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Arquivado em: Interview , News , Photos , Ultraviolence

Lana Del Rey is featured on the cover of Clashs The American Dream Issue. It features a new photoshoot by Neil Krug! You can find it on newsstands soon, so keep an eye out and feel free to send us the scans if you get a copy!

Photoshoots > 2014 > For Clash by Neil Krug
x— 05 Pictures were added —x

Magazine Scans > 2014 > Clash (June – UK)
x— 04 Pictures were added —x

Read the full interview:

California has a very direct and unforgiving steam beer called Anchor. But in Hollywood nobody drinks Anchor, because they prefer fresh peach Bellinis.

Since arriving here three days ago, every part-time actor I’ve met drinking these Bellinis, alone in the Chateau Marmont, says this feeling of dreamy detachment I’m experiencing is a spell well known to marinate your mind’s eye after a few days on the West Coast. I suppose you could call it ‘Californication’.

All around, I see the smoked glass freeze-frame of a film I once caught. The sidewalks of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Johnny Utah punching surfers on Leo Carrillo State Beach, or Billy Hoyle in White Men Can’t Jump arriving to play basketball on Windward Avenue in a ’60s Cutlass Convertible. This must be what turned David Hockney of ballsy British portraiture into David Hockney of paradise poolsides and burnt sienna buildings.

It’s like the very geography of Los Angeles strokes you into a coma of ignorant bliss and subdued optimism, where the future always looks good because you’ve stopped paying any attention to the past. Anchor tastes like the world you’ve got, and those Bellinis like the world you want. But you can’t drink Bellinis forever.

Lana Del Rey isn’t from LA – she was born Elizabeth Grant in New York in the summer of 1986 – but her new album, ‘Ultraviolence’, is what she calls “California driven”.

“I like the idea of talking about it more and more and living here more and more, and falling into a real life here by the ocean. There is definitely an over-arching theme of finding a home and being on the West Coast.”

She’s on her backyard patio when I arrive, and as I take a seat she slopes on a recliner, bathed under the sun’s first blush. I tell her about the theme of our forthcoming magazine, the American Dream, and she laughs: “I am definitely chasing my own little American Dream.”

She’s still carrying the glow of a heavenly Coachella performance just 48 hours earlier. Standing in the crowd for that show, I saw things I didn’t expect. In a tangerine dress patterned with night-fire hibiscus, she pattered barefoot around the stage – resembling a real-life Holly Golightly – delivering tracks like ‘Body Electric’, ‘Blue Jeans’ and ‘Ride’ at a trance-inducing pace.

But, around me, people weren’t simply soaking it in. They were really letting it out: cathartically embracing the angelic poet for every line she had, responding with tears, disbelief, weird expressions of joy, and frantic attempts to touch her as she passed by.

“She didn’t really tour America for the last album,” explains Lana’s father, who I strike up a conversation with after we realise our shared affinity for tasteless (by which I mean killer) Hawaiian shirts. “This is the first time they’ve seen her live. They want to touch her. It’s like they didn’t believe she really existed.”

I’d hazard a guess that the stateside critical reception Lana received after her breakthrough (second) album, 2012’s ‘Born To Die’, played a role in her choice not to tour America until now. While Europe generally embraced the record, a less-favourable gust blew from many publications across the Atlantic. It was a strange and personal one that often eschewed musical assessment in favour of troll-ish, chauvinistic rambles that boiled quite redundantly down to the size of her lips, how she’d changed her hair, and that she used to call herself Lizzy Grant.

I’ll admit, while observing this backlash with disdain, there was a small and shameful slither of excitement and curiosity within me, which relished the fracas. I wanted to know how someone could garner so much hate and praise in equal measure. A split-second of reticence diminishes, before Lana willingly reflects.

“It was never about the music for them. My public story is more a story about journalism; like a commentary on how modern-day journalism works. None of the stuff is ever really about me, because I didn’t even give that many interviews. Most of the stuff written was unsolicited or creative writing, and a lot of it was just wrong. I mean, there were pictures that had been f*cked with to look different. It was very weird.”

