah, my life is just feeling really heavy on my shoulders, and his own neuroses just getting the best of him, I think, just made it untenable. Which is sad, because it was truly circumstantial, the reasons for us not being together."

 

Ultraviolence feels, at times, like a breakup album, though Del Rey says all of the songs were actually about previous relationships.

Let's see. She started breaking up with Barrie "starting in December or so", right around the same time she previously said she stopped having writer's block and her concept for the album started to come together and she began recording stuff for it at Electric Lady Studios. And then there are those lyrics. Hmm...

 

After she played [Auerbach] some of the demos she was working on, he became a fan, lobbying to produce her.

Give us the demos Dan!

 

But he was taken aback by the major-label hassles he experienced - Del Rey is signed to two of them, Interscope and the U.K.'s Polydor. "There was a lot of bullshit I'm not used to," Auerbach says. "The label says, 'We're not going to give you the budget to extend this session unless we hear something.' And we send them the rough mix and they fucking hate it and they hate the way it's mixed. And it's like, 'Thanks, asshole.'

"The story I got told," he continues, "is that they played it for her label person and they said, 'We're not putting out this record that you and Dan made unless you meet with the Adele producer.' And she said, 'Fine, whatever.' And she was late to the meeting, so while they were waiting, the label guy played what we recorded for the Adele producer and he said, 'This is amazing - I wouldn't do anything to change this.' And here's the kicker: Then all of a sudden, the label guy said, 'Well, yeah, I think it's great too.'"

Fucking labels, man.

 

She was born in Manhattan to parents who both worked Mad Men-style jobs at the advertising giant Grey, but when she was one year old, they gave up those careers and moved to sleepy upstate Lake Placid... But Lizzy just wished they had stayed in the city.

The irony of this has always struck me. Her parents moved away from the city to the countryside because they had Lizzy who of course was powerfully drawn to the city when she grew up.

 

TO BE CONTINUED... Fucking quote limits.

[evilentity 13,303]

CONTINUED

 

A young English instructor introduced her to Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and Vladimir Nabokov (she has tattoos of the latter two names on her forearm), plus Tupac, the Notorious B.I.G. and old movies like The Big Sleep. Lines in "Boarding School" and another unreleased track, "Prom Song," led fans to question the precise nature of this relationship, but Del Rey says it was nothing inappropriate: "He was just my friend."

Someone's been reading Lanalysis.   Actually, between this and the age thing and the FMWUTTT/Lorde thing I think this guy's been reading a fair amount on LanaBoards.

 

She had gotten into SUNY GEneseo, a college in New York's state-university system, but decided not to go. She took the year off, heading to her aunt and uncle's house on Long Island. She worked as a waitress, just as she'd done over various summers.

This is really interesting. It explains why her high school yearbook photo said she was college bound for SUNY Geneseo even though she ended up at Fordham and the apparent gap between high school and her starting college. But it makes when she might have lived in Alabama all the more mysterious.

 

"I loved it," she says, though her mom told one of her label execs that she had been a truly awful waitress.

Ha! Me and my momma we don't get along, indeed. Though I can just see her being the kind of waitress that tries to make up for shitty service by flirting with her male patrons.

 

She cites a sparse, Cat Power-ish tune called "Disco" ("I am my only god now," she sings, cheerily) and "Trash Magic"

She still remembers these lovely early songs. 

 

The other possible name was Cherry Galore, she says, probably joking

Say hi to your Bond girl sister Pussy for me, will you?

 

They ended up all but scrubbing the LP's existence from the Internet, which made it look like they were trying to hide Del Rey's past, contributing to conspiracy-mongering later on. "We didn't want the old album to be available just as we were trying to launch a new thing," says Mawson, her co-manager. "And if that created suspicion in the eyes of weirdos on the Internet, then fine."

Ha, look at get all defensive about his cardinal error as her manager.

 

showing me the software on her MacBook, which has a badly cracked screen

I guess you guys weren't the only ones that noticed this.

 

While she was waiting for the Kahne album to come out, she got involved with an "East Village guru" who "had an ability to see into the past and read into the future." But she left his orbit after detecting something "sinister" about him.

