“People said I came from money,” she recounts. “From what I was told,” she says, “I sang verses before I spoke words, but I don’t think that necessarily meant I had to, or was going to be a singer.” Much else in her supposed biography, she says, is misinformation. The record states that Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was born in New York in 1985 as a baby, she moved with her parents upstate to Lake Placid. Back then, Lana Del Rey was more think-piece cipher than Boss-approved songwriter: “a young fiction,” sniffed the Los Angeles Times, “daughter of a domain-name magnate.”
You’d have got long odds, in 2012, on the internet phenomenon of the previous year’s Video Games becoming the decade’s most remarkable and provocative pop star. The Greatest, Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s defining song, was the cover’s aural analogue: “Hawaii just missed that fireball/LA is in flames it’s getting hot… Kanye West is blond and gone/Life On Mars ain’t just a song/I hope the livestream’s almost on.” But where do you go after burning America down? Did she know what was next? Behind her, the Californian coast is on fire. The cover showed Del Rey standing on a boat, one arm around Jack Nicholson’s grandson Duke, the other reaching towards the camera as if to save the viewer from the water. The most significant landmark, however, was the completion of Chemtrails Over The Country Club, the album she has been promising (sometimes as White Hot Forever) since the release of 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! Bruce Springsteen, who knows a bit about the flipside of the American dream, loved that album: “She just creates a world of her own and invites you in,” he said. In November, she covered Summertime as a fundraiser for the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras covering all bases, she also recorded You’ll Never Walk Alone for a documentary about Liverpool FC.
September saw the publication of her poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass. Tomorrow, Del Rey will hit the road back home to Los Angeles, preparing to spend Christmas Eve “with my sister and brother and just two girlfriends.” After the holiday, it will transpire she fractured her arm while spinning on her “beautiful skates” through the “twilight of the desert”: that’s why she’s wearing a sling in MOJO’s cover photograph.Įver since she studied philosophy at New York’s Fordham University in the late 2000s, there’s been a question lurking in Del Rey’s mind: what if something happened to make the world stop? “So when it did,” she says, “I was kind of shocked.” The pandemic has inevitably hampered her movements – festivals cancelled, studio time with producer Jack Antonoff truncated – but it hasn’t slowed down her creative jumps (or her willingness to crash into social media). We had a sweet little night singing all the old Disney and holiday songs – not what I expected after a long car ride, but everyone was in a good mood.”
It’s pretty idyllic: Northern California, pretty cold, 40 degrees and a little fireplace. “I’m at his parents’ farm, so we’re in, like, the guest house. “I told my boyfriend I was going to go out and sit in the car because I hate it when people listen to me talk,” she says. IT’S MIDNIGHT IN MODESTO and Lana Del Rey has swung into the backyard, pulled up in her fast car. “Fame can put you on the peripheries,” she told Victoria Segal, “ where the vultures can pick at you.” But while serenity seemed almost in reach, some wounds still burned and grievances rankled.
Her album, Chemtrails Over The Country Club, had opened a sunnier chapter in her controversial roman-à-clef, and folk legend Joan Baez had advocated her acceptance in the pantheon. In 2021, MOJO had an exclusive audience with the Springsteen-approved laureate of L.A.
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