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Lana released Did you know there was a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard in 2023 and is her most praised album to date by critics and other music legends

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Lana Del Rey's sprawling and obsessive new LP - "the ninth studio album," as its cover describes it in a flourish of self-mythologizing graphic design - is the one where this great American collage artist begins cut-and-pasting herself.

Known since she emerged over a decade ago for alluding to or borrowing from the music of Lou Reed, Nancy Sinatra, Joni Mitchell and the Beach Boys, among countless others, Del Rey here quotes a line from her own song "Cinnamon Girl" and repurposes a string arrangement from her "Norman F- Rockwell" before concluding the record with a luscious-spooky dub-trap remake of 2019's "Venice Bitch," in which she rhymes "Get high" with "Never die" and "Drop acid" with "Lake Placid."

And why not? At age 37, Del Rey has ascended to a level of prestige that for her younger inheritors - including famous fans like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo - more or less matches the esteem in which she holds those in her pantheon. What's more, she's almost equally revered by musicians from the generation before hers: Stevie Nicks, who appeared on Del Rey's 2017 "Lust for Life"; Cat Power, who's covered her "White Mustang"; and Courtney Love, who recently told Marc Maron that Del Rey and Kurt Cobain are "the only two true musical geniuses I've ever known."

Consider that as the new album arrives - it's called "Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd," in reference to a long-forgotten underground passageway in Long Beach - Del Rey's 2012 major-label debut, "Born to Die," is in its 475th week on the Billboard 200, one indication of a cultural endurance few envisioned back when that album was inspiring skeptical takes about Del Rey's artistic authenticity.

And yet the self-canonizing she undertakes on "Ocean Blvd" isn't merely a flex (though she does do a bit of told-you-so-ing regarding those old criticisms, as when she sings sarcastically of "big men behind the scenes sewing Frankenstein black dreams into my songs"). Rather, her summoning of Lanas past is a way to frame a work of determined introspection on which she's taking stock of the social and emotional forces that shaped her ideas about family, marriage, art, motherhood, sex, celebrity and death - "the stuff that's at the very heart of things," as she puts it in "Sweet."

Indeed, the scope of her examination is so broad that her count of nine studio LPs includes a little-heard 2010 indie project released under the name Lana Del Ray (note the slightly different spelling); "Ocean Blvd's" opener, " The Grants," points back even farther, to her upbringing in Lake Placid, N.Y., as Elizabeth Grant.

"My pastor told me when you leave, all you take is your memory," she sings, haunted yet blissed out, over churchy piano chords, "And I'm gonna take mine of you with me."

Del Rey isn't the only A-list pop star engaging in this type of personal history. " Endless Summer Vacation," by another of her admirers, Miley Cyrus, has a similar my-back-pages energy, while Taylor Swift - who recruited Del Rey for a cameo on last year's "Midnights" and with whom she shares a key studio collaborator in Jack Antonoff - just launched a blockbuster stadium tour built to showcase a succession of former selves.

But Del Rey's thinking, and by extension her songwriting, is the deepest and most penetrating. On "The Grants," she ponders the comforts and obligations of being a daughter and a sister; " Fingertips" recalls the tragic deaths of an uncle and a high school crush and explores the singer's troubled relationship with her mother. Del Rey muses on romance in " Let the Light In," a country-ish duet with Father John Misty, and the tender "Margaret," which she wrote about Antonoff's engagement to actor Margaret Qualley.

" A&W," whose title abbreviates "American whore" even as it knowingly evokes the nostalgic fast-food chain, takes up Del Rey's complicated performance of gender with startling candor: "If I told you that I was raped, do you really think that anybody would think I didn't ask for it?"

Line by line, her lyrics deliver a staggering blend of the profound and the vernacular, as in " Candy Necklace," where she's "sitting on the sofa, super-suicidal / Hate to say the word, but, baby, hand on the Bible, I do." Savor the intricate rhythms in those words! And behold her skill as a phrase-maker: "You're so funny, I wish I could skinny-dip inside your mind," she tells somebody in " Fishtail"; "I'm a different kind of woman," she declares in " Sweet," "If you want some basic bitch, go to the Beverly Center and find her."

At 77 minutes in length, "Ocean Blvd" risks tiring the listener's ear, which is why Del Rey and her co-producers - Antonoff along with Drew Erickson, Zach Dawes and Mike Hermosa - keep folding unexpected sounds and textures into the album's largely piano-based arrangements. "The Grants" has lush gospel-choir background vocals; "Fishtail" has squirmy synths reminiscent of those on Swift's "Midnights"; " Peppers" and " Taco Truck x VB " have the kind of bleary hip-hop beats that Del Rey mostly stayed away from on the folkier albums that followed "Lust for Life."

But even at its most stripped-down, as on "Fingertips" and the desperately pretty " Paris, Texas," Del Rey's richly expressive singing holds your attention in part because you're never quite sure where her slowly unwinding melodies will go. In a recent chat with Eilish in Interview magazine, Del Rey described her approach on "Ocean Blvd" as "straight vibing," and the result can remind you of the way SZA illuminates a mysterious interior world on "SOS."

Del Rey's inward focus doesn't mean she's stopped using her music to map the dense web of connections that is life in the digital era. These songs are bursting with samples and suggestions and shoutouts: On "Peppers," she and her boyfriend are listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and dancing to the surf-rock classic "Wipe Out," while " Kintsugi " nods to Leonard Cohen's famous line about the light getting in through a crack in everything.

Del Rey herself doesn't even sing on " Judah Smith Interlude," a 4 ½-minute excerpt from a sermon by the controversial pastor to the stars who also counts Justin Bieber among his flock. Yet the way Del Rey presents it, as an apparent voice recording captured on her phone, we're hearing Smith not at the pulpit but from what sounds like a pew at his megachurch; she shifts in her seat, murmurs in assent, laughs now and then whether or not Smith was making a joke. He's got the mic, but the moment is hers.

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Lana Del Rey's most personal album yet may just be her best

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On her sprawling and self-referential new LP, Del Rey's lyrics deliver a staggering blend of the profound and the vernacular.

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Lana visited Liverpool FC in 2013 and said she was a Liverpool fan and subsequently in 2020 released a cover of the club's anthem

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A new a-capella version of You'll Never Walk Alone has been recorded for a documentary about Liverpool Football Club by Lana Del Rey.

The Grammy-award nominated American singer-songwriter has produced a version of the iconic track which originated from the 1963 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical 'Carousel' and was covered by Merseybeat band Gerry & The Pacemakers before becoming the Reds' anthem.

The full details of the documentary are yet to be released but Del Rey took to Instagram to reveal her involvement.

Sharing a black and white video clip of the new a-capella version of You'll Never Walk Alone, which you can watch at the top of this article, she wrote: "You'll never walk alone- acapella. For the new documentary about Liverpool."

The 35-year-old star visited Anfield for a game against Tottenham back in 2013 and said she was a Liverpool and Celtic fan.

She told Liverpoolfc.com at the time: "I was introduced to Liverpool FC by my manager, Ben, whose mood is dependent on the Liverpool results. I love watching Luis Suarez play.

"It's actually my second time in Liverpool but my first time at Anfield. The people in Liverpool are so friendly and the stadium's really impressive.

"I've not had the chance to attend a game before but I've watched Liverpool on TV before. It's great to actually come to Anfield.

"Liverpool are my team but I also support Celtic in Scotland, who are my boyfriend Barrie's team."

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Lana Del Rey records stunning a-capella version of YNWA for documentary

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The American singer songwriter has recorded a new version of the iconic Liverpool anthem for a new documentary about the club

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throughout Lana's several controversial moments in her career she has maintained her individuality.

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How Lana Del Rey crafted a dark musical war on culture

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Ever since her debut, Lana Del Rey has tackled themes of feminism, sexuality, and abuse, but she risks becoming a true figure of the war on culture.

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Lana was bashed in the press and over social media after her performance on SNL in 2012. This influenced her to never perform on TV again in her career or do many interviews or red carpets.

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Lana Del Rey reflects on THAT disastrous SNL performance

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Lana Del Rey has had plenty of time to reflect on her disastrous 2012 Saturday Night Live performance.

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the reality as to why Lana was not performing on top form- she was living in a hostel and was using cocaine.

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Lana Del Rey was living in hostel when she made ‘SNL’ debut

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In a now-deleted Instagram post, Lana Del Rey has revealed she was living in a hostel when she made her debut appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’.

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Lana on why she took a shift at Waffle House during the promotional period of her album Did you know there is a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard. further adding to her rural 'Americana' image that the recent album is presenting.

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From her Did you know there's a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard tour is donating all the money back to the communities she performs in. Showing the fans that she is a giving kind person.

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Lana's unreleased songs which are going viral on TikTok.

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Lana Del Rey has been recording material since at least 2005 under various names, including Elizabeth Grant, and pseudonyms such as May Jailer, Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena, Lana Rey, Sparkle Jump Rope Queen, Lana Del Ray, and her current stage name Lana Del Rey. Much of this material has never been officially released. Songs included on these lists are either registered tracks that have not been commercially or promotionally released, leaked recordings that have gained attention from the media and fans, or songs confirmed by Del Rey herself or other musicians working with her.

Songs in this list are original songs recorded by Lana Del Rey that have been leaked onto the internet, or released un-commercially. Songs included in leaked albums are not listed in this section.

This is a list of original songs by Lana Del Rey that are confirmed to be real, but are unleaked and unavailable for public listening. For other songs that have not leaked and aren't confirmed to be real, see this list.

This is a list of alternate versions and demos of songs by Lana Del Rey that are confirmed to be real but are unleaked and unavailable for public listening.

Songs in this list are covers recorded Lana Del Rey that have not been officially released commercially that exist as either a studio recording or live performance.

This is a list songs that are confirmed to have been covered by Lana Del Rey but are unleaked or unavailable for public listening.

This is a list of albums or EPs recorded by Lana Del Rey that were never commercially released but have leaked online while remaining unreleased. Songs included in these albums are not listed above in the leaked songs section.

This is a list of albums that are confirmed to be real but are unleaked and unavailable for public listening.

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Lana Del Rey has been recording material since at least 2005 under various names, including Elizabeth Grant, and pseudonyms such as May Jailer, Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena, Lana Rey, Sparkle Jump Rope Queen, Lana Del Ray, and her current stage name Lana Del Rey. Much of this material has never been officially released.

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Lana presents her sense of star entitlement as she arrives late to her set at Glastonbury and then curses out the event runners who are not accepting of her lateness. But later apologises.

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Lana Del Rey has apologised to fans for the abrupt ending to her Glastonbury show last month.

The US singer-songwriter arrived half an hour late for her set and had the plug pulled when she broke the curfew.

Despite begging Glastonbury bosses to let her play "one more song", Del Rey had to leave without finishing.

Playing London's Hyde Park on Sunday, she introduced the song Diet Mountain Dew by saying: "This is where I got cut off last time - sorry about that."

Del Rey later toyed with breaking Hyde Park's own curfew, by stretching out the final section of Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd?

"I don't want it to end," she told her band, indicating they should keep playing, as the gospel ballad approached its conclusion.

And when it finally drew to a close, several minutes later, Del Rey added: "It's worth it. Even if you get the power cut, it's worth it."

Thankfully, she was still able to finish her show before the strict 22:30 cut-off, leaving fans with a blissful version of Video Games performed on a garlanded swing, suspended from the rafters of the stage.

The 19-song set was the same show she had intended to stage at Glastonbury - a highly conceptual, ultra-stylised performance, with Del Rey surrounded by a swirl of dancers who shower the stage with glitter and perform improbable feats of gymnastics.

She emerges to ear-splitting screams, in a floral-print dress and towering heels, smouldering through the achingly cool A&W, before segueing into the ethereal Young and Beautiful.

"Damn, this is a big crowd!" Del Rey says, to even more ear-splitting screams, as fans hold up signs - "Marry me," "Lana Del Slay" - in the hope of catching her eye.

Even in the era of "stan culture", Del Rey inspires an unusual level of devotion. People queued for a whole day to secure a place at the front of the BST Hyde Park show.

Her every move is greeted with feverish awe. Even when she takes a puff on a vape, there is an almighty roar of approval.

It would seem disproportionate for anyone else but no other modern artist has so successfully created a mythology and a sound of their own.

When Del Rey first arrived, with dreamy, hip-hop infused songs such as Born to Die and Video Games, people called her a fake. They said she was a Brooklyn hipster with artificially inflated lips and carped her father was a millionaire who - allegedly - bankrolled her career.

But those critiques, dripping with misogyny, have not aged well.

Del Rey's atmospheric, orchestral pop has inspired a generation of female singer-songwriters - Olivia Rodrigo, Lorde, Halsey. As Billie Eilish says: "Lana raised us."

And last year, before inviting Del Rey to duet on her latest album, Taylor Swift said simply: "She's the best we ever had."

Over the years, Del Rey's music has evolved and become more nuanced, while never quite departing from the twin topics that obsess her, toxic relationships and America - and, by proxy, America's toxic relationship with itself.

Her high-water mark, 2019's Norman... Rockwell!, an album painted in the palette of classic Californian rock, produced by frequent Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff, saw her take full control of her narrative. And on the sublime Mariners Apartment Complex, she even addresses the people - critics, boyfriends, record-industry bigwigs - who "mistook my kindness for weakness", the not-exactly-hidden subtext being: "That won't happen again, schmucks."

Del Rey has released three albums since then, with this year's Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd? marking a detour into more confessional territory. She frets about having children, the imminence of death and her family's history of cancer, her voice more vulnerable and human than before.

Filled with gospel harmonies and softly building pianos, it challenges Norman... Rockwell! as her best album yet - and the title track was one of the biggest highlights of her Hyde Park set.

'Beauty-queen style'

Del Rey is an intriguing performer - sometimes fully present, at others seemingly lost in the music. Often, she will mouth words off-microphone, as though singing a private melody to herself.