I'll be posting more about this soon.

 

This is too long to type up. Read from the paragraph beginning "Then, really without warning" to the end:

 

 

"Maybe I'm sensitive. Do you think?"

"You're asking all the right questions. I just really don't want to answer them."

"I'm just uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with you."

 

I think these quotes really highlight what's going on here. Interviewers ask her perfectly reasonable questions to ask, nevertheless she still feels uncomfortable being asked them. What I don't understand, given that so many of her interviews have turned out this way, why she still does them or why she doesn't just say "No comment" or "I'd rather not answer that" and move on rather than throwing a hissy fit at interviewers who are just doing their job.

 

Oh definitely. The questions are so invasive too like where do you get the right to ask her about some stupid theory that she was in a relationship with her teacher? I just don't get it. It's honestly disrespectful. People seem to think they're entitled to dig so deep into Lana's personal life and it's gross.

 

I love the part she said here which is so fucking true:

 

"I find the nature of the questions difficult. 'Cause it's not like I'm a rock band and you're asking how everything got made and what it's like touring in arenas and what are the girls like. It's about my father. It's about my mental health. It's fucking personal."

Why should it be out of bounds to ask about something she has consistently volunteered detailed information about unprompted in multiple interviews and may be referenced in several of her songs?

[Heaux 1,396]

i wish Neil Strauss would've done the interview.. He's done a lot of other Rolling Stone cover stories. He would've handled her much better. I'm reading his book and Julian from The Strokes was being really difficult and was saying stuff like "can we just wait until we have something good to talk about" similarly to Lana and Neill just made it work and the interview was readable at least..

[Heaux 1,396]

edit: nevermind..

[CherryGalore 99]

She's such a gemini   

[Swan Song 286]

I just bought the magazine today and wow, what an article. They did paint her as a drama queen, and the usual questioning of her authenticity dominated most of what was researched about her. 

 

Things that I liked:

- Called Francesco a "friend" 

- Ultraviolence is a really personal album, and that she made it for her. "I'm not selling the record, I'm signed to a label who's selling the record. I don't need to make any money. I really could care less. But I do care about making music"

- Lana showing the program that she uses to make the homemade vids on her computer with its cracked screen

[Sitar 22,172]

We weren't in that room. I really don't believe the question that undid the whole thing was as innocent as the interviewer makes it seem.

[evilentity 13,303]

We weren't in that room. I really don't believe the question that undid the whole thing was as innocent as the interviewer makes it seem.

Perhaps not, but even still, hasn't there been a pattern here for some time?

[Sitar 22,172]

Perhaps not, but even still, hasn't there been a pattern here for some time?

 

Yes, of you assuming the worst about Lana.

[Rafael 3,510]

Cherry Galore, oh my god. Imagine the lyrics:

 

I was working down in the corner café

You would drive by in the Chevrolet

Whistle at me as my hips go sway

"Cherry Galore", how you get that way?

 

Not even gonna quote "Ridin'"

[Rebel 3,175]

Cherry Galore, oh my god. Imagine the lyrics:

 

I was working down in the corner café

You would drive by in the Chevrolet

Whistle at me as my hips go sway

"Cherry Galore", how you get that way?

 

Not even gonna quote "Ridin'"

 

"Cherry, how I hate those guys..."

[pinkbubbles 41]

 

"I just thought it was strange, being born into this geographic lockdown location, and a name that you didn't choose, and going to school for fucking 23 years. It was just unfathomable to me."

 

I can relate to this sooo much.

[evilentity 13,303]

Yes, of you assuming the worst about Lana.

Assuming the worst? I'd say objectively critiquing her responses in interviews based on the information at hand without allowing myself to be prejudiced by the fact that I love her music. If anyone's assuming anything here it's you assuming the worst about her interviewers. Are you really telling me with a straight face (no pun intended) that you don't see a pattern of behavior here? You really think all these different interviewers are uniquely unfair to her and provoke this kind of response from her, but not their other interview subjects?