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From her evocative stage name (I wanted a name I could shape the music towards, the woman born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant told Vogue UK in 2011), to her affected, breathy vocals (she name-drops David Bowie, Prince, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen as influences), to her dramatic backstory (she began. In 2019, Del Rey also released the singles “Doin’ Time” and “Don’t Call Me Angel”, the latter being a trio with Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus.Īs of 2020, Del Rey has sold 19.1 million albums and over 13 million singles worldwide,while her YouTube and Vevo pages have combined lifetime views of 3.8 billion. Lana Del Rey is out to make a big splash. Del Rey’s sixth studio album, Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019), received widespread critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year.
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and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album. She released the album Honeymoon in 2015 and Lust for Life in 2017, the latter of which topped the charts in the U.S. That same year, Del Rey recorded the eponymous theme for the drama film Big Eyes, which garnered her Grammy and Golden Globe nominations. But the fact there is often little tangible difference between them is not the problem it might be for another artist: Del Rey is all about honing her own idiosyncratic melodic grammar – her toplines are always incredibly inventive and beautiful – that her peers inevitably chase years later.Del Rey subsequently issued her sophomore major label effort, Ultraviolence (2014), to critical success, topping the charts and spawning the single, “West Coast”. It does mean her songs’ musical foundations, usually either portentous piano or gently plucked guitars, tend to fade into the background. However disorientating her company can be, Del Rey’s world-building is never less than completely absorbing, and her vocal presence – which also seems to mess with female singing tropes (she is by turns breathily intimate, Joni-level piercing, despondently flat) – is as potent as any singer of her generation. Del Rey’s slipperiness makes her the mirror inverse of Adele – her mainstream counterpart when it comes to down-tempo, morose, “classic” balladry – whose own intentions always seem crystal clear: strictly earnest on record, gleefully irreverent off it. Yet in the middle the mood is completely undercut by a lyric about a woman who calls her child “Lilac Heaven after your iPhone 11”, and has a crypto-obsessed bro for a boyfriend. The gorgeous dirge-like closer, Sweet Carolina, co-written with her dad and sister, acts as a moving love letter to the latter as she prepares to give birth. Or does it? Is Beautiful – in which Del Rey defends her melancholic tendencies over twinkly keys with the line: “What if someone had asked / Picasso not to be sad?” – at all self-aware? It doesn’t seem like it – especially considering that the creative power of feeling blue is the album’s overarching theme. The sweeping but minimal opening track Text Book, about being attracted to a man because he resembles her father, seems to have a knowing wink baked in. Nevertheless, it’s still impossible to listen to Blue Banisters, where heart-on-sleeve soliloquies and meandering trains of thought rub up against wry humour and oblique braggadocio, and not feel confused. A recent announcement that alluded to media criticism included the line: “I must say I’ve enjoyed moving through the world beautifully – as a woman with grace and dignity.” And while her music sometimes seems tongue-in-cheek, her public statements suggest she takes herself very seriously indeed. Yet, in response to a review of her 2019 album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Del Rey insisted that she’d “never had a persona, never needed one, never will”. The conversation about whether there has ever been any sort of character at play with Del Rey has orbited her career since her 2011 breakthrough, thanks to her evocative aesthetic – a vaguely low-rent, all-American glamour that harks back to the 60s and 70s – fancy pseudonym (her real name is Lizzy Grant) and her borderline-camp treatment of femininity, toxic relationships and her homeland. The arresting, almost funereal title track begins as a tribute to her girlfriends, before talking about the limits of female solidarity when it comes to heartbreak and unhappy singledom. Yet Blue Banisters is perhaps her most autobiographically straightforward album to date, documenting a failed romance and the inception of her current one, and her relationships with her sister (close) and her mother (difficult). Ultimately, Black Bathing Suit returns to her favoured themes of “bad girls” and negative press attention. Later, she is overcome by signs of ordinary life returning: on Violets for Roses, once run-of-the-mill sights such as young women frolicking maskless and bookshops reopening can now elicit euphoria. “If this is the end, I want a boyfriend / Someone to eat ice-cream with and watch television,” she sings on Black Bathing Suit, a song that appears to nod to lockdown weight gain (“The only thing that still fits me is this black bathing suit”).