It is mesmerising to watch, like peeking through the window into her apartment as she writes. And that sensation is only heightened when she sits at a dresser while a stylist tackles her hair - "done up real big, beauty-queen style," to quote Summertime Sadness - freeing her tresses to tumble over her shoulders.

This too could be interpreted as a dig at Glastonbury, where Del Rey jokingly blamed her delay on her hairdressers - except, she staged the exact same interlude at Worthy Farm.

But for all of the shenanigans, the focus remains on the songs - from big hits Born to Die, Ultraviolence and Blue Jeans to beloved album cuts Pretty When You Cry and White Mustang.

Del Rey's voice is better than it has ever been. Throughout the show, she plays with her melodies, exploring new harmonies and breathing fresh emotional life into well-worn songs, And although she never touches an instrument, Del Rey is totally in control of the music.

A tiny gesture to her pianist lets him know she wants to vary the tempo of Candy Necklaces - performed while perched on top of a gold-plated grand piano, naturally. On Arcadia, a lovelorn letter to LA, Del Rey trades riffs with her backing singers, again teasing out the song's ending.

Fans' ears prick up when she changes the lyrics to 2021's Chemtrails over the Country Club, seemingly taking a venomous swipe at her ex-boyfriend Sean Larkin.

"He was born in December and he got married while we were still in couple's therapy together," Del Rey sings over the outro. "Sometimes I wonder what his wife would think if she knew."

If her heart is broken, the audience is there for her. One fan has even turned up with a picture of Mr Larkin on his T-shirt, a giant red "X" superimposed over the top.

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The affection is mutual, As Ultraviolence ends, the singer walks to the barriers to meet the faithful, spending several minutes talking, hugging, posing and signing autographs.

After the show, Del Rey spent time with fans backstage. And at 01:30, when she finally left the venue, she stopped to greet others who had waited at the exits.

"You've always got to take your chance to say hello, because you just never know," she said from the stage, blowing a kiss.

It is something fans know only too well - BST and Glastonbury were her only UK dates since a 2019 performance at Latitude Festival and Del Rey has not toured in England for 10 years.

But based on this magical, luminous performance, she would be welcomed back any time - even by Glastonbury.

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Lana Del Rey says sorry for truncated Glastonbury show

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The singer-songwriter apologises to fans for the abrupt end of her Glastonbury set, as she plays in London.

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Lana is interviewed by the HollyWood Reporter and talks about how she is seen as the "sad girl" of music since her release of Ultravoilence in 2014 and talks about how she will remain as such but has grown and taken different paths and inspiration since.

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Music’s introspective queen of melancholy discusses moving on from (and winning over) her longtime detractors, being a mentor to Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo and that viral gig at Waffle House.

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Courtney Love praises Lana as she describer her and Kurt Cobain as the only two musical geniuses. Being associated with such a misunderstood controversial figure only drives Lana's image further as controversial.

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Courtney Love has praised Lana Del Rey alongside Kurt Cobain. Picture: 1. Michael Kovac/WireImage/Getty 2. Victor Boyko/Getty Images for Balmain 3. Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty

The Hole frontwoman and widow of the late Nirvana rocker has praised Lana Del Rey alongside the grunge icon.

Courtney Love believes that Kurt Cobain and Lana Del Rey are the only "true musical geniuses" she's ever encountered.

The Hole frontwoman dubbed the Nirvana icon - and her late husband - and the Born to Die singer as the only people in the industry who "can Spielberg anything".

Appearing on the comic Marc Maron's WTF podcast on Monday 26th January, the 58-year-old rocker said: "Lana and Kurt are the only two true musical geniuses I've ever known And by that I mean they can Spielberg anything."

The Violet singer compared Del Rey's "integrity" to that of her late husband, who tragically died in 1994 by suicide and with who she shares daughter Frances Bean, now 30.

"She's got the integrity that Kurt had," she continued. "The only two people I know that I can say [that about].

"By the way, Stipe? Bono? Yes, these are people that I know and love. Billie Joe, sure. But Lana? She's got a magic thing. And she's not even f***** up!"
READ MORE: How Courtney Love inspired one of Nirvana's biggest songs
Courtney Love also revealed her plans to release new music, which was made in collaboration with Dirty Pretty Things guitarist Anthony Rossomando and Justin Parker.

The grunge rocker also confirmed that she dd pen the song Kill F*** Marry in response to Amber Heard and Johnny Depp's well-publicised legal drama.

She also teased the track Justice For Kurt, which she described as an "earworm and a half".

Meanwhile, Lana's forthcoming album Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is slated for release in March 2023.
READ MORE: The marriage of Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain

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Courtney Love: Lana Del Rey and Kurt Cobain are the only two true musical geniuses I've ever known

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The Hole frontwoman and widow of the late Nirvana rocker has praised Lana Del Rey alongside the grunge icon.

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Compliments given to Lana by other artists and celebrities, showing her work is not just adored by fans but other influential musicians and people

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Lana is praised in Mexico even by drug cartels as she frequently engages in Latinx culture in her music videos and songs such as Taco Truck x VB "that's why they call me Lanita, when I get down I'm bonita"

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(Image: visegrad24/Twitter)

Mexican drug cartels appear to be using customised guns with music superstar Lana Del Rey's face on them, to the chagrin of her fans, according to a viral video online.

A user on X shared a clip, now viewed more than 21 million times, of a man showing off his machine guns and handguns, all of which were loaded with magazines with the Video Games singer's face adorning them.

The page Visegrad 24 then picked up the story, sharing the clip with their 525,000 followers and writing: "Mexican cartels are using customised guns with Lana Del Rey's face on them."
READ MORE: Inside 'slaughterhouse' where cartel hitmen forced childhood friends to kill each other
However, there appears to be no further context to the clip online. Even still, Lana Del Rey's notoriously fanatical fans seem up in arms about the rumours.

"Stay away from her!" demanded one uber fan on a fan forum.

A second added: "The Patron Saint of drug cartels. But really, they can go to hell."

A third chimed in: "This is gross tbh fawk them. Cartels are the cancer the Americas."

Others lauded the star's ability to transcend her typical fanbase. "Questionable but we support regardless, I applaud Lana's impact."

Another person suggested the guns may come from a protection unit dedicated to the American singer.

"Protecting Lanita is their true mission," they said.

But reacting to the lauding of the cartel's apparent fine taste in music, another person took a common sense approach.

"I don't think is something to be proud about after what those animals did to those 5 innocent young men last week," she wrote.

She was referring to five students who were reportedly brutally killed by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel earlier this week.

The cartel thugs reportedly forced one man to decapitate his childhood friend before he was killed.

Childhood friends Roberto Olmeda, 20; Diego Lara, 20; Uriel Galván, 19; Dante Cedillo, 22; and Jaime Martínez, 21, were all reportedly beheaded.
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Lana Del Rey fans order Mexican drug cartels to stop using guns with her face

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A man showing off his machine guns and handguns appears to have a liking for American singer Lana Del Rey, to the chagrin of her super fans who have warned the cartel to back off

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Lana enjoys to engage in Latinx culture and has an alter ego, "Lanita" first introduced in her short film Tropico 2013. Which is contradictory of what people are saying in the media that she was appropriating Latinx Gang/ Cartel culture as it is well received by the community and she is praised for it.

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From the visuals in her short film Tropico to her nickname 'Lanita', Lana has always had a unique affinity with Latino and Mexican culture

On the inaugural night of Lana Del Rey's concert circuit in Mexico, an audience of 65,000 chanted " ¡Lana, hermana, ya eres Mexicana! ", or "Lana, our sister - you are now Mexican!"

Her shows in Mexico - including Del Rey's largest performance to date at the Foro Sol stadium in Mexico City, where she sold 65,000 tickets within an hour of general sale launching - have become an internet sensation, with social media users swooning over the singer's wholesome engagement with Mexican culture during her time south of the border. A photo of her holding a Mexican flag emblazoned with her nickname 'Lanita' has racked up over 25,000 likes on Twitter ; a TikTok photo carousel documenting other instances where she's engaged with Mexican culture has over 75,000 likes . The hype surrounding the mini-tour has demonstrated beyond doubt that Latinos - specifically, Mexicans - love, love , Lana Del Rey.

This isn't anything new, though; our hearts were arguably won over the moment Elizabeth Grant christened herself with a Spanish name . Throughout her career, Lana has continuously engaged with Mexicanidad and, more broadly, Latinidad - the condition of being Mexican or Latino respectively. Perhaps the most literal examples of this are in Tropico , the short film released by Del Rey in 2013. Here, Lana and Shaun Ross star as a gangster and stripper couple in East LA, an Angeleno neighbourhood with the highest concentration of Mexican Americans in the city. The film not only features Lana dressed in the style of a Latina gangster , but also as the Virgin Mary in a style reminiscent of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a symbol of Mexican identity and culture.

When it came out, Tropico was lambasted for cultural appropriation. "Dressing up like an entire culture and calling it 'fashion' is offensive," wrote one Jezebel article . "Using another person or culture as an outfit to make your art edgy is in poor taste." Some fans also feel that while Del Rey's proximity to Latin culture is cute or touching, she does not necessarily do anything to 'help' Latinos in a meaningful way. Speaking to Dazed, Mexican fan Danielle says she is a fan of Lana's work, but notes that she doesn't think Del Rey is "in necessarily any solidarity with Latinidad or our culture [...] she is in no way an activist trying to uplift Chicano culture."

Still, like any demographic, Mexican Americans are not homogenous, and opinions differ from individual to individual. Many Chicanas resonated with Tropico . Mexican-American fan Kaitlyn tells Dazed that for her, Del Rey captures the complexity of womanhood. "[I listen to her] when I feel sexy and strong and also delicate at the same time," she says, adding that Del Rey's self-presentation - such as the "lace, veils, bold red lips, curls" in Tropico - evoke Latino femininity specifically, and make her 'feel seen'. After all, Mexican Catholicism and Chicano culture are both premised on remixing, adaptation and interpretation - so why shouldn't Lana be able to remix in the same way, when such self-fashioning clearly feels authentic to her experiences?

@mexico_fairy #stitch with @paloma⭐️🧸💌 #greenscreen really curious as to what you all think esp if youre a lana fan! what does she offer you about your identity? what are some specific examples- songs, lyrics, acts? #lanadelrey #lanadelreylatina #mirrorpalais #catholiccore #mexicancore #mexicocore #mexicanidentity #morrissey ♬ original sound - steph 🤍

Tropico aside, Del Rey's earlier years are characterised by 'Americana' imagery, as she styled herself after white American cultural icons: Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Priscilla Presley , the fictional Lolita. With her apparent reverence for white America - and at a time when white nationalism was rearing its ugly head - it made sense that some people described Lana as a Republican. But in recent years, Lana's take on America has developed and become far more nuanced. The pivot had roots in Lust for Life but crystallised with Norman Fucking Rockwell! : as Hannah Williams writes in the New Statesman , "[the album] heralded the arrival of a poet... It feels vast, generational, emblematic of 21st-century America."

The artistic momentum of Norman Fucking Rockwell! and Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, combined with changing attitudes about the boundaries of identity, have sparked new discussions about Del Rey's affinity with Latino and Mexican culture and prompted jokes about her actually being Latino (technically, she describes herself as such in 'West Coast' when she sings "he's crazy y Cubano como yo, my love"). She is Lanita : our prima from Jalisco , our working-class Chicana queen.

lana holding a mexican flag with "lanita" on it ❤️ pic.twitter.com/z9FiWH34BK
- ROB CRAVE (@robgrantcrave) August 16, 2023

Most of these posts are made in jest, but they contain an undercurrent of sincerity. Her position as an honorary Latina is not unprecedented: 'outsiders' have often been participants and tastemakers in Latin American culture. Chicanos famously crowned Morrissey as one of their own, with multiple bars in east LA hosting Morrissey karaoke nights and the band 'Mexrrissey' reinventing Smiths and Morrissey songs with a Mexican twist. Costa Rican-born Mexican singer Chavela Vargas put it well: " ¡Los mexicanos nacemos donde nos da la rechingada gana! ", or "we Mexicans are born wherever the fuck we want!". 'Being' Latino or Mexican is less about geography and more about pouring your heart into it; getting it .

And Del Rey gets it - specifically, what it means to be an outsider, having rejected her WASPy upbringing and aligned herself closer to blue-collar diners, open roads, and trailer parks of Middle America. Post-. In the music video for " Norman Fucking Rockwell! , as she matured, she began to include more Mexican spaces in her vision of America: taco trucks, Long Beach and Santee Alley The Greatest ", for example, Del Rey makes the Port of Long Beach, where countless Mexican-American longshoremen work, the site of her elegy for America. For some fans, it is this deep knowledge of a non-mainstream, non-white Latino Los Angeles that elevates her work and rubbishes claims of 'appropriation'. If Lana knows about the swap meets and oil refineries, then she is definitely a bonafide Long Beach girl, explains self-proclaimed Mexican "super stan" Daniel*. And if she is a "Long Beach girlie," he playfully continues, "then of course she's Latina."

Many diasporic Mexicans also regard Lana as the Anglophone heir to the cultural tradition of tragic, elder female singers - colloquially dubbed "señora music". In señora music, outsidership features as a gendered position: one of underappreciation and martyrdom. TikTok often compares Del Rey to Jenni Rivera , a Long Beach-bred Mexican-American singer, while Danielle suggests that she's also reminiscent of Amanda Miguel and Jeanette. "This is the music introduced to us by our parents," she says, describing it as exploring "dramatic vulnerability and unhinged emotional release". Del Rey's lyrics - an alchemy of love, duty, desire and neglect - clearly chime with this. As Kimberly, another Mexican fan, says: "She suffers in her relationships, [and that parallels] the sort of imbalanced relationships dynamics we see play out at home."

