Arquivo da categoria: 'Interview'
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Arquivado em: Interview , News , Photos

Lana Del Rey is the new face of Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand Skims, modelling for their Valentine’s Day collection, which is out on January 23. Lana said: “I love Kim, and I love her family. Me and my sister are huge fans of them, and have been watching them forever.” To celebrate the new campaign, Lana spoke to Vogue about why she loves Skims, her thoughts on Valentine’s Day, creating one of the most celebrated albums of the year, plus what fans can expect from her upcoming Coachella set. A behind the scenes video from the photoshoot was also shared which you can find below.

Photoshoots > 2024 > For Skims Valentine’s Day Collection by Nadia Lee Cohen
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You can read the full interview below or on the Vogue website here.



Vogue: Hi, Lana! Congrats on your new Skims campaign. To start, I’d love to hear what drew you to working with the brand.
Lana Del Rey: It was kind of a cool coincidence. I actually had asked a mutual friend [of Kim and mine], Tracey Cunningham, if there was any way we could get one of the Swarovski [Skims] dresses that had sold out; at the same time, her friend Tracy Romulus asked if I’d be interested in doing a campaign. So it all happened at the exact same minute, which I took as a serendipitous sign. And I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ I didn’t really hesitate. Me and my girlfriends were pretty excited, actually.

What do you love about the pieces that Kim and Skims are making?
Well, first of all, I just love how well it’s doing for her. And second of all, I do wear basics on most days; I like wearing the little rompers, or onesies with a big T-shirt. I’m always curious to see what they’re going to do; it’s an ever-evolving brand. It started as kind of a niche brand, and I feel like it’s grown into a thing where now my sister and my best friend Margaret are wearing it. All of a sudden you’re like, ‘Oh, you’re wearing Skims too,’ and you show up in the same outfit as you’re getting a coffee. It’s really kind of sweet.

How did the concept for the shoot evolve with the photographer Nadia Lee Cohen?
It was for a Valentine’s Day drop, so it was driven by her and Kim’s concept, and I just liked it the way it was. They really wanted me to be blonde, so that it looked different from all the other photos that I’ve taken. I thought that was cool. I worked with [Nadia] before, and I love everything she does. I didn’t know that she was the person who shot Kim in her snow bunny [campaign]. That was what drew me in the most, and I was hoping [our shoot] would have a little bit of a sixties flare, too.

You’re someone who has written a lot about love, so I’m curious what your relationship to Valentine’s Day is.
Aw, that’s cute. I’m sentimental, so of course I’m going to love Valentine’s Day! It’s up there for me in terms of the holidays. I do what half of girls do, and buy themed tea towels from HomeGoods, and put a couple extra hearts in the kitchen while I’m making coffee just for fun—the way I would for Christmas or whatever. It’s the last holiday right after that triad of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then you’ve got that little reprieve of Valentine’s Day. It’s always been a happy day for me.

Do you have any reflections on love this year, coming up on Valentine’s Day?
Well, because I reflect on love every day, I must admit it holds not much more weight than a gentle Tuesday. I’m always thinking about everything all the time, including love and how things have gone, and how they’re going to go. So I mean, does Valentine’s Day magnify it at all? I think it used to. Now, I guess it depends on the year. Some years, all my friends are in town and they want to do something themed, which is cute. Some years are quiet, or some years you have a boyfriend; Some years two ex-boyfriends send you flowers, and it’s funny—I’m like, why? But I also think it can be a hard day for a lot of people. But it’s not for me.

I want to ask you about the upcoming Grammys. Congratulations on Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd getting an Album of the Year nomination. Looking back on making that record, what did creating that work mean to you?
I didn’t think I was going to be making this album until I met Mike Hermosa; he did not consider himself a musician at all—he was a cameraman, a DP—but he would play, and I really liked some of the stuff he was playing. I then turned that into an unexpected album for myself. I knew it was going to be an album after I sang casually to about four of his four-chord licks; I didn’t expect to get four songs quickly, but once I have about four, I always feel like then I am probably going to make an album, if I think they’re good enough. I wrote “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” “Let the Light In,” “The Grants, and “Taco Truck” within the same time period. With that little foundation, I was like, ‘Oh, okay, I’m going to go all the way with it.’ So that album kind of found me. Things did not really go the way I thought that year, we had a lot going on, so I wasn’t really sure what kind of life or legs the album would take on. Another thing that I think propelled it was actually the album covers. We took almost as long with making the cover as making the album; it was a slow process. But I really, really liked our album covers, and once I saw them all, I felt like there was a different energy around it. It’s sort of like, a picture’s worth a thousand words.

