SLOW BUT SURE
Lana Del Rey hears your criticism but is confident in her approach
Here’s a
SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. wild idea: What if Lana Del Rey is exactly who she says she is?
Her music keeps making us think otherwise. It’s still too elegant, too plush, too slippery to be real. Maybe that’s why, in concert, she likes to talk about a song after she sings it, as if to confirm that it wasn’t just a puff of Chanel No. 5 in our collective imagination.
At the Hollywood Bowl last month, she performed Wicked Game with Chris Isaak. “We can’t be in the middle of Hollywood and not hear the sexiest song of all time,” Del Rey explained as Isaak exited the stage. She wasn’t thanking her guest so much as expressing her gratitude to sexiness as a sound.
Has everyone heard Norman F---ing Rockwell! by now? It’s the greatest Lana Del Rey album, dizzying and precise, unknowable and lucid, unprecedented while still feeling like more of the same, genius all the way. She’s still blowing thought bubbles from the privacy of her mind into the slipstream of the American Dream, but this time around, she’s pared down the studio production and cranked up the paradox. The more beautiful her music becomes, the stranger it feels. It’s a triumph.
Two days after the Hollywood Bowl, Del Rey is in Santa Barbara to catch a Bob Dylan concert — partially to bask in mythological music alongside family and friends, partially because “it’s good to learn from everyone who’s been doing it for so long.” But before the Pacific Ocean can pull down the sun, the 34-yearold will spend an hour inside a conference room at the Four Seasons answering questions about the creative impulse in a tone of voice that’s bright, casual, searching and sincere.
She doesn’t sound embattled. “I, maybe at one point, thought of it as being on the firing line,” she says of the skepticism she has faced over the years. “But once you’re on the line, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s not all bad.’ ... There is kindness, and it’s not all speculation.”
That’s one way to explain the flood of hot and cold unleashed upon Born to Die, Del Rey’s polarizing 2012 album. As pop albums go, it was difficult to hear clearly at the time. The singer’s rise out of the New York openmic circuit and up through the industry machinery, while not atypical, had been spun into a bogus media narrative about how she wasn’t operating on her own creative volition, as if her songs had been focus-grouped into existence. On top of that, Born to Die landed at a time when a pop hit was expected to double as a melodic affirmation, a self-esteem vitamin, a danceable pep-talk, Gaga-rah-rah-rah. Del Rey was different, and so was her music. “I have a more delicate sensibility,” she says. “It’s just my nature, the way I’m not fast or on fire.”
Instead, she wrote ballads about surrendering to romantic oblivion — songs that made many listeners bristle on principle, even if Del Rey was telling her truth. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you,” she gushed on her breakout single Video Games, a self-erasing love song about a distant lover who’s more concerned with the pixels on his computer screen.
“I remember when Video Games came out, people were like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so anti-feminist!’ ” Del Rey says. “‘You’re sitting and watching him play video games?’ I was like, ‘Well, I would play, too, now and then. And I had other stuff I was doing. I wrote a hit album! Can’t I take an hour to watch him play World of Warcraft?’ ”
She continued to grow into her ideas while listeners demanded to know what her music meant, who it spoke for, what it stood for. Del Rey may not have answered directly, but she was listening. “What it taught me is that they saw more,” she says. “They thought there should have been more there. Like, a different path than maybe what I was laying down.”
Has her work been over-interpreted? Not necessarily. Listeners will blaze their own paths into and out of any piece of music. Del Rey does it, too. One of her most potent writerly devices involves recycling old lyrics from classic songs. Earlier in her career, it sounded like cheating off someone else’s paper, like she was spackling holes in her verses with mundane swatches of radio haiku — lyrics from Tom Petty, Snoop Dogg, Patsy Cline, David Bowie and dozens more. But across her discography, her commitment to the gesture has deepened its meaning. “Not intentionally,” she says. “I’m a bit of a muso. If we’re not at Dylan, we’re hopefully at another show. So, most stuff I just have on my mind.”
A conversation with Lana Del Rey rearranges time the way a
Lana Del Rey album rearranges time. She answers questions long after they’ve been asked, consciously or not, which makes her chit-chat, as straightforward as it feels, as non-linear as her music. Piece it all together, and you might start to understand her musical proposition.
She agrees that too many listeners reflexively hear the slowness in her songs as shorthand for sadness — what about patience, intensity, concentration? — and that her songs aren’t rebuking the speed of the information age. She just moves through her life at a slower pace.
She says that all of her best ideas arrive when life is calm. Lyrics appear. Melodies have to be searched for. And when she recycles her lines from her older songs, it might be because they express some consistent truth in her life, or “it might be because I forgot.” Or both. More than once, she tries to explain her approach to songwriting by singing a Gordon Lightfoot tune: “If you could read my mind, love, what a tale my thoughts could tell ...”
As for the meanings of her lyrics, not all of them are up for discussion. Some of her most intimate and enigmatic phrases swirl alongside one another during Hope is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have, including the lyric, “Serving up God in a burnt coffee pot for the triad.” Would she explain what the triad is? “I will not,” she says, smiling and shrugging. “I’m not going to tell everybody everything ... There’s so much to be treasured (in a song), just keep to yourself so that nobody can trash it.”