I can tell pretty quickly that though she may have risen above such clawing, some scars still remain. “When nobody has ever written about you before, you are interested in what they have to say. You hope it’s good. When it isn’t and you keep going anyway, you have to not care. You can’t.”

It’s no surprise that, through all this, Lana has become a darling of American culture. After all if you’re loved, then your lovers will celebrate you, but only when you’re loved and hated in equal measure will you get the whole world talking. The question is: at what cost?

I ask her if she ever considered giving up on music. “Every day,” she admits. “I didn’t want to do it, ever. You can make music just for making music. You don’t have to put it on YouTube, and that was definitely a viable option for me. I have a lot of passions and making music was always something I would do for fun. However, from what happened, it wasn’t worth it most of the time.”

It is interesting to consider the symbolism of Lana’s new album title, ‘Ultraviolence’, which is taken from A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. In the Stanley Kubrick screen adaptation of that film, music is salvation for the deeply troubled protagonist Alex. In spite of the pain, horror and “ultraviolence” around him, music is the only true passion that can relieve him and guide him to euphoria. However, it is music that ultimately leads to his demise.

“It’s still not really worth all the bullshit,” continues Lana. “Being able to tell my story through music is totally amazing, but that is where it begins and ends.” She flashes a smile, and if there was any bitterness in there, she’s smothered it with a dominant expression of dignity. “I don’t care now, because I can’t. I already know what’s coming. It’s gonna be disastrous on some level, in some way.”

Lana might feel like she stares down a barrel of inevitable adversity, but her new album carries no sign of apprehension. ‘Born To Die’, and its eight-track ‘Paradise’ extension, was a luxurious and impressive record, a real fresh peach Bellini, enriched in ’50s and ’60s Americana, with the grandiose string sections, the beehive hairdo, and the fallen angel narrative. But it was clearly a record that had been through the tinkering mills. Shaken, stirred and thoroughly mixed.

Conversely, ‘Ultraviolence’ – released on June 16th – is a rugged beast, an unforgiving and direct steam beer, made with a band, in a room. The earnest, lo-fi approach smacks of Lana’s almost-eponymous 2010 debut album, (swapping vowels to be titled ‘Lana Del Ray’) but with a much beefier mass of modified guitars and irregular harmonic collisions. Pop, jazz, rock and a lineage of classic records colour its influences: Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’, The Turtles’ ‘Happy Together’, The Byrds’ ‘Young Than Yesterday’. It’s clear that her producer, The Black Keys’ blues-rock maverick Dan Auerbach, was the boiling water on this psychedelic souchong.

“I didn’t know a lot about Dan or his records when I first met him,” divulges Lana. “For instance, I didn’t know that the word he loved to use was ‘fuzz’. For an age, I had been saying that I needed the fuzz and the fire. When we met, he was like, ‘Well, I’m pretty known for the fuzz.’ So I knew: ‘Cool! You’re my man!’”

Before Dan, there was December (New York, 2013, cold). Lana decided she was ready to take what she’d been working on into a studio. That decision eventually resulted in a twist of fate that would ultimately ignite ‘Ultraviolence’.

“I went to Electric Lady Studios down in the East Village for a while,” she explains. “My friend runs it now, so he let me have the whole place to myself for five weeks. I produced everything myself with my guitar player and then we hired a session drummer. We had made this kind of classic rock-inspired record – 11 tracks. So, I thought I was done.”

She laughs. “And then, on the last night, I met Dan. We went out to a club, we looked at each other and we were like, ‘Maybe we should do this together?’ It was rare for me, because it was really spontaneous. Five days later, I flew to Nashville and played all our tracks to Dan. We had been talking about this ‘tropiCali’ vibe, about how I loved LA, and that it was grounding me. I felt like the energy in LA was really sexy. But being there also enhanced my love for the East Coast, in being away from it. We really had this West Coast sound in mind, but with an East Coast flavour. And then we recorded it in the middle of the country. It was an American amalgamation.”

With an album inspired by the East and West, and made in the middle, would it be fair to assume that America is Lana Del Rey’s ultimate creative muse?