One of my favorite tracks on the album is “A&W,” which has a Grammy nod for Song of the Year. I think it delivers one of the best musical transitions of the year; the song takes you on a journey. What was the intention behind the track’s epic mid-song switch-up?
That song sat in Jack Antonoff’s mailbox for nine months. It was supposed to be a ballad, and when I was done making the album, I asked him to listen to it. I had already put down the instrumental, and it didn’t include the “Jimmy Cocoa Puff” part that it transitions into. He felt really, really strongly that it should. And I wasn’t sure, because I had written the Jimmy part 13 years ago, and I had recreated it with him two years ago. So I re-recreated that, and I did a different interpretation that was a little more bouncy. And at the time, I wasn’t really sure if the transition diminished the song’s point, or if distracted from it in a good way—if took it from one place into a better place. Ultimately I was like, I would prefer for this song to transition into a happier place; I don’t want it to land in this sad spot. So, it’s interesting: When Jack has a really strong opinion, I’ve definitely learned that it’s very worth trusting it. Sometimes we’re so differently inclined musically, but with this one, I’m really glad that we went with our inclination. If you asked me, I would not have thought that this song would gain any traction. But I am really happy about it; I think it’s cool.

Lastly, you’re heading Coachella this year! What can fans expect from the performance?
I am really excited about headlining. It’s funny, because it’s going to be about 10 years to the day that I was [last] there, which is insane. I’ve known I was headlining for a long time, because you get booked way in advance, so I’ve thought about it for a while, and I already have a lot of things set into motion. If all goes well, it’ll be as big and bold as I hope it will be. Architecturally, it’s going to depend on the structure, and whether I can make it…. But I’m really excited about it. I’m excited, so my fans can get excited.

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Arquivado em: Interview , News

Lana Del Rey was recently interviewed by Jonathan Dean of The Times to celebrate the newspaper awarding her ‘Album of the Year.’ In the interview, she talks about God, Glastonbury, her private life, and critics she calls “jerk-offs” and “naysayers” due to the lies they write. You can read the full interview below. Lana will be on the cover of The Sunday Times, a photograph by Neil Krug, released on December 3.

Lana Del Rey’s great-uncle Dick was so dazed the night before he died that he accidentally grabbed the singer’s wrist and coughed into her hand. “I just cried,” she recalls in her soft, airy American twang.

She was at his home at a vigil alongside 30 members of her extended family. “I shouldn’t have been the one crying,” she says. “The people around me were his children — I’m just this star who walked in.”

Then suddenly everyone started singing the old folk song Froggy Went a-Courtin’ — once covered by Bob Dylan — in a 13-part harmony. “It was a pivotal moment because I realised that they could sing as well as I do, but I just happen to be the one who made it. That was the missing piece I needed. I felt part of a very wide network, a grain of sand on the beach.”

So did the experience bring this star back to earth? “Yes!” she says. She laughs loudly, before slipping into the third person. “And for Lana Del Rey to be levelled out is a f***ing miracle!”

It is evening when I arrive at a sweet suburban house on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. This is where Del Rey comes to “decompress” after touring, instead of at home in Los Angeles. The singer, whose ninth album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, is our album of the year, welcomes me with an explanation of the overpowering scent inside: “I have burnt a heavy sage!” She really has. This quiet sanctuary, filled with guitars, vintage chess sets and magazines about Jackie Kennedy, smells strongly of the herb that people use for good energy and relaxation. Her sitting room is certainly full of the latter.

Darkness falls beyond the candlelight as Del Rey, 38, settles back on the sofa, wearing a white cardigan, crucifix necklace, tight jeans and cowboy boots, smoking a vape. It all feels very intimate as our conversation meanders. She talks about her ancestors in the American Civil War — “It didn’t go well for them” — and a close relative who died just before Del Rey had to sing privately for the Prince of Monaco. “I invite his spirit every night to come sit next to me,” she says. “I think that’s real …”

I leave more than two hours later, after a revealing, sometimes odd and frequently funny conversation with the 27th most-listened-to pop star on Spotify. Singing aside, what is she best at? Talking — “I’m rambling! — about life, death and fame. What is she scared of? “God, I see a spider!” What is she not great at? Ordering coffees on her app. One order is cancelled; another sits on the porch after she misses the notification. “Am I an idiot?” She opens the door to two cold coffees.