Del Rey fits into an interpretation of Latinidad that welcomes participants because of, not in spite of, their whiteness. But it's important to note that her fluency in Latino culture and her acceptance in Latino spaces does not mean that she is exempt from critique when it comes to her engagement with Indigenous or Black culture. After all, as evidenced in the past, Lana has been pretty clumsy when it comes to her comments about race - most notably in her 'question for the culture' post.

Many fans welcome Del Rey's engagement with the Latin experience precisely because they feel it represents something authentic about her experiences, and it strikes a chord with them too. Particularly in her recent work, Lana is fluent in several aspects of Latino culture that are not necessarily obvious: multi-layered femininity, melancholy, working-class Los Angeles. It is not straightforward 'copy-paste' cultural appropriation, nor is it "in poor taste". It's done sincerely. As Williams put it, "she has a fascination with American lives, an ability to be, as Whitman put it, 'commensurate with a people'". That's why we call her Lanita.
*Name has been changed
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Why are Mexicans so obsessed with Lana Del Rey?

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From the visuals in her short film Tropico to her nickname 'Lanita', Lana has always had a unique affinity with Latino and Mexican culture

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Lana playing into her image as a controversial figure by releasing a 'cocaine spoon' necklace which is now viral on TikTok and other platforms such as Tumblr and Pinterest.

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A discontinued Lana Del Rey necklace has gone viral, with people selling them for over $1,000

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A necklace originally sold by Lana Del Rey has become popular on TikTok, drawing comparisons to one Sarah Michelle Gellar wore in “Cruel Intentions.”

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Lana's history of drug use lends itself as a muse for her song "heroin". Other songs such as "off to the Races" "Yayo" "Florida keys" "summer bummer" are about cocaine. "freak" and "Is this happiness" are about LSD. "High by the beach" "born to die" "money, power, glory" "diet Mountain Dew" all mention getting high or being on drugs, showing Lana's substance abuse over the years.

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From Lou Reed to Lana Del Rey, musicians have been using the drug as both a literal and symbolic reference point for decades

It's always been cool to glamorise drug use in the music industry, with hard partying and substance abuse being a sad, all-too-often accepted consequence of the live fast, die young culture. The 27 Club immortalised the danger and risk of such close and frequent dabbling, with the list of musicians succumbing to tragic chicken-or-the-egg fame-fueled addictions including luminaries like Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse.

Throughout the past century, certain substances have even become the drug du jour, dominating the pop culture conversation for decades at a time - LSD in the 60s, cocaine in the 70s, crack in the 80s, ecstasy in the 90s, pharmaceuticals in the 00s, and so on. But heroin has consistently eluded this ebb and flow, from its prominence and influence in the jazz and blues era of the 30s, 40s and 50s (Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Chet Baker) to the rockers of the 60s, 70s, and 80s (Keith Richards, Sid Vicious, Nikki Sixx) and the heroin chic trend of the 90s, made popular by Calvin Klein's 'waif' models and further pushed by the grunge movement (Kurt Cobain, Hole, Alice In Chains, and more).

In the 21st century - and specifically in the United States - the opioid epidemic is now at an all time-high, with The New York Times citing it as "a modern plague" with 59,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016 alone, the largest annual jump ever recorded in the US. With the country's "drug-infested dens" (as President Trump so tactfully described earlier this year) becoming a national crisis, the topic of heroin addiction is coming out from under the bridge - and with it comes its resurgence as an inspiration for today's pop stars, as seen most recently on Lana Del Rey's latest chart-topping LP Lust For Life, whose haunting Topanga, California lullaby "Heroin" appears alongside high profile collaborations with The Weeknd and A$AP Rocky.

Below, we look back at the trajectory of chasing the dragon as a lyrical muse, with ten songs that highlight how music has developed a sour-yet-starry-eyed affair with the drug - from the explicit to the symbolic - and acted as an inspiration even for those who haven't used it.

LOU REED - "PERFECT DAY" (1972)

For anyone familiar with Lou Reed's discography, smack was an omnipresent force of inspiration for the late rock pioneer and The Velvet Underground leader. It was showcased most robustly on the group's seminal LP The Velvet Underground & Nico - see the jerky, frantic cuts "Heroin" and "I'm Waiting For The Man" - but it was Reed's solo debut LP Transformer, produced by disciple David Bowie, where Reed harnessed the drug's idyllic, isolating qualities best.

The sunny-yet-tragic "Perfect Day" was aptly featured in Danny Boyle's cult classic heroin case study Trainspotting. Over demure piano, Reed coos about drinking sangria and going to the zoo with an unidentified 'you,' representing his love affair with the substance. "It was such a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you," he sings on the heartbreaking chorus, before accepting his inevitable fate at the close: "You're going to reap just what you sow."

JAMES BROWN - "KING HEROIN" (1972)

The Godfather of Soul's spoken word anti-drug anthem appeared on his 1972 LP There It Is. The warning song finds Brown recounting a dream in which he meets the drug heroin personified, a man boasting of his power to control people of all walks of life. "I'm a world of power and all know it's true, use me once and you'll know it, too," he spits over a gloomy beat. "Some think my adventure's a joy and a thrill, but I'll put a gun in your hand and make you kill. For the white horse of heroin will ride you to Hell." The track proved that life imitated art, as Brown re-released the track in 1991, three years after he checked himself into an outpatient drug-dependency clinic.

JOHNNY THUNDERS & THE HEARTBREAKERS - "CHINESE ROCKS" (1977)

Penned by Dee Dee Ramone, this iconic punk anthem was inspired by the pursuit of 'the score.' "Hey is Dee Dee home, do you wanna take a walk, do you wanna go cop, you wanna go get some Chinese rocks," the unabashed melody snarls, referencing the slang term for a potent blend that saturated New York at the time. The songwriter initially wrote the track to spite his pal Richard Hell, who said "he was gonna write a song better than Lou Reed's 'Heroin'," Dee Dee recalled in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. "I wrote it by myself, in Debbie Harry's apartment on First Avenue and First Street. Then Richard Hell put (a) line in it, so I gave him some credit.

The track was passed on by Tommy Ramone, who initially refused to record it due to its drug connotation. Hell brought the tune to his band The Heartbreakers, who released it after his exit from the group, with Johnny Thunders as frontman.

THE STRANGLERS - "GOLDEN BROWN" (1981)

In his 2001 memoir The Stranglers: Song By Song, Hugh Cornwell - frontman of the UK baroque pop outfit - states that the group's famed single, off their 1981 LP La Folie, works on two levels because it's "about heroin and also about a girl." (A common theme for this list, it seems.) "Every time just like the last, on her ship tied to the mast," he belts over rococo guitar, before closing with the false prophet claim: "Never a frown with golden brown." Despite the carefree hook, the track takes a sinister turn on the bridge, which lets spin an airy, dizzying guitar solo, followed by a wash of hazy, tripped out vocal layers.

THE LA'S - "THERE SHE GOES" (1990)

While it appears on the surface to be a light, carefree song about the infatuation that comes with falling in love, Liverpool pop group The La's "There She Goes", off their 1990 debut (and only) album, is now infamous for its drug undertones. As lead singer-songwriter Lee Mavers' lyrical hook describes the feeling "racing through my brain" to "pulsing through my veins", the ode to the intravenous substance becomes clear. The single earned a second life with covers by Sixpence None The Richer, Robbie Williams, and The Wombats, though The La's unfortunately never surpassed this early success.

ELLIOTT SMITH - "NEEDLE IN THE HAY" (1995)

"Strung out and thin, calling some friend trying to cash some check," the late singer-songwriter slurs in frantically-lulled despair as he reflects on a life of dependence, and a specific trip to score at '6th & Powell' in Portland, Oregon. "Go downstairs to the man, he's gonna make it all okay," Smith sings on the heart-rending chorus. "I can't beat myself, and I don't want to talk. I'm taking the cure so I can be quiet, whenever I want." The defeated ballad also famously soundtracked Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson)'s suicide attempt in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.

MGMT - "TIME TO PRETEND" (2007)

Alongside "Kids", "Time to Pretend" was one of two singles that transported then-19-year-old Wesleyan undergrads Ben Goldwasser and VanWyngarden to global fame, a label deal with Columbia, and a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 2010. "Time To Pretend" was written about the quest for the rock-star lifestyle. The aim? To "make some music, make some money," and "find some models for wives," VanWyngarden boasts on the hedonistic hook. " I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and fuck with the stars, you man the island, and the cocaine and the elegant cars."

LADY GAGA - "DOPE" (2013)

The pop star née Stephanie Germanotta famously performed this Artpop standout in tears at the YouTube Music Awards in November of 2013, less than 24 hours before her highly publicised split from longtime manager Troy Carter over "creative differences." "I'm sorry mom and (sister) Natalie, this is for my fans, I'm sorry too," she says mournfully before pulling off her sunglasses. "This is for my lover, I love you too. This is for anybody that has that pain inside that they don't know what the fuck," she said in a deep exhale.

The stark, poignant ballad, produced by Gaga alongside Rick Rubin, is about having to decide whether to give up "dope" or lose a lover, with the singer-songwriter passionately revealing her decision on the tragic hook: "I'll keep on searching for an answer, 'cause I need you more than dope, I need you more than dope."

LANA DEL REY - "HEROIN" (2017)

With the release of Lana Del Rey's latest album Lust For Life, the singer-songwriter continued her reign as dark alt-pop purveyor, treating fans to high-profile collaborations with The Weeknd ("Lust For Life") and Steve Nicks ("Beautiful People, Beautiful Problems") while continuing to push the needle sonically and even making a point to acknowledge the US political situation in 2017. But it's the nightmarish lullaby "Heroin" that feels the most timely in its haunting delivery and comment on the opioid epidemic. "I'm flying to the moon again, dreamin' about heroin," she sings on the moonlit chorus, before acknowledging the substance's ultimate power and hold: "how it gave you everything and took your life away."

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From Lou Reed to Lana Del Rey, musicians have been using the drug as both a literal and symbolic reference point for decades

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Lana receiving woman of the year in 2012 for GQ magazine following her debut album Born to Die. However, this achievement was overlooked as Lana posed naked for the magazine sparking controversy but adding to her wild girl aesthetic at the time.

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From the GQ archive: "Video Games" announced her arrival as a fully formed pop star, but it's the No.1 album, Ivor Novello award and the GQ award that confirm the enigmatic-pneumatic bombshell is here to stay

In an expansive, gilded suite in the famous Hôtel de Paris, Monte-Carlo, Lana Del Rey, dressed in a simple grey hoodie, skinny dark-blue jeans and a crisp white T-shirt, sits down on the floor next to a perfectly vacant couch, lights a cigarette as slim as a Mikado stick and explains how pretty she thinks this part of the world is. "It's just the most beautiful place," she enthuses, breathlessly. "I knew it from the moment I saw it." Funny, I say, as Monaco's reputation for being a tax haven for the world's filthy rich brings with it a certain, well, contention. "Yes," smiles Del Rey, sharply. "But some people don't make any money."

I'm not quite sure what to make of this comment. Does she mean those of us who don't make enough cash to become tax refugees in this "exclusif" sunny state should either put up or shut up - or something else? For a split second, I'm thrown. I'm told Del Rey is prone to doing this - cutting unashamedly to the quick, speaking her mind no matter the consequences, not biting her tongue, laying it on the line. Some, like this writer, find it refreshing, others a little too confrontational. This isn't her intention at all; she's as sweet as a peach deep down.

Reserved, even. If not a little weird. I don't mean "kooky" weird.

Kooky is the wrong word as that makes her sound like the sort of girl who collects Hello Kitty lunchboxes, wears American Apparel body stockings and draws pictures of unicorns all day long - or someone like Lena Dunham from HBO's Girls. No, Del Rey is weird weird. Odd. Eccentric. Remarkable. A proper pop star. Not like you or me.

She's also exceptionally beautiful: the cascading, auburn hair, those blown-out lips, the thick kohl-dipped lashes. Del Rey is sexy but with a dreamy apartness, like an old-fashioned movie star whose name you can't quite remember from a film whose title you can't quite place. Forget the Day-Glo cartoonish eroticism of Nicki Minaj, the geisha-cyber-punkiness of Lady Gaga and Rihanna's rude-girl swaggering - Del Rey is a very different sort of modern pop star. Her sex appeal is more refined. Grainier. Vintage-looking. Cloaked in a veneer of prissiness. She's beauty, Instagrammed. Part of Del Rey's charm is how such a projected innocence jars against lyrics that drip with a desire to be corrupted: "I heard you like the bad girls/Honey, is that true?" she sings. For a man, that sort of tease is magnetic.

As Del Rey puffs away cross-legged on the expensive hotel carpet, speaking her mind, she seems more content than maybe she has been for some time. It's little wonder she's feeling buoyant considering the news: last night in London she won an Ivor Novello award for her single "Video Games" - an honour artists crave, as it's vindication of their songwriting ability, awarded by their peers - and now she's been crowned GQ's Woman Of The Year. She's genuinely delighted: "Thank you. Just to have someone acknowledge the material I write is incredibly touching. It's an affirmation of sorts. I just didn't think that this was going to happen. Not any of it."

Fifteen months ago, the world fell in love with Lana Del Rey, or more accurately, the world fell in love with "Video Games"; a record that is about the minutiae of daily life resonating to mean something far greater, far darker. Throughout the song, Del Rey sings with a sort of resigned, melancholic subservience - "I'm in his favourite sundress/Watching me get undressed/ Take that body downtown" - her sophisticated lyrical ennui wafting in a sombre key against the sound of doomsodden harps and soaring strings. Although Del Rey insists it's about being in love and she's singing about being in the throes of a loving relationship, that's not how it comes across. Not at all. The whole record sounds elegiac - sort of a mourning song for a certain type of perceived American dream; the perfect fit for Del Rey's aesthetic.