“It definitely was. I was trying to get my loving feeling back for New York, because a lot of shit went wrong there. I had a real aromatic inclination there, alone for years, wandering the streets, feeling free and unhinged. I didn’t feel free once things got bigger. I lost that feeling. So, coming back West and working with a stranger like Dan made me feel more alive and more in touch with America.”

I ask Lana about her choice of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis as heavenly spirits in the Garden of Eden for her short film, Tropico. “I wrote a little monologue for everyone who came to the premiere of Tropico. When I was studying philosophy my teacher told me that it’s okay to feel like the people you’re closest to aren’t alive anymore. Sometimes that is the best company to keep. It’s about the people that pondered the same questions as you did, and had the same sort of life mentality as you. I was upset and inspired by that premise.

“I knew then, really, that my closest friends would be people I have never really met before. I was different and I didn’t know many people who felt about mortality how I did. As a result, I do feel a personal connection with the icons: John Wayne, Elvis. I loved how nice Marilyn was, I related to her. Finding girls who were as loving and warm as her is hard.”

Like Lana, Marilyn Monroe wasn’t one without her detractors. “Success makes so many people hate you,” she once said, “I wish it wasn’t that way.” Similarly, some still see Del Rey’s femme fatale aura as a commercial angle aimed purely to incite lust and sell, sell and sell again. “Forget about singing,” begins a recent live review in The Chicago Tribune, “Lana Del Rey could’ve passed for a swimsuit model posing for paparazzi cameras on Friday at a sold-out Aragon”, epitomising how, to many, her enchantment will always be superficial.

But for more avid fans, her allure is artistically cavernous. Just like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly, Charles Vidor’s Gilda, or even the original Carmen, yes, there is a surface of seduction – but beyond that image, there is deep play in action. Lana personifies a struggle between stability and freedom; she conveys expressions of escapism, a scramble for courage in the face of fatalism, a subconscious need to confess, a desire for power. This is no swimsuit competition.

This expressive storyteller springs from the darkness for the new album track ‘Money Power Glory’. It might have textured guitars and a rock soundscape, but – with a trudging beat, and bass so deep even Adele wouldn’t roll in it – this track is essentially gold-digger dub. Lana opens with her trademark rap drawl, before peaking with some soaring vocals, a good octave higher than the smoky and languorous alto depths she’s known for. “I want money and all your power and all your glory,” chimes the lyrical Medusa, “I’m going to take you for all you’ve got.”

This mood continues into ‘Sad Girl’, which might not be her most explosive or infectious song, but these lyrics are expertly vivid, and a disturbing and sadistic love song is spun into a cinematic plot. “Being a mistress might not appeal to fools like you,” she derides, “but you haven’t seen my man.” The line typifies this track’s motif: that despite the best intentions of the onlooker, sometimes people don’t want to be saved. All this Mary Gaitskill-like debased romance is sugar coated with ghostly production and racy Spanish guitar.

‘Shades Of Cool’ rises like a deathly waltz for depressive lovers, and it illustrates this turmoil with a jazz air, slow drums, a stargazing chorus and a helter-skelter middle-eight. I begin to ask Lana what her favourite track is.

“(Album opener) ‘Cruel World’,” she decides, before I’ve even finished. “I went down to the beach and I was thinking about everything, personally. The verse is thoughtful and laid back, but then the chorus falls into this world of chaotic and heavy sub-bass. The juxtaposition of those two worlds, the peaceful beginning and the chaotic chorus, it summed up my personal circumstances of everything going easily and then everything being f*cked up. It felt like me.”

On this West Coast she so fervently draws from, the one I’m sitting beside right now, even the weather is in on it. In some pact of pathetic fallacy, it stubbornly refuses to rain, ever, and instead bakes the city in a constant beam of delusional ‘everything’s fine’ sunshine. One time, in the throes of jet lag, I did catch it lightly sprinkling at 5.30am, and as I looked down from the 10th floor of my hotel, it felt like the glamorous districts of Bel Air, Beverly Hills and Westwood were recoiling from me like a girl with no make-up on yet, yelling: ‘You weren’t supposed to see me like this!’