Del Rey is an anomaly. Those Spotify numbers mean she’s now more popular than Harry Styles and Beyoncé. Yet most of her songs are ballads hailing from a different era — Hollywood in the 1950s, say, or Mad Men 1960s. Her music is better suited for a sad journey home than a big night out. Just check out the video Elders Read Lana Del Rey’s Hit Songs on YouTube and watch pensioners enraptured by her songs — one old man says in awe: “Younger people are listening to that?”

What is more baffling is that her songs on Did You Know … are even further removed from the present crop of algorithm-led factory pop. Her latest tracks are complex, personal (Great-Uncle Dick pops up on one) and, frankly, incredibly long, often stretching well over five minutes. “It’s weird,” she admits of her ever-increasing popularity. “It’s not necessarily what I saw coming!”

Last month Did You Know … secured five Grammy nominations, while Del Rey was announced as the headliner for the 2024 Reading Festival, after the success of big gigs in London and Glastonbury over the summer, where the age of her devoted crowd ranged from teenaged up to, yes, a surprising number of seventysomethings.

To find out how Del Rey got here, let us go back to the start. Not to the open-mike nights in her early twenties — “awkward when nobody listens” — but to when Del Rey was 26 and her game-changing single Video Games was released. It was a song that drivers would pull over to listen to — a classic of love and longing.

Other hits followed quickly, but some people had an issue. Del Rey was born Elizabeth Grant and released music as Lizzy Grant before having the gall to change her name and adopt a new, sultry femme fatale persona steeped in the iconography of American pin-ups and the silver screen.

Many pop stars — Bowie! Elton! Eminem! — reinvent themselves, but purists fell over each to denounce the new-look Del Rey as a fraud, an industry construct and fake feminist. This criticism got to her. “I will never sing again,” she laments in Swan Song, released four years after the giddy heights of Video Games.

“When I hear Swan Song now I think, ‘Oh girl, they brought you to that point. That sucks for you,’” Del Rey says with a sigh. “I get dressed up for my shows while some folks don’t. For some reason that was a problem. I had books thrown at me in San Francisco by liberal female groups. I’ve been punched in the face in Brooklyn. Ten years ago, mentally I badly needed some beauty to come out of the chaos. For something to make sense.” She sighs again. “I’ve been on guard for so long.”

On guard from whom? “Jerk-offs!” she yells. “F***ing narcissists! Take that cotton out of your ears and stuff it in your mouth.” Naysayers insisted Del Rey did not mean a word she sang. “Listen,” she says angrily. “You can hear I mean it. You might not know what I am getting at, but wouldn’t you be curious to know? Maybe you could learn something? Or just listen to someone else.”

“I don’t need positive feedback,” she continues. “But you cannot just make things up.” She mentions wealth. An early column in The Guardian called her father a millionaire — something she refutes. “It’s crazy if you say something that’s tabloid-psycho untrue about me but I can’t get a word in? Congratulations! You’re going to ruin how people listen to my music.”

There is a lot of talk today about pop stars and their mental health. How did she cope when it wasn’t much discussed ? “Well, you really have to take care of yourself,” she says, somewhat sadly. “Because putting your faith in the public is like building your house in the sand. They’ll turn and turn. I’ve experienced that in all parts of my life. People reveal sides of themselves years after you meet, so you have to ground yourself all the way down to your knees …

“But, back then, it is no wonder I felt I did not have a voice in a particular movement — they quieted me.”

Does she still think she would not be taken seriously if she wanted to speak out or get political? “That was then,” Del Rey says firmly. “I couldn’t do anything. Singing about a boyfriend, playing a video game and chilling out? That’s a joke, dude. I’d have looked stupid. Now I would feel pretty confident, and I do feel passionately about Black Lives Matter and women’s issues. Now I’m not afraid. But I was. I read what they said about me: ‘Do not step forward. Do not pass Go.’ ”

She shrugs. “But I’ve been trying and trying,” she says about writing more political songs. Four years ago she wrote a one-off single, Looking for America, with her regular producer Jack Antonoff, in response to a spate of mass shootings in the US. The impact of the shootings “just hit us”, she says with a nod. “We all sat at the back of cinemas for a while so we could be by the exit.