Del Rey herself made it on her MacBook; composed of clips she found on the internet - vintage-looking Super 8 footage of skaters, pink roses bursting open proactively, Betty Boo cartoons, dappled sunlight over an LA canyon, the Hollywood sign, TMZ video footage of Paz de la Huerta stumbling away from the Chateau Marmont after the Golden Globes, visibly worse for wear. Occasionally Del Rey herself pops up, out of focus with beehive hair and beestung lips looking like a hipster Jackie O. Or an Abercrombie & Fitch model. If you watch the video with the sound off, as I've done, you'd think it a song about the trappings and fragility of fame, a yearning for a more golden, more dignified age of celebrity - knowing Del Rey (someone more aware of her image than perhaps any other pop star working today) such a tone is certainly no accident. "It took me two hours to write," she explains of the track, to be found on her album Born To Die, released in January this year. "It was in the middle of a long writing process where I had moved to London. I was in the Sony Writing Room" - a creative sanctuary provided by the label that acts as a sort of boot camp for wannabe hit makers - "and Justin would write the chords and I would write the words and the melody. We'd written five songs and we took a rest. Then I started to write things that I especially loved, that were just perfectly tailored to me - 'Video Games' was one of them. No one thought much of it at the time; it was just pretty simple with one piano line. But I liked it right away. I knew. I have an instinct about these things. With songs or with people..."

Throughout last summer, as the song spread online and across the globe, so did the critical acclaim for the New Queen Of Sadcore. But with the praise for the song came a backlash against the singer - all before Del Rey had even officially released a single note of music. People were suspicious. It was as if the song was too accomplished, Del Rey too beautiful. Who was this enigmatic artist, the self-coined "gangster Nancy Sinatra"? Some were saying that Lana Del Rey, far from being a fresh talent, was in fact a reincarnation of a folk singer (with a previously released, unsuccessful album) called Lizzy Grant - cosmetically enhanced (those lips were just too pillowy by far, apparently), label-made, ambitious and, rather than a new discovery, she was a bona fide fraud who sang about living in a trailer when really her dad was a millionaire real-estate developer buttressing her career. The online attacks were vicious and unrelenting; the internet trolls feasting on all the digital hearsay. Her American audience was particularly savage. And it hurt. "People were just so mean to me," she admits.

The truth of Del Rey's story is this: born Elizabeth Grant in New York City 26 years ago, she was raised upstate in Lake Placid. Aged 14, she was shipped by her parents to Kent School, a strict boarding house in Connecticut. She left, or, rumour has it, she was kicked out for bad behaviour, moving back to NYC aged 18. She enrolled in Fordham University to study metaphysics, all the while playing in clubs and bars, just her, her guitar and a microphone. Aged 20, two years later, Elizabeth Grant was offered her first recording contract - for a rumoured $10,000 - and moved to New Jersey to live in a trailer park.

This was 2006, and the record label was a small independent called 5 Points Records. Under the guidance of a producer called David Kahne - who apparently signed her on the strength of hearing only one demo - two years later in October 2008, Grant finally released her first three-track EP entitled Kill Kill. A full-length album would follow in January 2010 entitled Lana Del Ray AKA Lizzy Grant. Somewhat mysteriously - and this is the bit the sceptics really enjoy getting their teeth into - this first album was only available on iTunes for a matter of months, until it was suddenly withdrawn, with Grant buying back the rights from her label. The artist called Lizzy Grant then vanished. In June 2011, someone called Lana Del Rey - this time with an "e" - released her "debut" single "Video Games" and signed to Stranger Records. A few months later, she signed a joint deal with majors Interscope and Polydor.

You can see why all those nitpicking guardians of pop culture's "authenticity" got so upset - for some it looks like a classic case of a pretty, yet so-far-unsuccessful pop star (Lizzy Grant) being moulded and reshaped (physically via the surgeon's knife as well as sonically) into a more appealing, more exotic package (Lana Del Rey) by some Machiavellian record company suit and a bunch of blowhard lawyers with dollar signs for eyes. What happened couldn't be further from the truth. If anyone here is the Svengali behind the phenomenon of Lana Del Rey, it's Lana Del Rey. Or rather Elizabeth Grant. "People act like I've been trying to rewrite history," she explains when I ask her why she bought back the rights to her first album and took it off iTunes. "I made that first record in 2008, alongside the EP, but my label at the time waited three years to release it. They thought maybe someone bigger would buy it, but they didn't, so in the end they just released it themselves. By that time, three years had passed; I'd moved on. All I wanted to do was own the masters myself and the easiest way of doing that was to buy the rights back. That album is still online for anyone to hear; it's not this terrible lost album I hate and never want to claim ownership of. I'm actually pretty proud of that earlier stuff."

So why, and how, between 2006 and 2011, did Lizzy Grant become Lana Del Rey? Rapper Princess Superstar, who became friends with Del Rey in New York as she was going through this metamorphosis, helping the young singer find a new vision and a new voice, has this to say: "I've never understood this controversy about whether [Del Rey] is real or fake. All artists have a persona. She's not put together by some company. These are her songs, her melodies, her singing - she's always had this Sixties aesthetic." Del Rey's one-time mentor is spot on. Since when has it been "inauthentic" to reinvent oneself if you're a pop star? Isn't that what the being

a pop star is all about? Isn't it this precise aspect of them that keeps us absorbed? Who wants David Robert Jones when you can have Ziggy Stardust? Or Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta instead of Lady Gaga? Or Lizzy Grant. "It was nine years ago." Some of the answers as to tracking the emergence and the evolution of Lana Del Rey can be found in knowing that when she was young, very young, somewhere between the ages of 13 and 18, Del Rey began drinking. Heavily. Even before she had her current persona, Lizzy Grant was seemingly trying to escape from something, or more precisely someone - herself. "It's been nine years since my last drink," she explains, a subject she's never gone on record about so candidly before. "That's really why I got sent to boarding school aged 14 - to get sober." Did it work? "I was a big drinker at the time. I would drink every day. I would drink alone. I thought the whole concept was so f***ing cool. A great deal of what I wrote on Born To Die is about these wilderness years. A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I'm writing about New York. And when I write about the thing that I've lost I feel like I'm writing about alcohol because that was the first love of my life. Sure, there have been people, but it's really alcohol."

I ask Del Rey how she got over her alcohol addiction: "My parents were worried, I was worried. I knew it was a problem when I liked it more than I liked doing anything else. I was like, I'm fed. I am totally fed. Like, at first it's fine and you think you have a dark side - it's exciting - and then you realise the dark side wins every time if you decide to indulge in it. It's also a completely different way of living when you know that, it's like being a different species of person. It was horrific. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me." Drugs too became part of her life: "It was everything in the end."

Heroin? "No. But other things just to feel different." In the end, Del Ray ended up leaving school and being sent to rehab. "I moved back to New York and worked at an outreach programme for drug and alcohol addicts in Brooklyn." Such work is something she still does to this day: "It's the only thing that's really important to me. My music is a luxury. Just like being here in Monaco is a luxury."

It was while attending rehab in Brooklyn, aged 18, that Del Rey's musical journey began in earnest. Although it was her uncle who first taught her to play guitar, she looked to other people, strangers, for another kind of inspiration.

She began exploring the city. Alone. Fearlessly. "It's interesting for me to be where people are not," she explains. "When I was young I felt really overwhelmed and confused by the desire not to end up in an office, doing something I didn't believe in." So she did what any curious 18-year-old recovering alcoholic schoolgirl would do - she started wandering down dark alleys looking for trouble. "I was a secret thrill-seeker. I was putting my feelers out all over the city, in different places with different people, trying to see what felt right."

Del Rey calls her hobby "stranger searching". She adds: "It's still my passion. I would just walk out of my front door in Brooklyn or Manhattan with an intention to meet somebody who has the same energy. You just put it out there. I would always run into somebody and see them and say, 'Oh excuse me, your money is hanging out of your pocket.'"

And what? "We'd ride motorbikes or go somewhere. It's amazing what happens when you put your interests out into the universe and make it known what you want - you just have to know what it is. For me, I didn't want anything except to feel new every day. I wanted to try different things. I felt alive. But you have to put limits on. You can't go too far with it."

This all sounds a little dangerous to GQ. Jumping on bikes with total strangers.

Picking up weird guys on the street just for kicks.

Did she have any bad experiences? "No. Never. I'm an independent operator. It's just f***ing different. I never wanted to lead a normal life." Did she keep in contact with any of the randoms she encountered? "Some of them."

I ask Del Rey whether she believes in soulmates: "I do. But I think there's more than one for everybody. I could meet one person, but like other people too. I've seen it happen before: people who have their true loves, with many great loves around them." She stops, suddenly, blushing. " GQ's Woman Of The Year is a polygamous thrill-seeker!"

Until recently Del Rey's one true love, other than alcohol, was America, in particular her home city of New York.

Part of the fallout from all the criticism she received at the beginning of this year - the greatest vitriol reserved for her performance on Saturday Night Live in which Del Rey's pitch was, admittedly, a little flat in places - is her despondency at how certain parts of her country attacked her so savagely. The mauling truly blind sided the singer, the wounds yet to heal: "It didn't affect my writing, but it affected my happiness. I became depressed. Because I love New York so much. I was born there; it was my city. I was going to die there." Even now, almost a year on, performing live is one of the hardest things for Del Rey - difficult to avoid when you're a pop star. When she saw the hologram of Tupac Shakur performing at Coachella festival this year, she said to her manager, "Right there is the future of my live tours." She was only half joking.

To compound her insecurities, not only were critics saying she hadn't written her own songs, Del Rey was sued for the video she put together for "Video Games", having failed to obtain any copyright permission. Does she feel betrayed by America? "No, just like the love of my life isn't with me any more. The Hollywood community has been so good to me and they didn't have to be, but not New York.

As a person who becomes really attached to places for their energy and their beauty, for me New York was a match. To lose it, it really felt like my life was over. It's a totally different life experience when you have to learn to love the things that don't love you back. It's the last great life experience. Not that many people have to live like this - live without their icons or their idols or their country. I know people won't be listening to my music next year, but I still will have lost those places I cared about so dearly."

Such was the criticism, and Del Rey's heartbreak, that, from the sounds of it, either this year or last year, she came close to pressing the self-destruct button once again: "Yes. It hasn't been activated in some time.

In the last two years I do feel more upset, which kind of triggers those feelings, making me feel as if not everything is in my control. The bigger things get, the bigger this whole thing gets, the easier it is for things like that to start happening again. When I feel like I'm being overwhelmed it's hard to remain a guiding force. That's one reason to keep things small, play small venues, that sort of thing, which is what I always wanted to do."

The trouble is, Lizzy Grant may have had a chance of keeping things small, but Lana Del Rey hasn't a hope. B orn To Die went to No.1 in 14 countries this year.

Keeping this thing small, keeping incognito while roaming the streets, trying not to let the critics get to her, learning to live with lost loves - none of it will be easy for Lana Del Rey. For someone who strives so hard to be free, containment, even amid Monaco's moneyed splendour, is perhaps harder than it appears. The turmoil for this fantastically original pop star - and the great appeal of Del Rey for her audience - is that all this friction bubbles to the surface, through her voice. In some ways, the singer couldn't be more like this beautiful, damned town: a gilded place with a dark heart; real yet fake; a paradise from the outside, a prison from within. It's a true spectacle. After all, what's more beguiling than a very bad girl, desperately trying to be good?
Originally published in the October 2012 issue of British GQ.

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Watch Lana Del Rey's GQ Woman Of The Year acceptance speech and see her naked British GQ cover

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Lana covers VOGUE UK 2012 presenting her opulent star image. Lana has also graced the covers of VOGUE Italy Australia and Turkey in addition to Rolling Stone, Billboard, GQ, Interview, Dazed, FASHION mag, Elle, Glamour, V Mag, Wonderland, Complex, Interview, The Hollywood Reporter, NME, L'Officiel, Madame, Grazia, TREND, Another Man, W Mag, Music week mag, Mojo, The New York Times from 2012-2023. Showing her presence as a Style icon and demonstrating her influence and acceptance in the Fashion community.

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Months before its release, Lana Del Rey's ninth studio album - titled, with typical lyricism, Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd - had already begun making headlines. In a deliciously petty move, the songwriter had erected precisely one billboard to promote the record, and it was in her ex-boyfriend's hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. "It's. Personal," she said by way of comment on her private Instagram account, where her followers currently number 3.5 million. And if Del Rey has experienced something of a renaissance lately - Billie Eilish has cited her as a key musical influence, while Taylor Swift collaborated with her on Midnights - Ocean Blvd proves she's still at the top of her game. Below, revisit her first interview with British Vogue in March 2012, shortly after the release of her reputation-making LP Born to Di e.

Our hotel-room rendezvous was billed as an interview; it wasn't until afterwards that I realised Lana Del Rey turned it into a seduction. She had given straight answers to almost none of my typed list of questions; at the time, I barely noticed and didn't care. Her voice was rich and slow as treacle, and she sat close to me on the sofa, holding my gaze with eyes hooded and sad beneath those showgirl lashes, weaving a web of half-told stories, making every evasion feel like a heartfelt intimacy. She's good, this girl, very good.

Lana Del Rey is a siren for the YouTube generation. Last May, when she was an unknown 24-year-old living in New York, singing in clubs in the East Village, she made a video montage on her laptop to accompany "Video Games", a bruised, melancholy love song she had recorded. The video feels like a homage to American teenage summer love - jumping into swimming pools, a stars-and- stripes flag in the breeze, the view of trees you get when you're lying on the grass - spliced with film of Lana herself, dolled-up and deadpan, singing into the camera. Within weeks, the video went viral; by the end of the summer, she was an internet sensation with a record deal. Before her album was finished, let alone released, she was selling out gigs and being analysed as a pop-cultural phenomenon in the broadsheets.