Even now, as the idiotic sun burns down onto the patio, I swear I can hear each stone cracking in surrender. Sensing the heat, Lana asks if I want to take a walk, and for some corporeal reason that first movement in an hour – sending chemicals fizzing, blood flow rising and muscles warming – sparks a shift to deeper conversation.

“When I was 15, I had this teacher called Gene Campbell, who is still my good friend,” begins Lana. “In boarding school, to become a teacher you don’t have to have a Masters. I was 15 and he was 22, out of Georgetown. He was young, and at school you were allowed to take trips out at the weekends. On our driving trips around the Connecticut counties, he introduced me to Nabokov, (Allen) Ginsberg, (Walt) Whitman, and even Tupac and Biggie. He was my gateway to inspirational culture. Those inspirations I got when I was 15 are still my only inspirations. I draw from that same well. It’s one world I dip into to create other worlds. Like this philosopher Josiah Royce once said: ‘Without the roots, you can’t have any fruits.’”

The idea of “sculpting your own world to live in” is a priority to Lana, and it is from this inherited inspiration that she irrigates Planet Del Rey. We find an exaggerated form of this world in the visual art that accompanies her music, just as much as the tracks themselves. She raises a finger that beams to me ‘hold that thought’, and scurries into the house only to return with a large hardback photography book under arm. The cover reads Pulp Art Book, and carries the image of a naked woman wearing a Native Indian warbonnet while lighting a cigarette.

“A friend gave this to me as a present, but for some reason they thought the photographer (Neil Krug) was dead,” explains Lana. Krug’s work is bold, and comes across like that of a spaghetti Western surrealist with an eye for finding the artistic merit in ’70s American schlock. This book in particular is a collection of sublime moments captured through ancient Polaroids, which portray kaleidoscopic acid fantasies, B-movie sexploitation/violence, and Middle American subculture.

“I was so heavily influenced by it, always thinking he was dead,” says Lana. Fortunately, the information was duff: Neil wasn’t dead. He was alive, well, and managing both very nearby in Los Angeles. It didn’t take too long for the pair to hook up some long-term plans, and his visual impact on ‘Ultraviolence’ has been prominent.

“For some reason, he has been really life changing for me,” admits Lana. “He loves painting Polaroids and making little 8x10s. I saw one of the shots he took of me, and I felt it had to be the album cover. That photo influenced me to change the track listing.”

Only yesterday, I watched Neil shoot Lana on a beach location in Malibu for Clash. When the camera stopped, and nobody was adjusting a fringe, summoning a pose or straightening a collar, she paused alone in the ocean, splashing lightly, seizing a tranquil moment while throwing an endless gaze at the Pacific horizon. It reminded me of a line by the Californian writer Joan Didion: “Here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

I ask Lana if she remembers it. “I’m like a little fish,” she proudly declares. “When you get to that water, and you’re not from here, it feels like you’re as far as you can go. You have your feet in the ocean and you’re at the edge of the world.”

I ask if her spirituality resides purely with sublime nature, or is there some religion in there? “I got to a point 10 years ago where everything was so wrong in my personal life that I let go and stopped willing my way into life. When I let go of everything and stopped trying to become a singer and write good songs and be happy, things then fell into place. I was surrendering to life on life’s terms. It was this very real experience with a life science that nobody had taught me. You let go of everything you think you want, and focus on everything you love, so it’s the only vibration you’re putting out there.”

So, when you cease focusing on your desires, the things you’ve always wanted come naturally to you?

“No. It’s feeling like you’re already there; that you are where you wanted to be the whole time. You just have to imaginatively let it already be so.”

It’s that idea of decorating reality with elements of fantasy that lines ‘Ultraviolence’: this marriage of an orange-blossomed West Coast dream with bleak and difficult East Coast realism; the idea of seeing the blue pill and the red pill, and choosing to double dunt both. It’s ordering a fresh peach Bellini, and pouring in a can of Anchor.

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Arquivado em: Interview , News , Photos , Ultraviolence

Lana Del Rey is featured on the The New York Times. It features an article by Jon Pareles and a new photoshoot by Kurt Iswarienko! You can find it on June 14, so keep an eye out and feel free to send us the scans if you get a copy!