“And there were seven political songs on one album and nobody cared,” she adds, referring to 2017’s Lust for Life. “For instance, When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing. I talked about Trump and the worry of him having his finger on the red button. But the problem, right now, is there is just such a lot going on.”

Did You Know … largely skips politics, and writing it made her nervous. The lyrics deal with death, ageing and when she might become a mother. (The singer’s relationship status remains something of a rumour.) Throughout you can hear her early detractors, who wondered how “real” she was, being forced to scoff humble pie. It plays like autobiography. The singer is remembering people, while wondering if she will be remembered.

Del Rey was born in Manhattan and raised in Lake Placid in upstate New York. Her father, Rob, worked in various businesses before finding his success with domain names. Her mother, Patricia, was a teacher. It was a Roman Catholic family and Del Rey, one of three siblings, was a worried child. Indeed she was so concerned about the meaning of life and death that she studied philosophy at university. “I was trying to help myself,” she says of her degree. “I was constantly reading and applying what I learnt to figure out how we got here. That has been in me since I was three!”

“There were things that bothered me at a young age,” she continues. “Like what does it mean if people come into the world as quadriplegics while people say that everything plays out the way it should? Or when you meet people who are severely sociopathic and think, ‘How’s God fitting into all this?’ I’m still trying to figure out the bigger questions.”

It is fast approaching midnight. “I’m not saying I’m going to answer,” she begins, mischievously, as we start wrapping up, “but did you have a horrible question you were going to ask me?” Not really, I say; we’ve covered enough. “You could’ve said, ‘Are you married?’ Why didn’t you?!” Do you want me to ask? “No!” She takes a beat. “But no, I’m not!” She bursts out laughing.

I ask about Glastonbury. Booked to headline the Other Stage this year, Del Rey turned up late and was cut off before she could even play Video Games. On stage the singer said her hair took a while to perfect, while the crowd were left stunned and disappointed.

“I’ve heard of curfews before,” she explains. “But I didn’t know they actually turned the lights off! I didn’t feel great about it, but I was a little confused because I don’t think I was ever in a position where somebody said, ‘If you do not finish by this time, everything will go out.’ I was only 15 minutes late.”

She will simply have to come back another year to headline the Pyramid Stage, because, for someone obsessed with her own legacy, it feels as if she is edging closer to her idols, who now talk of her as a peer. Stevie Nicks adores her. Joan Baez invites her to dance parties on Zoom. “She just creates a world of her own and invites you in,” Bruce Springsteen gushes.

Did You Know … is a beautiful but intense album — like having a therapy session on a Californian beach. But what comes next for her? “I’m tired now,” Del Rey admits. “So keeping it simple is probably the way that it’s going to go. I dug around a lot writing this [album] and don’t think I have to go there again.”

As such, she has plans to write an album of standards — classic, simple songs that could reach even more people than she does now. A bit like the gorgeous, piano-led cover of Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver that she released on Friday, or the Elvis Presley version of Unchained Melody that she recorded at Graceland for a Christmas TV show. She is a star who not only finally feels understood, but also finally understands.

“That’s why God didn’t give me children yet,” she says tenderly about what may or may not come next. “Because there is more to explore. I know people who’ve tested every water. It’s burnt them, like Icarus. But I’m willing to go there. I see it coming for me. We’ll see.” She is speaking quickly now, excitedly. “We’ll see what melts the wings.”



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Arquivado em: Interview , News , Videos

Lana Del Rey appeared on the cover of the December/January issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Below you can watch the video interview they did with Lana where she answers questions all about her!



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Arquivado em: Interview , News , Photos

Lana Del Rey is on the cover of the December/January issue of Harper’s Bazaar. The interview was conducted by Chloé Cooper Jones with the photos shot by Collier Schorr and styling by Yashua Simmons.