There is something very odd about Lana. It is as if a David Lynch character has walked into a music world mostly scripted by Simon Cowell. Her popularity flies in the face of the current accepted wisdom that showing the public how real and normal you are, Adele-style, is the key to success. Lana's oddness - a sense that there is something spooky or unsettling about her - is what gives her star quality, more than the gorgeous voice, or the beautiful face. The china-doll veneer of her look combined with the sad, sad look in her eye, and her lyrics, which are about heartbreak - not the peppy, let's-get-back-together-baby version which is the common currency of pop, but real heartbreak.

Lana answers the hotel-room door in Wrangler jeans, T-shirt and white Converse. She is wearing small pearl stud earrings and a silver chain around her neck. She is 25, but looks younger, and the effect of the outfit - combined with her girlish best-behaviour manners and a startling, honking laugh - is teenage-babysitter cute. Except, this being Lana Del Rey, the look is set slightly off- kilter by some extraordinarily vampish nail art and false lashes that look scaled for a Las Vegas nightclub stage. Oh, and the fact that rather than being paid a few dollars for an evening babysitting, she has just stepped off a flight from Beijing, where Dior flew her to sing at a party. (So busy is her schedule, they had to make a two-hour stopover in Heathrow, on her way home to New York, just for this interview.) She sips her soda through a straw, the better to preserve the richly glossed lips - which in the flesh are full but not as cartoonishly so as they appear in her videos, routinely sparking rumours of collagen (these she flatly denies). Her long hair, the colour of a fox's tail, is set in her trademark Veronica Lake waves; on her left hand she has a tattoo of an M, for her grandmother Madeleine.

She sings about love. Not about flirting or having crushes or first kisses, but the grand amour type of affair that, in art, always ends badly. She wrote the just-released Born to Die album "because even though I can't be with that person anymore, I still want to honour those memories. I felt like falling in love changed me, neurologically, and the record is about being faithful in my mind to the memory of a particular person." I ask if it's all about one specific past relationship, and she giggles and says, "Yeah, definitely." So I ask if she's still in contact with him, to which she replies, "Um, I'm in contact with his mother." This is such an odd answer that I have to ask, is he still around? She fiddles with her hair and chain, and says, "Um, he's somewhere else, but he's, um, around, yes." So of course now I am dying to ask: is he dead? In prison? But she is staring at me wide-eyed, and looks quite panic-stricken, and I have no idea now whether this line of questioning is going to make her cry or whether she's playing me, but I don't have the heart to pursue it.

I'd bet that Lana has some stories to tell, if and when she chooses. She has described the album as "a tribute to living life on the wild side", but when I ask her about this, she says, "I'm sort of kidding, because I'm not that wild anymore." When I ask how wild she used to be, she winces and says, "Um, pretty wild." In what way? She winces again and laughs, and says, "Pretty much any way, I guess, but it was a long time ago." OK, so how long have you been... not wild? "Seven years. I used to drink a lot. Too much. I haven't had a drink for seven years now."

Autobiography is never far from the Lana Del Rey story. She was born Lizzy Grant in Lake Placid, a quiet, half-forgotten mountain town at the outer edge of New York state. Her father is a real-estate broker. "It is cold, sub-zero cold, for nine months of the year," she says. Not much happens in Lake Placid, by the sound of it, and Lana's family didn't have a television. At 14, she was sent to boarding school in Connecticut; as a teenager, she says her musical tastes revolved around "Eminem and current rap, and that was about it. I was singing in school, and writing things here and there, but music wasn't a big part of my life."

Her interest in music seems to have begun with falling in love with the characters that musicians can make for themselves, rather than in the chords-and-keys sense. One of Lana's defining memories is seeing, aged 11, the Anton Corbijn-directed music video for Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box". "I was just floored by it, by seeing Kurt Cobain as a person. I had never seen anything like it." Aged 18, she moved to New York to study metaphysics at Fordham University and "that was when my musical experience began. I kind of found people for myself." She made rent doing odd jobs on Craigslist: "Helping somebody move across town for a day, or appearing in NYU student B-movies for $100 cash, that sort of thing."

Lana "loved Bob Dylan as a person before I heard his music. I liked that he was political, and I liked that he was kind of a bum. It made me feel better about the way I was living at the time, really day to day... the way you do live when you are young and in New York." She was also influenced by Elvis because "he made me realise how beautiful the human voice could be. Him and Frank Sinatra." The torch-song heritage is strong on Born to Die, but the bored teenage years listening to Eminem and Biggie Smalls weren't wasted either. "That music taught me that it was OK to tell your story in a song," she says.

There was a false start to Lana's career five years ago. She signed a record deal, earning $10,000 dollars, which she spent on renting a trailer outside New York City for a year and a half. An album was released, then shelved, and the momentum faded away. Lana "shifted focus onto other things" - primarily working in community service. "Homeless outreach, drug and alcohol rehabilitation - that's been my life for the past five years. My friends are a core group of girls I met through work, and they never really knew I was a singer, because nothing was ever happening. I consider myself coming out of retirement as a singer at this point. Until last year I hadn't been on stage for three years." Lost love, wild days, and an almost evangelical service ethic: there are a whole lot of tantalising elements to the Lana Del Rey back story, but she doesn't ever give away quite enough to let you figure out how they fit together.

No one describes Lana's look better than Lana herself. "Gangster Nancy Sinatra", "Lolita got lost in the hood", and "I live in Monaco but don't fuck with me" are just a few of the lines she has used. Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, who signed Lana to his Polydor label and describes her as "scarily smart", says, "It is rare to find an artist who can step out of themselves and visualise how they will be perceived." The fashion world has fallen for Lana in a major way. After "Video Games" was the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack to Christopher Kane's spring/summer 2012 London show, other labels followed. Just before the Dior gig in Beijing, she sang a set as the star of a Mulberry party at the Chateau Marmont. She tells me that when she and her sister came up with the name Lana Del Rey eight years ago, she conceived it as "the name for an art project that I could build a sonic world around". But, in the next breath, she is adamant that the way she looks in the videos is just the way she naturally is, and that she doesn't have a style. "If I'm going on television, I guess I should wear something nice, but that's as far as it goes." Asked who she thinks has great style, she says she can't think of anyone. Pressed, she offers Grace Kelly. I get the impression that she is holding back on talking about her image because she knows that any soundbite she gives on how she looks will be the quote everyone remembers, and will be seized upon by the internet trolls who have it in for her.

Such is the breakneck speed of modern celebrity that Lana was the victim of an online backlash within weeks of having her first hit single, with detractors accusing her of being fake. The top line of internet gossip is whether she has had collagen in her lips, an obsession which seems to be her critics' way of articulating a sense that Lana's persona feels confected. Photos of her as a teenager looking pretty but less dazzlingly styled are posted as triumphant evidence that she is somehow inauthentic. It is puzzling, because no one goes online and tries to expose Lady Gaga as a fraud because she didn't wear Philip Treacy lobster hats to school.

The difference, I think, is that Lady Gaga isn't trying to be sexy. Lana's combination of a theatrical persona and a flesh-and-blood sex appeal frightens or threatens people in some way. Lana seems genuinely disquieted by the vitriol she has experienced. I get halfway through a question about her lips and her hands fly up and cover her mouth, which is such an unexpected reaction that I break off and ask something else instead. She says what bothers her most is the prevalence of the idea that she doesn't write her own music, and that she can't sing. Success has been a bittersweet experience so far.

Now - ironically for the newly crowned queen of heartbreak pop - Lana has a boyfriend. This much she will tell me, but no more. Who is he? "Just a guy." How long have you been seeing him? "Um, I don't know. I guess the last couple of months." Is he involved in music? "Um, I guess, no." So when she writes another record, will it be a happier one? "Oh, I don't think I'll write another record. What would I say? I feel like everything I wanted to say, I've said already."
Jess Cartner-Morley is associate editor (fashion) at The Guardian

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From The Archive: When Vogue Met Lana Del Rey In Her 'Born To Die' Era

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As Lana Del Rey prepares to release, 'Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd', revisit Lana Del Ray's first British Vogue cover.

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H&M collaborates with Lana on their very first collaboration as a brand. "The Vogue cover girl will star in its autumn campaign, as well as its Christmas adverts. "We were looking for a style icon and singer to model our autumn/winter 2012-13 collection and Lana Del Rey was the perfect choice," said H&M PR manager Chloe Bowers."

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Lana Del Rey will star as the label’s new face, it has been announced

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Lana becomes brand ambassador for Gucci and their new Gucci Guilty perfume and aftershave alongside Jared Leto.

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Lana attends The Met Gala in 2018 dressed by Gucci, accompanied by Gucci's creative director Alessandro Michele and Actor/ Singer Jared Leto.

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Lana attends the Met Gala for the first time in 2012 dressed by Altuzarra. Signalling her very new and sky rocketing rise to fame after her debut album.

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Lana doesn't just glamorise and romanticise her life in her music and music videos but shines a light on the underbelly of American culture and the struggles that people are faced with within American society.

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The trash on the Venice boardwalk sparkles like Wet n Wild lip gloss. This is what people forget about Los Angeles beaches: They're part of the city, inundated with the city's grit. Half-melted Icees in Styrofoam cups, one flip-flop, taco foil, condoms, a dead vape pen. Needles. But also: a Swarovski crystal earring. A pinwheel unmoored from its handle. A streak of gooey glitter. Coins of many lands. A few miles up the Pacific Coast Highway, away from the skateboarders and homeless people, WASPs sun themselves at country clubs as employees sweep the sands. But their brooms can't clear the ocean.

"I'm mostly at the beach!" Lana Del Rey exclaimed in a recent interview, explaining her cultivated disconnect from the Hollywood pop machine. Reading this, I wonder where she goes and what she does after she unfolds her towel and sets up her umbrella. Does she drive past Malibu to El Matador, where the water is the cleanest but the one Porta-Potty often overflows? Down to Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, near the aquarium where schoolkids swarm? In her songs she dwells on Venice and Long Beach, two places where the red signs the city uses to warn of excess sewage in the water show up the most. I think she goes to the beach but she spends her time looking at that filthy, shiny sand.

Lana Del Rey is up to her elbows in water in the video for "F*** It I Love You," one of the singles that built excitement for Norman F****** Rockwell! (referred to hereafter as NFR!), her fifth album and the one that has cemented her status as a serious artist among critics who may or may not have thought her previous work problematic, or at very least, incomplete. In several shots, she holds onto a surfboard. Her hair is in in Dutch braids, similar to the styles cholas wore in the 1990s. See, there's the slippage, the step away from an authentic or even consistent narrative: Few Latinas from East L.A. would have made it the 15 miles west to the beach 20 years ago, or even at the height of the surfing craze in the 1960s, when as a kid the writer Jack Lopez almost got beaten up by a tough guy for walking down Western Avenue in board shorts, clutching a copy of Surfer magazine. " Cholo meets surfer," he wrote in his memoir. "Not a good thing." But Lopez was insistent in violating the boundaries of the acceptable; that wrongness, he wrote years later, endangered him but also helped him get free.

Music videos juxtapose disconnected images to induce a kind of dream state in the viewer: to approximate the effect of music itself. There's a subtle tension within many popular songs, however, between the unsettling effect of juxtaposing disparate elements - say, English folk melodies and Delta blues (that's Led Zeppelin) or Caribbean inflections and Nordic electronic beats (many Rihanna singles) - and the comfort of a unified narrative, the songwriter's art. The rise of the singer-songwriter in the 1960s reinforced the value of narrative pull and shored up other hierarchies: rock over disco, sitting and listening over dancing, lyrics over sound. (Exhibit A: The Poetry of Rock.) Hip-hop, a revolution in fragments, challenged this order, yet it still exerts itself in most discussions of what makes great songs.

For most of her career, Lana Del Rey has not participated in this discourse. Instead, she has made slippage the basis of her approach. It took her time to master this practice, and she's gone to extremes: Over the course of five albums, she's often repeated herself, mixed signals and followed her impulses over the edge of good taste. Critics have doubted her motives. But she has earned a following among listeners who value unmonitored reveries.

On NFR! Del Rey is at her most instantly compelling, a pro asserting her future spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as her closest peer and rival Stefani Germanotta did with her turn in A Star is Born. Words like "classic" and "greatest" adhere to her now; she writes songs that use them unironically. The possibly fictional shade whose fluttery alto flickered and beckoned on YouTube nearly a decade ago is a woman now - "a modern day woman with a weak constitution," she intones on the album's billowing final track, "hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it." That's one of several moments in which Del Rey seems to open herself up; another is the melancholy "Mariners Apartment Complex," four and a half minutes of gospel-inflected transcendence in which her pastiche is so perfectly constructed that it becomes flesh, an utterly believable plea by a weary but steadfast soul to the lover whose tether she refuses to loose. It's a story about which most people can feel something.

Yet the sensitivity and compassion Del Rey expresses in these songs really resonates not in its straightforwardness, but because of all the pings it sets off in the listener's brain, each one hitting like a nearly-erased memory. In "Mariners," she deflects the Elton John comparison its piano part demands ("I ain't your candle in the wind"), only to build to a chorus that seemingly echoes the Oscar-winning theme from a classic 1970s disaster movie (Maureen McGovern's magisterial "The Morning After") and, in its warm but uncanny multi-tracked vocal hook, the synth-kissed love songs that brought Leonard Cohen back from obscurity in the 1980s. At least that's what one fan, namely me, hears. That's the gist of Lana Del Rey, and still her superpower as she floats toward more readable songcraft: Whether her music makes cultural connections that are obvious or obscure, they always feel deeply personal, individuated, like mementos.

In her early days, what she claimed - bouffanted femme-fatalism weirdly aligned with a tattered Fourth-of-July style patriotic nostalgia, Bettie Page reborn as an Instagram star - felt undeveloped and, because of that, cynical. Intimations that she'd had help in inventing herself clouded her status. But as she built her repertoire, Del Rey proved fully committed to the messy alignments of her art, and better able to articulate how they formed the stories by which she, or the characters she claimed as her own, lived. She would be a problem - a loyalist to outdated ideals like mad love and bad-boy machismo, a constant gardener of the weediest patches of the contemporary psyche. On NFR! she remains that artist, even as she asks herself if she might, with insight, better compartmentalize her impulses.