Photoshoots > 2014 > For The New York Times by Kurt Iswarienko
x— 02 Pictures were added —x

In October, before starting an international theater tour, the songwriter Lana Del Rey consulted a clairvoyant. She was instructed to write down four questions in advance and sleep on them. The first question on the list, Ms. Del Rey said in an interview in May at her house here, was “Am I meant for this world?”

It’s probably not the kind of question most multimillion-selling pop singers would ask themselves with their careers clearly ascendant. This year, Ms. Del Rey was called on to sing a spooky remake of “Once Upon a Dream” for the Disney film “Maleficent,” and she sang at Versailles for the pre-wedding party of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.

But doubt, regrets, obsessive longing and self-destructive impulses are often at the core of Ms. Del Rey’s songs and videos. “I wait for you babe, that’s all I do/You don’t come through babe, you never do,” she sings in “Pretty When You Cry” on her new album “Ultraviolence” (Polydor/Interscope), due for release Tuesday.

Since her emergence on a major label with the single “Video Games” in 2011 and the album “Born to Die” in 2012, Ms. Del Rey has drawn passionately opposed responses. Her songs and video clips demurely step into cultural minefields, exploring eroticism, mortality, power, submission, glamour, faith, pop-culture iconography and the meaning(s) of the American dream. She has faced, in reviews and online discussions, shifting accusations of inauthenticity, amateurishness, anti-feminism and commercial calculation (although her only Top 10 single in the United States was unplanned: a dance remix by Cedric Gervais of her wistful ballad “Summertime Sadness”). But she has also, largely through YouTube, gathered an adoring worldwide audience that takes her every lyric to heart.

“Ultraviolence” will doubtless stir up more disputes. But one thing the album should immediately eliminate is the notion that Ms. Del Rey is only chasing hits. The album reaches deeper into her slow-motion sense of time, her blend of retro sophistication and seemingly guileless candor. It also moves gracefully between heartache and sly humor, sometimes within the same song.

The music on “Ultraviolence” sets her further outside whatever passes for current pop mainstream. While radio playlists are full of futuristic electronic dance beats and Auto-Tuned testimonials to self-esteem, Ms. Del Rey, 28, has taken a contrary path, melodic and melancholy. Much of her music has been lush and downtempo, invoking vintage movie scores and echoes of the 1950s and 1960s; it opens quiet spaces. Her voice sounds human and unguarded, offering sweetness and ache even when she sings four-letter words.

The tracks on “Born to Die” drew on hip-hop, with grunted samples and hefty beats, but now, she said, “I’m not crazy about some of that production.” The hip-hop influence was already receding on “Paradise,” the EP she released in 2012. And “Ultraviolence” is more languorous than ever. Its first single, “West Coast,” actually downshifts to a slower tempo for its chorus, where standard radio formula calls for a big buildup.

Continue reading the main story
In a throwback to a less-computerized era, many of the tracks on “Ultraviolence” were built around Ms. Del Rey and a seven-piece band recording together and responding to one another. The songs often float in a psychedelic haze that she described as “narco-swing.” Dan Auerbach, the Black Keys’ guitarist, produced and performed on the album, and said, “She was watching us and swaying while we were playing.”

Mr. Auerbach was drawn to her songs because, he said, “They felt old and new at the same time.” Ms. Del Rey freely cites inspirations including Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Cat Power, Nirvana and Eminem, but none of them emerged in this century. “Think of what’s going on now,” she said. “Where am I going to get my inspiration? I couldn’t think of a thing today that I would really genuinely want to be a part of.”

In conversation, Ms. Del Rey isn’t the low-voiced chanteuse of songs like “Video Games” or “Blue Jeans”; her voice has a girlish, soprano lilt, punctuated with giggles. Wearing a blue mini-dress and clear sandals that revealed toenails painted a pearly peach, she sat on her couch here, sipping coffee and smoking through a pack of cigarettes, under a painting of cherubic angels. She showed off a recent tattoo on her right arm: “Whitman Nabokov,” two authors she has quoted in songs. She had just returned to Los Angeles to finish her North American tour, with a show at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall.