Lana Del Rey points a red vape at a set of lounge chairs in her backyard. “When I bought those,” she tells me, “I was stoked.” I’m skeptical. The chairs look untouched, unused. A telltale line bisects their fabric, marking where the fence has cast a shadow over half of the material. There, in perpetual shade, the vibrant green pattern is preserved, but above it the fabric is exposed, bleached by the sun, nearly to white.

“We had a firepit,” Del Rey says, gesturing first to a place in the yard that doesn’t seem to have ever had a firepit and then to a dilapidated daybed. “Despite its state, this daybed, I’m proud of this,” Del Rey tells me. “I got it from Living Spaces. They brought it in the morning and assembled it by four. That’s amazing.”

Is it? I wonder. Is this quick assembly of a now waterlogged and forgotten daybed amazing to Lana Del Rey, one of the most successful and influential singers, songwriters, and forces in popular music overthe past decade? Some of my doubt manifests in relation to her house, which seems more set design than home, conceived to persuade me that I’m in the presence of the world’s most down-to-earth multimillionaire.

To be clear, this house is charming. I can only describe it as unassuming, with a small yard of yellowing grass. But it is also exceedingly modest for a woman of Del Rey’s fame and resources. The home is comfortable, clean, and simply adorned. There’s little in the way of decoration other than a magazine cutout of Marilyn Monroe tacked to a window in the bathroom and a few pictures of family. Her brother, Charlie, uses a sunny room in the back as his office, and their sister, Caroline, is over often. “We process things as a family,” Del Rey says, speaking to her bond with her siblings. “It’s never alone. Some nights it’s alone, but not really. We’re on the same page. We’re always on the same page.”

Click here to read the full interview.

Magazines > 2023 > Harper’s Bazaar (December/January – USA)
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Photoshoots > 2023 > For Harper’s Bazaar by Collier Schorr
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Photoshoots > 2023 > Behind the Scenes of Harper’s Bazaar Photoshoot
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Arquivado em: Interview , News

Lana Del Rey was interviewed by Craig McLean of The Face, alongside her father Rob Grant and sister Chuck Grant, for Rob’s upcoming debut album, ‘Lost at Sea,’ out June 9. The interview discusses Rob’s new album, being a nepo daddy, when Lana and Chuck were kids, and more.

“Rob Grant: daddy cool. He’s a 69-year-old retired businessman and debut recording artist who’s made the chillest album of the year. And all with a little help from his daughter Lana. Do put your father on the stage, Ms Del Rey…”

“I know I’m not Joni Mitchell, but I’ve got a dad who plays like Billy Joel” – Hollywood Bowl from Lost At Sea, 2023.
how confusing is all this, your dad embarking on a music career at his age and stage of life?

Lana: ​“Not confusing at all. I would expect nothing less. I don’t think anything could surprise me now, just in general in life. If a pig flew by, I’d be like: check that out! I think our first thought was: great.”

And not concerning?

Chuck: ​“No, it’s not concerning. It’s a glitch in the Matrix just because it’s usually me shooting my sister. Or just me taking the photos. And I haven’t seen my dad wear a sweatshirt ever in my entire life.”

Lana: ​“Or a suit.”

Chuck: ​“Or a suit. So it’s just like: damn, we’re doing this now. But I feel like he’s very [comfortable]. It makes sense to me.”

Rob, how do you feel about being music’s first proper Nepo Daddy?

Rob: ​“Well! I went out and registered the domain nepo​dad​dy​.com. And we’re going to come out with a whole line of merch that’s Nepo Daddy-branded. I can show it to you. It’s really cool stuff.”

So where other artists trying to make their own way might be like, ​“having famous relatives has nothing to do with my career, I’m not that, that’s a bad look”, you’re saying, ​“fuck it, let’s have some fun with it – and make some money while we’re at it”?

Rob: ​“Oh, totally. No, I’m all for Nepo Daddy. And I also registered nepomommy. com. You know, I’ll listen to what the kids are saying… in the comments on Instagram or Twitter. I just crack up. Another one is ​‘Robert Fucking Grant!’, after Norman Fucking Rockwell! [Del Rey’s 2019 album]. So I went and registered that name, too.”