Lana Del Rey is all about wrong combinations: sunset dreams and dirty water, Mexican-American braids and a wetsuit, hip-hop flow and torch song feeling, conventional feminine submissiveness and post-feminist self-possession. Cognitive dissonance is the essence of her art, the way she builds her dream logic. Satin slips, Freudian slips: Throughout her tenure as a pop star, Lana has pursued revelations about how desire disassembles and recombines elements of a woman's personality. "Heaven is a place on earth with you," she whispered in her first hit, 2011's " Video Games." She sang it just the way you do a line from a song that pops into your head unbidden, wondering if you're quoting your favorite current pop star or the one your mom loved in the '80s or something some guy said back in the '60s to a girl trying to be his perfect date. The sentiment is soaked in banality, but also in the perfume of all those other girls. "Tell me all the things you want to do," Lana continues. "I hear that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?" And so a dream of romantic fulfillment slipped into self-negation, the way it has since time immemorial in the scripts that young women learn from those songs and from movies, their moms, other girls and the boys who benefit. The tone of her voice as she uttered these words was forever after labeled "sad," but was really something different. My mom would have called it "needy"; today, more common descriptions are "disempowered," "self-sabotaging," "unwoke." "Women hated me," Del Rey told writer Alex Frank in 2017. "I know why. It's because there were things I was saying that either they just couldn't connect to or were maybe worried that, if they were in the same situation, it would put them in a vulnerable place."

But we know this. Over the course of her five albums, as she has learned to be a more specific writer and a more adventurous vocalist and to make room in her echo-saturated arrangements for her words to resonate, Del Rey has continued to stand firmly against the ideal of self-empowerment. Instead, she has explored what happens when women call themselves children; when they stumble in high heels; when they put the love of a man before all. Mostly, critics have perceived this as an anti-feminist stance. Lindsay Zoladz sympathetically recontextualized it in a cogent 2017 essay, seeing Del Rey's embodiment of the weak woman as an antidote to "empowerment as the default aspiration of the pop star" - the tendency of chart toppers from Beyoncé to Taylor Swift to configure their careers as one long therapeutic, vaguely political pep talk. Del Rey herself simply said she found feminism uninteresting. She's modified that stance somewhat in the aftermath of the #metoo movement, citing Trump's infamous "grab 'em" remark as a sign that sexuality has been weaponized beyond even her tolerance levels. Yet even on NFR!, an album some writers have extolled as a (circuitous) form of protest, Del Rey remains much more invested in describing how people - mostly women - fall apart, how they take risks or otherwise work against their own best interests in the pursuit of pleasure, intimacy and what she still guilelessly calls "love."

To many of its champions, NFR! is Del Rey's revenge against those who would misinterpret her, a fully realized conventional singer-songwriter album offering a critique of 21 st-century decadence rather than another chance to wallow in it, an " obituary for America" that still extends some hope that, with the proper perspective, its best qualities - its beauty, its small-d democratic impulses - can be redeemed. The album certainly boasts Del Rey's most artfully constructed narratives, extending the arc of apparent self-realization also evident in widely framed narratives that stood out on her previous album, Lust For Life. In songs like "Coachella - Woodstock In My Mind," in which she made a cosmic quilt of her experience watching her artistic soulmate Father John Misty perform for fourth-generation flower children at a festival built on the countercultural helium fumes of electronic dance music, Del Rey made a sonic and emotional argument for collapsing the boundaries that uphold authenticity as a cultural value. Referencing a Led Zeppelin lyric in an easy-listening arrangement, she shared her view of utopia: a place in which parents and children and their children's children dissolve into each other under the sway of art. Music's power to unite is an old fashioned idea, romantic, even mystical - and conservative, in that it argues for art as a conduit for personal transformation rather than an identity marker that fuels political or cultural debate. At first considered a nihilist, Lana Del Rey became a champion of the meaningful, even as she maintained her stance that meaning is best communicated through strange juxtapositions.

With NFR!, Del Rey further invests in meaningfulness. She seems to have become more interesting in standing alongside (or towering over) her peers; in league with producer and co-writer Jack Antonoff, she makes space for comparisons to Lorde and the aforementioned Gaga and even Taylor Swift. The album's dominant story line describes an affair with a fellow artist in which the power roles never solidify, a situation Del Rey depicts as unsustainable but clarifying. Addressing this bohemian deadbeat, she upends the gender roles she's so often fetishized, trading in her kitten heels for kicks that allow her to keep walking. She cusses at her "man child," demanding that he grow up; she describes herself as the more active breadwinner ("you write, I tour, we make it work"). At one point, in a sonic nod to Leonard Cohen, she simply announces, "I'm your man."

These are the most cleanly satisfying moments of the album, evoking what we expect from singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell or Tori Amos, both of whom are clear inspirations in Del Rey's pursuit of legible expressiveness. She and Antonoff don't try to imitate Mitchell's tricky musical fusions, but they do invoke the finely honed confidentiality of Amos' music, and similar moods cultivated by other women in the 1990s, when Mitchell served as a beacon lighting many different approaches to the singer-songwriter role. (Fiona Apple is another obvious source of inspiration.) These artists made spaces where women could share complicated thoughts and otherwise unspoken feelings, using tools traditionally associated with the feminine: piano, lyric poetry, a voice cultivated by singing hymns and lullabies. The most straightforward songs on NFR! have that morning-light quality: a woman sitting at a keyboard, singing what she needs to say.

But as winning as those moments are, they aren't what makes Lana Del Rey an interesting artist. The power of NFR! emanates from another source: her compulsion to collapse logic, to violate boundaries musically, through imagery and within her storytelling. This is not only about Del Rey's persona as a bad girl to whom bad things are done; her supposed confessions would be nothing more than reality-show fodder if not for the way she and her collaborators construct them. On their own, taken song by song, her lyrics - even in the full flower NFR! represents - often read as unremarkable and derivative. What hooks the listener is the way she enacts her dramas just as the mind replays formative memories, especially painful ones. She repeats herself. She veers into cliché. Her touchstones fall into each other across time. Many people have called NFR! a 1970s throwback, but its songs barely dip into that era's experimental sounds, instead touching down in the baroque-pop 1960s, the cyborg 1980s and the G-Funk 1990s without distinguishing between its reference points. And its lyrics, as always with Del Rey, similarly recombine references, not to make them fresh, exactly - no shout-out to Sylvia Plath can feel new, not since about 1981 - but to put them in our faces as old friends, old adversaries.

Take " Cinnamon Girl," one of the new album's deep cuts. The title's a mildly clever cop from a Neil Young classic, and the first line, "cinnamon in my teeth from your kiss," takes you somewhere. But then? There's a line about different colored pills, alluding to her sweetheart's addiction, and one about her frustration becoming like fire. B-plus poetics. There's some moaning about how no one has "held me without hurting me," and half-formed thoughts about words she cannot speak. Compare this vague non-story to four lines randomly pulled from Mitchell's 1972 song about her then-lover James Taylor's heroin habit, " Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," written when she was five years younger than Del Rey is now: Concrete concentration camp / Bashing in veins for peace / Cold blue steel and sweet fire / Fall into Lady Release.

Mitchell's lyric reads as poetic and incisive. Next to it, Del Rey's feels uncooked. Musically, "Cold Blue Steel" also strikes the listener as much more sophisticated, with its subtle arrangement and a melody that sinuously moves from folk to jazz.

Yet let Del Rey's song sink in, and it offers its own revelations - sensual and emotional, like Mitchell's, but less clearly mediated. The simplicity and directness of "Cinnamon Girl" hits as its leaden rhythm seems to grow more elastic. A syn-drum keeps the narcotized time as a string section puddles around it. Del Rey moans her lyrics in a small voice, almost pleading but also self-soothing. Sometimes she makes a trilling leap that sounds like the squiggle of one of the vintage synths Antonoff employs - a sign of her indebtedness to West Coast hip-hop, whose smudged arrangements and stoned cadences she often assimilates. Sometimes all the song's effects fall away, only to push forward again; there doesn't seem to be much order to the dynamics. The whole effect is slippery, unattached to the process of telling a story. The song feels more like you're in a story, in someone's head at a particularly unsure moment. A great songwriter, as we tend to understand that role, would offer a more coherent view. But for Del Rey, the mash-up of affects and references is the point. It is emotion's actuality.

The principles that direct Del Rey's artistic practice are embedded within a particular cultural lineage - though perhaps it's more accurate to call it a tendency. We can think of this inheritance as one aspect of the American Dream, though not in the usual sense of that phrase. It's more like America's dream life, its psychic swamp, its nocturnal emissions. The 20th century saw the development of a scientific language designed to shed light on this realm, one that is unique to each person but also shared, culturally shaped and individually rearranged. Artists responded, differently every decade, forming a timeline that connects European Surrealism to American horror and noir, free-associative jazz improvisation to the transgressions of post-punk. Lana Del Rey took this lineage to heart as a teen named Lizzy Grant and created a character through which she could explore it. At first, she followed her impulses and landed on clichés: She was a bad, bad, girl, "born to die." But even then, there was power in her commitment. Over time she has developed the ability to step back from her compulsions, and though she still finds power in them - NFR!, like all of her albums, remains a repository of masochistic out-breaths and bad-girl flexes - she has become curious about how this language formed and why it speaks to her.

As virtually everyone who's commented on her work has noted, Del Rey accesses the twin realms of Surrealism and the psychoanalytic most often through their cinematic manifestations, particularly film noir and its latter-day revival, especially within the work ofDavid Lynch. To adopt a noir style is not original, but Del Rey has outdone her rivals in this arena by going deeper into its essence - that phenomenon of slippage that also defines her music. Noir is Surrealism unleashed in the city, amidst its noise and grime and electric-lamp shadows. Like that art movement, it privileges psychic interiority over other aspects of experience. In a film like Edward G. Ulmer's 1945 noir Detour, in which a man kills a woman because she is blackmailing him, but also because he can no longer stand to hear the sound of her voice, the crisis leading up to the murder is depicted as a visceral assault on his senses, the pressure of his situation magnifying everything and eventually leading to disaster. That's just one example. The most powerful scenes in Lynch's films often build to a similar level of disorientation, with characters morphing into monsters for a moment, or being absorbed into rips in the time-space continuum. These baffling scenes affect the viewer because they express the ways stress and a trauma can reconstitute a person's internal life.

It's easy to read the Del Rey's map of the noir landscape, but just as enlightening to consider how her musical precedents set the stage for the work she's doing. West Coast rappers and producers have tread similar ground for decades: A playlist of songs that lay deeply embedded within the Lana Del Rey aesthetic would include Cypress Hill's " How I Could Just Kill A Man," with its insights into the mood of murder, and Warren G's " Regulate," a drifter's tale as redolent of menace and magic as any of Lynch's scenes. Those sources linger like friendly ghosts on NFR!, as do Kim Gordon's explorations of the abject in Sonic Youth - the tenderness she brought to Karen Carpenter's story in " Tunic" prefigured Del Rey's faded warmth in " How To Disappear." If this album signals the peak of Del Rey's singer-songwriter period, it's worth remembering that her first debts were to hip-hop and post-punk, and noticing how crucial those sources remain even as she nods more noticeably toward Laurel Canyon.

"Beloved imagination," Andre Breton wrote in the manifesto that, in 1924, announced Surrealism's intent, "what I like most in you is your unsparing quality." We live in a time when the interpretation of dreams has given way to psychopharmaceutical rebalancing, and when the neatening effects of self-actualization are generally considered more rewarding than the dwelling on the psyche's dark expanse. Recently, though, in the music of young artists like Billie Eilish and Logic, in the podcast-driven true crime craze and the work of women auteurs like Joanna Hogg and writers like Elena Ferrante, that expanse has again come into view. Lana Del Rey began her inquiries there. Sheis a creature born of trauma, possibly literally, if you take Lizzy Grant's teenage experiences with addiction into account; but certainly aesthetically. At its best, her music absorbs and disorients. It calls for interpretation, but in the most personal sense of the word - it wants to be crazily loved or angrily hated. It wants to trigger you.

NFR! still allows for that seductive uneasiness. It surfaces in the long outro to " Venice Bitch," a psychotropic soak that buries the chorus of the bubblegum drug trip "Crimson and Clover" in reverb, guitar noodling and Del Rey's voice murmuring a line that smudges the line between tenderness and obsession: If you weren't mine, I'd be jealous of your love. Even as she learns the comforts of coherence and closure, Del Rey still knows there's something to learn from the weird and the wrong.

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Lana Del Rey Lives In America's Messy Subconscious

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Over a decade, the Los Angeles-based singer has built a career - one that peaks on her new album - and a musical identity on the idea that greatness doesn't have to be emotionally tidy.

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Lyrics to Heroin by Lana Del Rey

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Serving as the fourteenth song on her fifth studio album Lust for Life, "Heroin" is Lana's favorite track on the record and also the longest one on the LP. It is a dark and dreamy pop ballad set in Topanga, California that finds Del Rey singing about the decay caused both by literal heroin and using dope as a metaphor for fame.

Lana namechecks band Mötley Crüe which had a member who struggled with heroin addiction and Charles Manson probably alluding to the Manson Family and their murders, following her tendency to explore the dark corners of American pop culture history.

Also there's been some speculation the song could be at least partly written about Elizabeth's ex-boyfriend Rob Dubuss, and there are several reasons for that:

1. Lana mentioned the song means a lot to her and is very personal. The lyrics suggest she is recalling some moments of her life that "make it hard to dream". Also Del Rey adresses somebody with "you" several times in the track which means it has to do something with one particular person.

