If we’re not at Dylan, we’re hopefully at another show. But across her discography, her commitment to the gesture has deepened its meaning. Earlier in her career, it sounded like cheating off someone else’s paper, like she was spackling holes in her verses with mundane swatches of radio haiku - lyrics from Tom Petty, Snoop Dogg, Patsy Cline, David Bowie and dozens more. One of her most potent writerly devices involves recycling old lyrics from classic songs. Listeners will blaze their own paths into and out of any piece of music. Has her work been over-interpreted? Not necessarily. Like, a different path than maybe what I was laying down.” “They thought there should have been more there. “What it taught me is that they saw more,” she says.
Del Rey may not have answered directly, but she was listening. She continued to grow into her ideas while listeners demanded to know what her music meant, who it spoke for, what it stood for. “It’s just my nature, the way I’m not fast or on fire.” (Kevin Winter/Getty Images) “I have a more delicate sensibility,” says Del Rey, seen in 2012. I wrote a hit album! Can’t I take an hour to watch him play ‘World of Warcraft’?” “ ‘You’re sitting and watching him play video games?’ I was like, ‘Well, I would play, too, now and then.’ And I had other stuff I was doing. “I remember when ‘Video Games’ came out, people were like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so anti-feminist!’ ” Del Rey says. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you,” she gushed on her breakout single “ Video Games,” a self-erasing love song about a distant lover who’s more concerned with the pixels on his computer screen. Instead, she wrote ballads about surrendering to romantic oblivion - songs that made many listeners bristle on principle, even if Del Rey was telling her truth. “It’s just my nature, the way I’m not fast or on fire.” “I have a more delicate sensibility,” she says. Del Rey was different, and so was her music. On top of that, “Born to Die” landed at a time when a pop hit was expected to double as a melodic affirmation, a self-esteem vitamin, a danceable pep-talk, Gaga-rah-rah-rah. The singer’s rise out of the New York open-mic circuit and up through the industry machinery, while not atypical, had been spun into a bogus media narrative about how she wasn’t operating on her own creative volition, as if her songs had been focus-grouped into existence. As pop albums go, it was difficult to hear clearly at the time. That’s one way to explain the flood of hot and cold unleashed upon “Born to Die,” Del Rey’s polarizing 2012 album.
There is kindness, and it’s not all speculation.” “But once you’re on the line, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s not all bad.’. “I, maybe at one point, thought of it as being on the firing line,” she says of the skepticism she has faced over the years. Two days after the Hollywood Bowl, Del Rey is in Santa Barbara to catch a Bob Dylan concert - partially to bask in mythological music alongside family and friends, partially because “it’s good to learn from everyone who’s been doing it for so long.” But before the Pacific Ocean can pull down the sun, the 34-year-old will spend an hour inside a conference room at the Four Seasons answering questions about the creative impulse in a tone of voice that’s bright, casual, searching and sincere. Singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey made her first big splash in 2012 with the polarizing album “Born to Die.” (Austin Hargrave/AUGUST) Behind the lyrics She believes in songcraft as truth-telling. Now she has made an album where she’s patrolling the margins of her psyche and relaying her findings, whispering hyper-intimate lullabies that can feel as exquisite and disorienting as reality.
I’m just singing because that’s what I know how to do.” Never will.” Gawkers are still gawking at that retort, but why not take her at her word? Back in 2011, at the dawn of her fame, she told Pitchfork, “I’m not trying to create an image or a persona. When NPR published a deep, diligent, largely flattering review of her new album last month, Del Rey took issue with its mention of personae and blasted back on social media: “Never had a persona. Here was a remote pop star dream-journaling from a perspective too fabulous to belong to an actual human being.ĭel Rey has rejected that idea from the jump. For years, the easiest way to reconcile the strangeness of Lana Del Rey was to tell ourselves that we were listening to a persona.