After living in London and touring the world, Ms. Del Rey bought her house here, an elegant English-style residence in need of repair, seven months ago. The walls are newly painted in the blues and greens that were also the palette of “Video Games,” the homemade video clip — she edited it on her laptop — that catapulted her career and has now been viewed more than 119 million times on her two YouTube sites alone. The paintings in her living room are of icons — the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth Taylor — and a book on the coffee table had Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

“I have strong relationships with icons,” she says. “They’re probably my most meaningful relationships. They feel personal to me, but maybe that’s what being an icon is. Maybe everyone feels like they have that special relationship that’s different from everybody else, like you love them and you think you understand them more than anyone else, or you get them for who they really are.”

It’s not a position she aspires to for herself. “I wouldn’t really know how to shape myself as an icon,” she said earnestly.

Many of the accusations that were leveled at her major-label debut were inaccurate. She wasn’t a pretty face serving someone else’s concept, or a dilettante. As Lizzy Grant — born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant — she had worked at being a songwriter since her teens, and playing in small clubs on the Lower East Side and in Williamsburg. She grew up in Lake Placid, N.Y., and came to New York City with, she said, “a Dylan-esque dream of a community of writers,” but never found it.

In 2007, she got her first recording contract when she was a senior at Fordham, studying metaphysics. She recorded a debut EP in 2008, and briefly released an album in 2010 — “Lizzy Grant a.k.a. Lana Del Ray” — before it was withdrawn while she renamed herself Lana Del Rey. The songs on that album were already exploring the tarnished innocence and dangerous compulsions that she would return to on “Born To Die.” The production would change with her collaborators, but her perspective did not.

As many songwriters do, she works with more trained musicians who supply foundations for her melodies and lyrics. Sometimes they offer chord progressions while she improvises; sometimes she brings finished words and tunes for them to harmonize. “She’s very clear about what she wants and doesn’t want,” said Rick Nowels, who wrote “Young and Beautiful” and “West Coast” with her, and who has collaborated with Madonna and Dido. “She is the captain of her own ship.”

Ms. Del Rey describes her songwriting simply. “I want one of two things,” she said. “I either want to tell it exactly like the way it was, or I want to envision the future the way I hope it will become. I’m either documenting something or I’m dreaming.”

On “Ultraviolence,” that means songs like “Cruel World,” in which she breaks away from a long failed relationship — “Shared my body and my mind with you/That’s all over now” — and “Sad Girl,” a bluesy reflection on “being a mistress on the side”; she also sings “The Other Woman,” a song recorded by Nina Simone.

Already braced for disapproval, she said: “If you really do want to analyze me, if that’s maybe something you’re interested in, let me tell you my story and you can look at that.”

The recording of “Pretty When You Cry” is built around the original writing session: chords from her band’s guitarist, Blake Stranathan, a fluctuating tempo and words she was making up on the spot. “I’m stronger than all my men,” she sings, “except for you.” A more conventional approach would be to redo its shaky, scratchy lead vocal with something prettier. “I didn’t even think to go back and fix it,” she said, “because if you know the story behind it, then you can tell why it was sung that way.”

The angry responses to “Born to Die” left scars. “Carl Jung said that inevitably what other people think of you becomes a small facet of your psyche, whether you want it to or not,” she said. Her new album includes a retort: “Money, Power, Glory,” which claims, with deep sarcasm, that those are what she’s after.

“I learned that whatever I did elicited an opposite response, so I’m sure ‘Money, Power, Glory’ will actually resonate with people as being what I really do want,” she said with a shrug. “I already know what’s coming, so it’s O.K. to explore irony and bitterness.”

A recurring criticism was that her songs about being swept away by love were anti-feminist in their passivity; she contends that she was writing about private, immediate feelings, not setting out doctrine. “For me, a true feminist is someone who is a woman who does exactly what she wants,” she said. “If my choice is to, I don’t know, be with a lot of men, or if I enjoy a really physical relationship, I don’t think that’s necessarily being anti-feminist. For me the argument of feminism never really should have come into the picture. Because I don’t know too much about the history of feminism, and so I’m not really a relevant person to bring into the conversation. Everything I was writing was so autobiographical, it could really only be a personal analysis.”