2. Rob actually died in the end of 2011, according to Lana's and other people tweets. His death was because of a heroin overdose.

This fact is clearly referenced in the lines "How it [heroin] gave you everything and took your life away" and "Bad beginnin' to my new year".

Elizabeth has recently brought up the topic of Rob, especially during the LA to the Moon Tour. She revealed her other song "Yayo" is about him and confirmed he was her ex.

So probably it is true Lana always sings about the same person, not only in but her whole discography.

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Heroin Lyrics: Topanga is hot tonight, the city by the bay / Has movie stars and liquor stores and soft decay / The rumblin' from distant shores sends me to sleep / But the facts of life can

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Lana's debut album released 2012 which sky rocketed her to fame and also brought about a lot of hate and judgement as she was accused of romanticising domestic abuse, substance abuse and paedophillia in songs like, "Lolita".

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Lana's second album released 2014. This album carried much controversy as she was accused of glamourising domestic abuse and being anti-feminist.

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Lana's third album released 2015 and her most overlooked which touches upon themes of tortured romance, resentment, lust, escapism, and violence.

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Lana's fourth album released 2017 with features including: The Weeknd, ASAP Rocky, Stevie Nicks, Sean Lennon, and Playboi Carti. Her first album with features. Showing that she is gaining more recognition for her work.

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Lana's fifth album released 2019. This album is what starts getting Lana more attention by musical critics who start to praise her work.

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Lana's sixth album released 2021. This album is the beginning of Lana's new era and new sound as people have described this as the beginning of her "mother era". Contrasting to this, this album cover received hate and criticism for being non inclusive and showing only white women.

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Lana's seventh album released 2021 starts to show a more vulnerable and open side to the previous controversial sad girl/ glamour romanticism shown in her songs.

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Lana's eighth and most recent album released 2023. Lana takes us on a journey through her past and shares her hopes and dreams for the future in songs like, "fingertips" "sweet" and "peppers". And including features from Jon Batiste, SYML, RIOPY, Father John Misty, Bleachers, and Tommy Genesis.

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Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd

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Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd

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Due to Lana's popularity amongst young women, she has released one of her previously unreleased songs in 2023 as it gained major popularity as of recent years.

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The TV show Euphoria asked Lana to do a song for their series in 2022. This aligns with Lana's image as the show is concerning young people who are swept up in taking drugs and in a bad lifestyle which shows the "real" America which is struggling with a drug epidemic.

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Watercolor Eyes (From “Euphoria” An HBO Original Series)

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Watercolor Eyes (From “Euphoria” An HBO Original Series)

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Lana releases single Season of the Witch in 2019. This is very on brand for Lana as Usmar (2014) suggests Lana's star image shows Gothic themes.

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Season Of The Witch (From The Motion Picture "Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark")

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Season Of The Witch (From The Motion Picture "Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark")

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In 2014 Lana did a song for Maleficent the movie. Similarly to Season of the Witch, this carries Gothic themes portrayed by Lana's music and music videos.

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Once Upon a Dream (from "Maleficent") [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]

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Once Upon a Dream (from "Maleficent") [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]

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in 2013 Lana was approached to do a song for The Great Gatsby movie. This aligns with her star image as she projects wealth, elegance and stays true to her romanticisation of America, especially as this film is about the ultra rich in the 1920's.

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Lana faced the most backlash over this picture used for the release of Blue Jeans as it was a single. She was accused of glamorising domestic abuse.

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Lana helping boost her Father's musical career by featuring on a song in his album in 2023. Suggesting a new calmer more loving Lana as she has previously talked about her father in her songs as being absent and abusive, now showing they have patched up their relationship.

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Lana talking about the backlash she has faced over the years talking about abuse which people accuse her of romanticising.

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'Thanks for the Karen comments'

Singer Lana Del Rey has posed a "question for the culture," asking why artists such as Doja Cat, Ariana Grande, Beyonce and more have been able to sing about whatever they want - while she has been "crucified" or accused of "glamorizing abuse."

However, she has since clarified her remarks in the comments section, writing, "Bro. This is sad to make it about a WOC issue when I'm talking about my favorite singers. I could've literally said anyone but I picked my favorite f-ing people. She continued on to say, "It's exactly the point of my post - there are certain women that culture doesn't want to have a voice it may not have to do with race I don't know what it has to do with."

For those seeking help for themselves or others regarding domestic abuse, support for women and children can be found at Refuge online here or by ringing their 24/7 national domestic abuse helpline at 0808 2000 247. Support for men can be found at Respect's Men's Advice Line here and their 24/7 national domestic abuse helpline can be rung at 0808 8010327.

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Lana Del Rey says she's been 'crucified' for singing about abuse

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Lana's Twitter feud with Azealia Banks in 2020 started over Kanye West's post on Instagram as to why he supports Trump. Banks called Lana out for being a hypocrite, and accused her of using West in her "vapid attempts to seem politically aware." An angry exchange of tweets

lead to Lana tweeting "U know the addy. Pull up anytime. Say it to my face. But if I were you - I wouldn't." Continuing the stars outrageous and fiery image.

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Drama: Lana Dey Rey and Azealia Banks are feuding on Twitter

Alexandre Schneider/Getty

Celebrity feuds are nothing if not entertaining, and the latest beef between singers Azealia Banks and Lana Del Rey is no different.

What did Lana Del Rey say about Donald Trump?

Feud: Lana Del Rey is not taking any prisoners

Why are Lana Del Rey and Azealia Banks fighting?

Queen troll: Azealia Banks loves a Twitter feud

Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella

Who else has Azealia Banks feuded with?

In 2017, Banks targeted Rihanna, criticising her tweets slamming President Trump over his executive order to ban citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.

Back in 2013, Banks also came for Lily Allen when she called the singer's now ex-husband, Sam Cooper, ugly and insulted her children.

Most Read

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Lana Del Rey v Azealia Banks: Why are the singers feuding?

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Celebrity feuds are nothing if not entertaining, and the latest beef between singers Azealia Banks and Lana Del Rey is no different.

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In 2020 Lana called Kanye West out in the comments of his Instagram post talking about how Trump is a misogynist and it is "a loss for the culture" that Kanye is supporting someone who promotes such hate. Portraying a new era for Lana, a new more considerate and caring star.

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Lana performed at Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's Wedding in 2014 as she was his favourite artist at the time, this influenced people to start taking more notice of Lana as Kanye was very influential already in the music scene.

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2022 Pusha T posts a picture of Lana from the Lust for Life era (2017) with cocaine over her face. He describes its use, "I think Lana Del Rey speaks to the same subject matter but just on different ends of it, you can hear remnants of drug indulgence and addiction". Hinting at the fact that Lana is talking about the same themes that Rappers talk about; drugs, money and women, in the same capacity just using different music backing and way of singing/ rapping about these topics.

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"I think Lana Del Rey speaks to the same subject matter but just on different ends of it," rapper says. "You can hear remnants of drug indulgence and addiction"

Amid the usual grid of promotional clips and photos of his children, one picture on Pusha T's Instagram page sparked an unusual amount of online chatter early this year. In January, he accompanied a video of himself rhyming along to his new single "Diet Coke" with a photo of Lana Del Rey's face from 2017's Lust for Life, obscured by a white powder. The post kickstarted the campaign for his upcoming album, with the cryptic image and song preview leaving Lana fans fiending for a collaboration.

The rapper tells Rolling Stone he posted the shot because he identifies with the themes of the "High by the Beach" and "Florida Kilos" singer. "Musically, I think Lana Del Rey speaks to the same subject matter, but just on different ends of it," he says. "You can hear remnants of drug indulgence and addiction. So it's like, 'Man, why not?' I thought it made sense." (Del Rey did not reply to a request for comment.)

The two haven't collaborated yet, but according to the rapper, there's at least a tentative plan. "One of the heads of Interscope called right after the picture came out and asked me to get on a remix," he says, laughing. "I forgot which song, but I'm still waiting for them to send it over."

Earlier this week, the rapper was at the center of one of hip-hop's most unusual beefs. Two decades after he has claimed he wrote the McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" jingle (others have disputed this claim), Pusha reunited with Arby's to record "Spicy Fish Diss," a track taking aim at McDonald's Filet-O-Fish to hype up the company's own fish sandwich. "I'm the reason the whole world love it/Now I gotta crush it/Filet-O-Fish is shit/And you should be disgusted," he rhymed.

"I did it at a very young age at a very young time in my career where I wasn't asking for as much money and ownership. It's something that's always dug at me later in life like, 'Dammit, I was a part of this and I should have more stake,'" he added. "It was like half a million or a million dollars for me and my brother - but that's peanuts for as long as that's been running."

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Pusha T Finally Explains That Cryptic Lana Del Rey Photo

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Pusha T finally explains why he posted a photo of Lana Del Rey with a powdery substance over her face.

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Lana has been accused of appropriating native american culture as she is wearing a traditional Native American head piece in the music video.

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in 2013 Lana produced a short film; Tropico. In this piece of film Lana was accused of cultural appropriation of Mexican/ Latinx gang culture and her glorification of sex work/ stripping.

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Lana Del Rey - Tropico (Short Film) (Explicit)

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2021; Following the release of album Chemtrails over the Country Club Lana's music and image took a turn as she appears dressed in more modest clothes and sings about more intimate and melancholy topics but with a positive outlook for the future. Creating a more gentle, soft, caring image for Lana in contrast to her wild and ferocious past.

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Lana Del Rey’s new era: How the sultry songstress became an alternative icon

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She took the pop-obsessed world by storm as it subsequently criticised her image and authenticity, only to influence a new generation of musicians and become a record-breaking artist now popularly dubbed ‘The Queen of Alternative Music’.

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Lana in 2014 on her Facebook account admitting to be clean from Meth.

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2020; Lana was complaining that she was fed up with people criticizing her for writing about her life experiences. She also pointed out the unfair criticisms that she has sent women back a hundred years just because of the minor lyrical exploration of her rather submissive and passive roles in her relationships.

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Lana released self titled album Lana Del Rey in 2011 which was quickly taken off the market. 2011 Lana was still going by her birth name, Lizzy (Elizabeth) Grant before her name change.

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When Lana Del Rey burst onto the scene in 2011 after her track "Video Games" went viral on YouTube, both fans and critics were desperate to learn more about her. Even before her debut album was released in early 2012, the then-26-year-old singer's image seemed fully formed. With promotional images that featured her in in chains, heart-shaped sunglasses, bouffant updos, and flower crowns, she was dubbed the "gangster Nancy Sinatra" - a confounding yet beguiling image of contemporary hipsterism and the past.

No thanks to misogyny, that meant many were ready to disparage her vision and authenticity - questioning who might've helped to create her sound and aesthetic, whether she was an industry plant, and how she could've become the biggest thing in alternative-pop seemingly overnight. In reality, the singer-songwriter had been working on her craft for years.
Read more: Lana Del Rey stuns and asks big questions on Did you know there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
What we know now is that, before there was Lana Del Rey, the pop icon performed without a stage name as Lizzy Grant. Under her birth name (and briefly as before that), in her early twenties, she was a pop-rock singer-songwriter who evoked a surf-tinged Nancy Sinatra sound, or what she called "Hawaiian glam metal."

Now, a prolific artist under her stage name - just coming off the release of her ninth studio album Did you know there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd - her early days seem ages ago. Still, fans are still nostalgic for what they've dubbed as the "Lizzy Grant era.". You can find streams of her album Lana Del Ray A.K.A Lizzy Grant on YouTube with over 700K views; the #LizzyGrant hashtag on TikTok has over 1.2 billion views of old performances, songs, and fan-inspired videos. Fans clearly have an affinity for her early work like Lana Del Ray , which was pulled shortly after it was released in 2010 because her label couldn't actually fund it ( she bought back the rights to herself.) But beyond the love for early standouts like " ," the fascination with Lizzy Grant perhaps lies in how much it lays the groundwork for what Del Rey ultimately became.

Her early music may prove just how many strides she's made as a songwriter, but the nostalgia that's become so ingrained in her artistry and her visual perceptiveness is cemented in the Lizzy Grant era. Singing in New York clubs by night and taking the train to Coney Island - a part of the city that forever feels entrenched in oddity and 20th century sleaze - by day, her music at the time is a throughline of themes that carry through her discography. Del Rey's obsession with setting and the open road is there, she explores toxic relationships, power dynamics, and ingenuity, and at times puts on the cheeky lounge singer vocals that filtered into at times.

Her homemade music videos from this time are even a mood board for the big budget and productions that would follow. Videos for " ," " ," or pre- demo " Kinda Outta Luck " find her, with her hair bleached blonde, singing in front of a webcam or dancing in front of backdrop, interspersed with early Hollywood films like (a sacred LDR text) and The Barefoot Contessa , or random clips of vintage Americana footage (fireworks, jazz singers, cars with the top down, sprawling beaches in the summertime). In "Kill Kill," she even wraps herself in an American flag - holding dearly the beacon of the American dream that she's in love with and chasing after (even years before her iconic "Ride" video , in which she holds it while wearing a Pabst Blue Ribbon tee, dropped).

It's all there in Lizzy Grant, even when it seems ever so humble. That humility is arguably also what fans are still so drawn to. She wasn't the popstar with the longest charting albums on the 200, she was an up-and-comer, living in a trailer park in New Jersey, trying to make it. That said, it's also been documented that it was a tougher period for the singer, as she was coming of age out of a troubled youth and dealing with addiction. On the Chemtrails Over the Country Club track, "White Dress," though, she reflects with adoration on this time and wonders if she was better off before the fame. In many ways, its significance is not lost on her either.

Especially as lore and self-mythologizing has become increasingly intrinsic to LDR and her lyricism over the years, there's a charm in revisiting where it all began: a young woman romanticizing Brooklyn beaches and Neptune Avenue, doing her hair up like the icons she lives by, still unaware of her own status as an icon that's to come.