Click here to read the full interview at theface.com

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Arquivado em: Interview , News , Photos

GQ Magazine took Lana Del Rey and her boat enthusiast father, Rob Grant, sailing up the Hudson River in a classic leisure yacht to celebrate the upcoming release of Rob’s debut album, ‘Lost at Sea,’ out June 9. The pair were photographed by Caroline Tompkins and interviewed by Gabriella Paiella.

Photoshoots > 2023 > For GQ Magazine by Caroline Tompkins
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At 69 years old, Grant is in the midst of promoting his debut album, Lost at Sea, which is out on June 9th. Whenever Grant would crash at his eldest daughter’s house in LA, he’d often find himself playing her old, out-of-tune piano. He wasn’t classically trained or anything, choosing instead to hit whatever notes instinctively flowed out of him. If his daughter heard a chord progression that clicked, she’d join him. Soon enough, they had a couple of songs between them.

“She’ll start singing and the songs will come together magically, but in a very beautiful, organic, intuitive way,” Grant tells me. “There’s no planning.”

“It’s so cool to create music with my daughter,” he adds. “Because we really are very simpatico.”

“Oh yeah,” his daughter chimes in, an ethereal sparkle in her voice. “I like what I like.”

His daughter, I should mention, happens to be Lana Del Rey. As in: internationally famous singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey.

Yes: Lana. She’s next to her father, both of them sipping sugar free Red Bulls. In her white Los Angeles 1984 sweatshirt, black skirt, and white sneakers, the high priestess of mystery and melancholy appears disorientingly normal. On this four-hour boat tour, she could be any millennial daughter good-naturedly spending the afternoon with her boomer dad, were she not, you know, Lana Del Rey.

Her presence is a slight surprise. A few days beforehand, Grant mentioned that his daughter might want to join. By the time we set sail, Lana, who flew in from LA to support her dad, is blasting Kodak Black on the speakers to set the mood. Later, she’ll step in to help stage daughter her father during the photo shoot, advising him on how to best angle his face. (“Maybe don’t smile, Dad.”)

With all the cultural discussion around the prevalence of nepo babies—children of celebrities who have a leg up, especially in the arts—Grant occupies a unique, singular role. He may be the world’s first, and perhaps only, nepo daddy. Papa Del Rey. And, hey, he’ll take it.

“The nepo daddy thing I love,” he says, having first encountered the concept in his Instagram comments. “I thought, My God, this would make really cool merch.”

“I mean, at that point, he was on his own, obviously,” Lana says with a laugh.

“I’m happy to be the first nepo daddy,” Grant says.

Click here to read the full interview at GQ.com

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In this year’s Culture issue, New York Times Style Magazine asked mid- and late-career artists and other creatives (the majority of them over 45) to identify a younger female artist who inspires them. It didn’t have to be someone they knew, or even someone in the same field or discipline, but it had to be someone they saw their younger selves in or who gave them a sense of hope. They were brought together, some their first meeting, for some photos and an interview about their relationships with ambition, legacy and mentorship. Legendary American folk singer-songwriter and activists Joan Baez chose Lana Del Rey.

The interview, which can be read below and also online here, is titled “Lana Del Rey Wanted to Sing With Joan Baez. But First, She’d Have to Find Her.” The singers talked about the audition that changed them both — and the “secret to real success.” The print edition will be available on Sunday, April 23.

Joan Baez: In 2019, Lana, whom I’d heard about from my granddaughter, Jasmine, invited me to sing with her in Berkeley. I said, “Why? Your audience could be my great-grandchildren.” And she said, “They don’t deserve you.”

Lana and I are sort of opposites. When I was starting out, I wouldn’t let anyone else onstage. I had two microphones — one for me, one for my guitar — and I stood barefoot, singing sad folk songs. I didn’t even write for the first 10 years, and she’s a songwriter.

I stopped singing three years ago; it was time to move on. After 60 years as a musician, I started painting. An artist friend said I need to loosen up and make mistakes so, if a painting isn’t working out, I dunk it twice in the swimming pool to see if it becomes something interesting. A hose will also do.

If people want to learn from me, I tell them to look beyond the music to my engagement with human and civil rights. My voice was what it was, but the real gift was using it. A documentary has just been made about me [“Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” 2023]. There’s footage of me marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Grenada, Miss., in 1966. At another point in the film, I mention in a letter to my parents that I want to save the world. Lana doesn’t make such grand political statements — at Berkeley, she brought me out to do it for her. And yet, amid the colorful chaos and glitter of her show, she was at one point, I believe, barefoot.