She has also been denounced for video clips that culminate in her death: by drowning, by falling, by choking. The video for “Born To Die” ends with her in a boyfriend’s arms, inert and covered in blood. She agrees that her videos have often been “exploring ways to die,” she said, adding: “I love the idea that it’ll all be over. It’s just a relief, really. I’m scared to die, but I want to die.” The title song of “Ultraviolence” ventures into precarious territory. In an arrangement that melds Baroque dirge and wah-wah guitar, the singer describes herself as “filled with poison but blessed with beauty and rage,” and goes on to quote a fraught 1962 song from the Crystals, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).”

The lyrics also mention a “cult leader,” and Ms. Del Rey said the song looked back to a time soon after she moved to New York City, when she considered following a guru who “believed in breaking you down to build you back up again.” “It sounds kind of weird,” she added, “but that is what it’s about, and having romantic feelings entwined with the idea of being led and letting go and surrendering. That’s always a concept to me, like I’m wavering between independence and falling into lifestyles and being led.”

There’s an underlying pattern to the songs throughout “Ultraviolence”; Ms. Del Rey’s voice appears alone and often fragile in the verses, then is swarmed by instruments and multiple backup vocals. “Each tune fully represents the ebbs and flows, the periods of normality mixed with this uncontrolled chaos that comes in through circumstances in my life,” she said. “It’s your story. If you’re the one writing it, you want to tell your story right.”

The next night Ms. Del Rey was at the Shrine’s Expo Hall before a packed, standing audience. There were high-pitched screams when she strolled onstage, and from the front to the back of the hangarlike hall, voices were raised to sing along. It wasn’t, like some concerts, a social occasion; this audience was devotional, sharing every word, sometimes close to drowning her out. Onstage, Ms. Del Rey just stood there and sang, swaying occasionally; when she did her one planned bit of choreography, a single hip flip in “Body Electric,” the whole room roared.

“The energy is so much higher in the pit than it is onstage,” she noted afterward. She strolled twice down into the photo pit, trailed by a video camera, as fans reached for her with offerings and hugs; one fervent embrace looked like a half-nelson. “I’ve lost a lot of hair on this tour, I will probably have to get a hair transplant nyc once tour is over” she said later, backstage. “The audience has been an unexpected well of comfort that I’ve dipped into recently. It was never something I even thought to go to for strength or affirmation.”

But the adoration hasn’t quite broken through the solitude of her songs. “Yes, I’m in a different place today than I was four years ago,” she said. “But I’m some ways I’m still in the exact same place. I’m still on the periphery.”

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MENANCE
Lana Del Rey also sat down with Menance from ALT 98.7. last friday (6) to talk about her new album, ‘Shades of Cool” music video and much more. You can listen to it below and check the photos:

Public Appearances2014 > At ALT 98.7. Studio (June 6)

x— 08 Pictures were added —x

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Arquivado em: Audio , Interview , News

>kiis2
Lana Del Rey gave an interview to KROQ and KISS FM yesterday (June 6) and talked about ‘Ultraviolence’, her celebrity crush and much more. Listen to it below:

[Interview for KROQ here]

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Arquivado em: Interview , News , Photos , Ultraviolence , Videos

FADER

Lana Del Rey is featured on the cover of Fader’s June/July issue. It features a new photoshoot by Geordie Wood ! You can find it on newsstands soon, so keep an eye out and feel free to send us the scans if you get a copy!

Photoshoots > 2014 > For Fader Magazine by Geordie Wood
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The camera zooms in on Lana Del Rey as she turns away from the crowd, hiding all but the slightest silhouette of her face. In the background, a massive screen flickers deep purple and blue; beside her on stage sits a potted palm. For one full minute: riotous, embracing applause. Gently, she wipes a tear with the middle finger of her left hand, then wipes her nose, which from this angle appears as the bottom-half of a perfectly slender S curve that begins on her forehead, shimmies down her face and ramps off into the void. Finally, she turns to address the audience, smiles and says, “I think you’re going to have to sing it for me.” The piano starts, and everyone complies, very loudly and very clearly. She tries to sing too, of course, then pauses to cry and smile at the same time, seemingly overwhelmed by the audience’s affection. But no one else stops singing: It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you…