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Why so many Lana Del Rey fans are still fascinated by her Lizzy Grant era

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Lana Del Rey used to release music as Lizzy Grant, with albums like Lana Del Ray A.K.A. Lizzy Grant. Here's why fans are fascinated by her early Lizzy Grant era music, style, and visuals still today.

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Lana on why she changed her stage name: 

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Lana on why she changed her stage name: 

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"I wanted a name I could shape the music towards. I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba, Lana Del Rey reminded us of the glamour of the seaside.”

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"Dealer" "was originally intended to be featured on the scrapped collaborative album between Del Rey and The Last Shadow Puppets, It features uncredited vocals from Miles Kane." Originally recorded when she was in the band The last shadow puppets with Miles Kane pre Lana Del Rey debut, and after years later decided to release it. showing past works of Lana are still brought to the forefront of her musical career showing she hasnt changed that much as an artist and shows the different eras she has brought us through sonically.

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Producer(s)

Lana Del Rey
Loren Humphrey
Zach Dawes

From

" Dealer" is a song by Lana Del Rey from her eighth studio album and seventh major-label studio album Blue Banisters. It was originally intended to be featured on the scrapped collaborative album between Del Rey and The Last Shadow Puppets, as well as her seventh studio album and sixth major-label studio album, Chemtrails Over the Country Club. It features uncredited vocals from Miles Kane, as well as writing credits from Kane, Loren Humphrey, Tyler Parkford and Zach Dawes.

The title was revealed in Interview magazine. About the track, Del Rey commented:

"I think I need to add that song "Dealer", where I'm just screaming my head off. People don't know what it sounds like when I yell, and I do yell."

On October 2, 2020, during a book signing event for the poetry book Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, Del Rey revealed that the track is the most different song on the album, tentatively being track 8. She also confirmed that the song was done with Zach Dawes.

The song's fate was unknown after it was not found on Shazam alongside the rest of the Chemtrails Over the Country Club tracklist on December 18, 2020. On January 10, 2021, Del Rey uploaded the tracklist for the album, of which "Dealer" was not included. It was later confirmed to appear on Blue Banisters.

The song features vocals from Miles Kane, frontman of The Last Shadow Puppets. The song was originally meant for their scrapped collaborative album, alongside Blue Banisters song " Thunder" and Norman Fucking Rockwell!'s " California".

Kane did an interview in January 2022 where he confirmed this song and " Loaded" came from the same recording session.

On the week of November 6, 2021, "Dealer" debuted and peaked at #17 on Billboard's Hot Alternative Songs chart.

The song also entered selected Spotify Charts. On October 25, 2021, it debuted and peaked at #168 on the Spotify Global Top 200 chart, at #74 on the US version of the chart, and at #141 on the UK version of the chart.

Partially due to the song's popularity on TikTok, on November 15, 2021, Dealer debuted and peaked at #31 on the US Spotify Viral 50 chart, and at #49 on the Brazil Spotify Viral 50 chart.

Personnel

Lana Del Rey - songwriting, production, vocals

Loren Humphrey - songwriting, production, engineering, drums

Zach Dawes - songwriting, production, keyboards, bass

Miles Kane - songwriting, vocals

Tyler Parkford - songwriting, keyboards

Jason Wormer - mixing

Adam Ayan - mastering

Weekly charts

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"Dealer" is a song by Lana Del Rey from her eighth studio album and seventh major-label studio album Blue Banisters. It was originally intended to be featured on the scrapped collaborative album between Del Rey and The Last Shadow Puppets, as well as her seventh studio album and sixth major-label studio album, Chemtrails Over the Country Club.

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in 2020 Lana released Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, a poetry book. Which is very on brand for Lana as all of her songs are poems in their own sense, touching upon real things that have happened to her or stories and issues she wants to show us about. Therefore furthering her star image as a soft, kind, thoughtful and emotional person who a lot of people can take comfort in.

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All the things we learnt from Lana Del Rey’s poetry book

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Lana Del Rey has just released Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass

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Lana wearing a mesh mask for a book reading of her new poetry book, furthering the idea that she holds 'traditional American' views aka, Republican views about Covid, furthering her image as an all American star.

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Lana Del Rey criticised for wearing mesh mask to meet fans

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"Please wear a real mask," plead the star's fans, after she attends a meet-and-greet in Los Angeles.

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"Text book" by Lana includes the lyrics, "There we were, screamin', "Black Lives Matter" In a crowd, by the Old Man River And I saw you saw who I am" This song was released a year after Lana's online feuds with Kanye West and Azealia Banks as she had been accused of being racist by twitter and instagram users, and said she had to set the record straight and say she is in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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“By interpreting Del Rey’s work as a both a component of, and a contributor to, the Pop Gothic advance, themes of social climate, consumer culture, gender identity, sexuality and the male gaze can be interrogated.”

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Born To Die: Lana Del Rey, Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess? | M/C Journal

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Closer examination of contemporary art forms including music videos in addition to the Gothic’s literature legacy is essential, “as it is virtually impossible to ignore the relationship the Gothic holds to popular culture” (Piatti-Farnell ii). This article critically examines how Gothic themes and m…

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"The music videos of Lana Del Rey effectively articulate ways in which precarious mediation is used in contemporary popular culture. In many of her music videos, like Summertime Sadness (2012) and Summer Wine (2013), the precarious mediation is given a nostalgic inflection, where an ambiguous yearning for the past is imbricated with cunning attempts to perfect imperfection."

Fetveit, Arild: Death, beauty, and iconoclastic nostalgia: Precarious aesthetics and Lana Del Rey. In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 4 (2015), Nr. 2, S. 187-207

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"Lana lets us negotiate American identity with less cognitive dissonance by serving patriotic cliché as kitsch. ... Affectless without irony, full of pop-symbolism that refuses to signify, perhaps an American culture drained of all moral qualities or ethical commitments is worth holding onto."

Siddiqi, A.A. ‘Ms. America’, The New Inquiry, Special Issue on Lana Del Rey, 2014: 2-5.
Sobchack, V. Carnal thoughts: Embodiment and moving image culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

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"Lana Del Rey’s work prompts scrutiny because of the incongruence between her life and her persona and the varieties of contrasting imagery and content in her work. A mirror to the listener’s own under-standing of religion, America, love, and beauty, the incongruence is vulgar, disturbing, and grotesque. Indeed, while scholars and critics support the argument in this essay, as it weaves through interviews, lyrics, music videos, reviews, and scholarship, readers ought"

Paul A Crutcher (2019) Lana Del Rey’s American Grotesque, Rock Music Studies, 6:3, 237-257, DOI: 10.1080/19401159.2019.1689722

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“Del Rey’s songs and videos speak of the American dream, of aestheticised beauty, of being immaculately presented, well dressed and having hair “beauty queen style”, as in Summertime Sadness”

Usmar, P. (2014). Born To Die: Lana Del Rey, Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess?. M/C Journal, 17(4). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.856

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Lana at age 14 got sent to boarding school in Kent, Connecticut as she was struggling with alcohol abuse.

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Lana Del Rey has revealed she suffered from an alcohol addiction when she was younger, and was sent to boarding school by her parents to get sober.

The 'Video Games' singer made the stark revelation in an interview with GQ, in the issue the singer came under-fire for earlier this week for appearing naked on its front cover.

While dispelling rumours of her past put to her by the interviewer, Del Rey revealed that her parents sent her to Kent school, a strict boarding school in Connecticut, at the age of 14 to help kick her drinking habit.

She said: "I was a big drinker at the time. I would drink every day. I would drink alone. I thought the whole concept was so fucking cool. A great deal of what I wrote on 'Born To Die' is about these wilderness years.

"My parents were worried, I was worried. I knew it was a problem when I liked it more than I liked doing anything else. I was like, 'I'm fucked. I am totally fucked'."

She continued:

Like, at first it's fine and you think you have a dark side - it's exciting - and then you realise the dark side wins every time if you decide to indulge in it. It's also a completely different way of living when you know that...a different species of person. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

Lana Del Rey drew heavy criticism last week for posing naked on the cover of GQ magazine. The singer was named as the magazine's woman of the year on Tuesday (September 4) and is pictured alongside Tinie Tempah, Robbie Williams, Mad Men actor John Slattery and James Corden on the magazine's cover. However, all the men are dressed in suits, while Del Rey isn't wearing anything at all.

The cover has attracted criticism from across Twitter and from online magazine Jezebel, which called the cover "internalized sexism". Del Rey has also been criticised for the photographs that accompany the feature, with one showing a man with his hand around her neck.

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Lana Del Rey: 'I was sent to boarding school age 14 to get sober'

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Singer opens up about her alcohol problem in controversial GQ naked cover issue

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Daniel Radcliffe comes out in support for Lana saying "If you read what people are saying about her online, it's all about her past and her family, and stuff that's nobody else's business." Showing us that with Lana you get more than face value as her identity is layered.

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(CBS) Daniel Radcliffe, who hosted "Saturday Night Live" over the weekend, is defending musical guest Lana Del Rey's performance on the show, which has been blasted by many critics.

The singer, whose album has yet to be released, was once praised on the blogosphere for her single "Video Games," but after her "SNL" performance critics called her live show off-key and just plain awkward.

"It was unfortunate that people seemed to turn on her so quickly," Radcliffe said at the BAFTA awards nominations, reports Reuters.

"I also think people are making it about things other than the performance," the "Harry Potter" actor said. "If you read what people are saying about her online, it's all about her past and her family, and stuff that's nobody else's business."

Before her appearance on "SNL" most of the singer's critics had problems with her past, citing her name change (she was born Elizabeth Grant), her millionaire father, and her first album titled "Lana Del Ray" released in Jan. 2010, which has since been deleted from iTunes so she could start fresh with her new album, "Born to Die."

After her performance on "SNL," even celebrities chimed in the discussion.

"Just watched SNL. Not only was @LanaDelRey vocally WAY off, but watching her utter lack of stage presence was cringe-worthy. #DontBuyTheHype," tweeted Perez Hilton.

"Who....is....this wack-a-doodle chick performing on #SNL..? Whaaaaa?" tweeted actress Eliza Dushku.

Brian Williams even slammed Del Rey's performance, calling it "one of the worst outings in SNL history." The NBC Nightly News anchor wrote that in an email to Gawker chief Nick Denton, which was intended to be a private message, according to Reuters.

"Wow watching this 'singer' on SNL is like watching a 12 year old in their bedroom when they're pretending to sing and perform. #signofourtimes," Juliette Lewis wrote on Twitter, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The tweet has since been deleted.

Lewis has since seemed to change her mind a little bit about Del Rey tweeting, "I woke up singing a @LanaDelRey song! Such great haunting melodies! Regardless of my own taste LIVE she's a #FreshandYummy songwriter. Period."

Del Rey's debut album will be released on Jan. 31

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Daniel Radcliffe defends Lana Del Rey's "SNL" performance

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The actor defends Del Rey against critiques of her weekend "SNL" performance

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Lana finds herself being accused of witchcraft and snaps back with “Bitch I know the Bible verse for verse better than you do" following her recent promotion of her Christian faith. Including a song on her most recent album featuring her pastor, Father John Misty. Suggesting a change in image as Lana touches and displays anti-christian values in her earlier work.

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Lana Del Rey defends her biblical knowledge after being accused of witchcraft by a Christian influencer

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Lana Del Rey is sparring with a Christian influencer who accused the singer of casting ‘demonic’ spells at shows: ‘I know the Bible ... better than you do.’

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Lana was approached to do a song for Coppola's "Priscilla" the biopic of Priscilla Presley which shows her struggles as Elvis' wife in the 1960's. This is reflective of Lana's star image as she is associated with the glamour and melancholy of one of the worlds most famous women of the 1960's. Coppola wanted Lana as she can perfectly reflect and project this image through her work.

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Lana Del Rey is not involved with the new film Priscilla, but director Sofia Coppola was open to the idea.

The Hollywood Reporter says the director first became aware of fans associating Elvis and Priscilla Presley with Del Rey - who has embodied Priscilla's '60s-style big hair and thick eyeliner throughout her career as an artist - while filming Priscilla.

"I'm learning that people really connect Lana Del Rey and Priscilla and I didn't realize that, but I got a lot of requests with, 'How is she gonna be a part of the movie?'" Coppola said in a recent interview with .

"We were hoping she could do a song for it, but it didn't work out with the timing," she explained.

Besides embodying Priscilla's style, Del Rey, known as a longtime fan of the Presleys, has referenced Elvis in her lyrics. She had a demo titled "Elvis" featured in Eugene Jarecki's Elvis documentary, The King, in 2017.

Coppola invited Del Rey to the Priscilla premiere, but the singer-songwriter couldn't attend. She says she is "excited for her to see it."

The film is based on Priscilla's memoir, Elvis and Me, and follows the romance between Elvis and Priscilla, told from her perspective. It doesn't feature Elvis' actual music because Authentic Brands Group, the majority owner of Elvis Presley Enterprises, didn't accept Coppola's offer for the rights.

"They don't like projects that they haven't originated, and they're protective of their brand," Coppola told earlier this year. "But that made us be more creative."

Although the late Lisa Marie Presley, who was the only child of Elvis and Priscilla, seemingly did not approve of the way her dad was depicted in Coppola's script, Priscilla was moved by the project.

At the movie's Venice Film Festival showing, Priscilla embraced Coppola and wiped away tears during a standing ovation. "We haven't talked specifically about the music, but she said, 'You did your homework,' " Coppola told . "She felt it was authentic, which was so important to me."

Priscilla, starring Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, is now playing in theaters.

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Sofia Coppola Hoped to Get Lana Del Rey for 'Priscilla' Soundtrack: 'Didn't Work Out With the Timing'

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Lana Del Rey is not involved with the new film 'Priscilla,' but director Sofia Coppola was open to the idea.