Lana Del Rey: I was having a show at Berkeley three years ago and wanted Joan to sing “Diamonds & Rust” (1975) with me. She told me she lived an hour south of San Francisco, and that if I could not only find her but also sing the song’s high harmonies on the spot, she’d do it. I was given a vague map to get to a house distinguishable only by its color and the chickens running in the yard. At one point during my audition, she stopped me with a steely look to let me know I didn’t get it right. By the end, she said, “OK, that’s good. I’ll sing with you.”

Midway through the performance, I said to the audience, “I have someone coming onstage who is the most generous-of-spirit singer I know, and the most important female singer of the ’60s and ’70s, and we’re gonna do ‘Diamonds & Rust’ together.” After the show, we went to an Afro-Caribbean two-step club, and she told me not to stop dancing until she did. That’s what my song “Dance Till We Die” (2021) is about.

I think the secret to real success is to make sure you’re always emotionally intact. I learned that from Joan. I recently said to her, “I just want you to know that I’m keenly aware that, in this lifetime or any other, I have no right to be standing shoulder to shoulder with you.” And she replied, “Oh, shut up.”

Photoshoots > 2023 > For New York Times Style Magazine by Katy Grannan
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Lana Del Rey is on the April/May cover of Rolling Stone UK, which is currently available to purchase, including a second cover which is a black and white version. The photoshoot was shot by Lana’s sister, Chuck Grant, with styling by Joseph Kocharian. The interview was conducted by Hannah Ewens. Lana later shared some outtakes from the shoot, though they are photos of a computer screen.

By retreating, she believes she has begun to see the culture more clearly. Her albums have followed suit, increasingly humorous and observational in their commentary. Meanwhile, regardless of genre, her sound has distilled into something that is pure Lana: classic and glamorous with her trademark airy, theatrical vocals. She found a fellow partially off-grid companion in Antonoff. “Jack Antonoff and I are super similar in the way we know about so much that’s going on culturally, but we have no idea how. We definitely don’t read that much about it or hear that much about it, but all of those turning points in culture, somehow we’re always aware,” she explains. Often, she and Antonoff will sit together in the studio and discuss what they’re doing to try to survive the negative waves of trends in tech, self-promotion, music and society. “I think even if I was in a remote area, I would always know what’s going on and I’ve always had a little bit of an intuitive finger on the pulse of culture,” she continues. “Even when I started singing, I knew it wouldn’t completely jive right away.”

A spiritual instinct is ever-present in Del Rey, the person. As soon as she sits down, we’re laughing about astrology and the time she tweeted her birth time and everyone realised — along with her — that she’s a Cancer, not a Gemini. “Once I had a thousand dollars, I bought this beautiful Gemini medallion which is no longer relevant to me,” she hoots, clapping her hands together. She’s so impressed with her regular psychic that every time someone tells her that she must be proud of her music, she thinks, “‘You should see what these people in the wellness community can do’ — especially in LA, it’s the mecca.” Singing is a talent too, but psychic abilities to her are magic. “It’s so validating when I meet someone like that because it’s very affirmative that there’s so much more going on.”

This fascination with the otherworldly began when she was young growing up in Lake Placid, New York. “I had fun playing sports and meeting new friends, but I was concerned about why there were no television shows or talks from people and parents about where they thought we came from and why they thought we were here. It deeply troubled me from the age of four,” she remembers. “So, my parents did have their hands full with a lot of esoteric questions. I think that’s just a predisposition.” Attending a Catholic elementary school only encouraged this search for knowledge, as did her philosophy class at age 15. In the mid-00s, she went to Fordham University in the Bronx to study for a degree in philosophy with a specialism in metaphysics. “I tried to get as many questions answered in four years as I could,” she says, sagely. “And then I was taught that philosophy was a study of questions, not answers. There were no answers, which almost made things worse.”

Read the full interview at rollingstone.co.uk.

Magazines > 2023 > Rolling Stone Magazine (April/May – UK)
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Photoshoots > 2023 > For Rolling Stone UK by Chuck Grant
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Photoshoots > 2023 > Behind the Scenes/outtakes from Rolling Stone
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