Lana Del Rey, the singer whose entire self so often seems a carefully constructed display, didn’t conceive of this scene, like she has the many music videos that helped propel her to fame. First came the eerily star-foreshadowing montages of 2008, in which she stitched together found footage and vamped in front of an American flag under her given name, Lizzy Grant. Back then, sometimes she’d make four videos for the same song, but most times, nobody much saw them. Next came “Video Games,” which applied that same cut-up look to a slightly fuller sound, and thrust Grant, now singing as Lana Del Rey, from bedroom clips to blockbusters. Then the big budgets arrived: she sat on a throne backed by two tigers in the video for “Born to Die,” embodied both Jackie O and Marilyn in a span of minutes for “National Anthem” and, for “Tropico,” lounged with Elvis and John Wayne in CGI heaven. Lana Del Rey’s filmography is a master class on how to build an icon, and yet, no footage feels like proof of her iconicity as much as the shaky clip of a teary 2013 performance, shot on a phone by a fan in Dublin.

I ask her why she was crying. “I’d been sick on tour for about two years with this medical anomaly that doctors couldn’t figure out,” she says, to my surprise. “That’s a big part of my life: I just feel really sick a lot of the time and can’t figure out why. I’d gotten these shots in Russia, where we’d just been. It was just heavy. It’s just heavy performing for people who really care about you, and you don’t really care that much about yourself sometimes. I thought it was sad. I thought my position was sad. I thought it was sad to be in Ireland singing for people who really cared when I wasn’t sure if I did.” I’d expected self-congratulation, the triumph of finally making it. You never really know.

We’re speaking in the Brooklyn backyard of this story’s photographer, and she’s wearing one of his shirts. It fits her poorly—probably a men’s XXL—and with her hair and makeup done up for the cover shoot, she gives the impression of a young lumberjack’s date the morning after prom. She must know this. They’d been taking the photos in the house earlier, in an attempt at a more laid-back glimpse of a star known for her Hollywood glamour, when she noticed a rack of his vintage clothes and asked to pull from it. More than raw beauty, hers is the gift of producing a precise effect; voilá, she looks like somebody’s girlfriend.

It’s a few weeks before the release of her second major-label album, Ultraviolence, and like any artist with over a billion YouTube views, the 27-year-old Lana Del Rey is blessed and cursed with a punishing schedule. By the time I click off my recorder, after nearly 90 minutes, her publicist has twice come out to end the interview. In both cases, she rebuffs him. Barefoot, she carries a casualness with hardly a hint of the imperious pop star I’d expected; she’s excited, pensive, a little bit apprehensive. After, she tells me it’s the longest interview she’s ever done.

From the backyard where we sit, through an old screen door with a frame rimmed in dried-out vines, I can always hear her entourage. Among the six or seven inside, there’s her bodyguard, formerly employed by Brad Pitt, and her British stylist, Johnny Blueeyes, who during the shoot was prone to bursting into the room and crying, “You’re a staaaar!” The whole team, she says, was hired in 2011, after “Video Games” attracted offers from Interscope and Polydor. “I met everyone the same week,” she says. “Because I was very shy, I just sort of stuck with them.” Later, she mentions the staff again, by way of self-analysis. “I’m never the star of my own show,” she says. “I have a very complicated family life. I have a complicated personal life. It’s not just my life, it’s everyone else’s in this extended family unit. It’s always about someone else, even with the people I work with. I’m the quietest person on the set, generally. I’m actually the one that’s trying to keep it all together. It’s pretty weird. It’s a weird, weird world.” She’s chain-smoking Parliaments.

Everyone knows Lana Del Rey’s so-called true identity: she was born Elizabeth Grant, daughter to an entrepreneur who sold domain names. In the press, there’s been a perverse joy in labeling her a phony, whether that’s regarding her supposedly surgically enhanced lips (she has always denied this), or the rebranding that marked her early career. She was born in Lake Placid, in upstate New York, and went to boarding school in Connecticut. When she first started doing shows in 2006, while studying metaphysics at Fordham University in the Bronx, it was with a folky bent and a guitar that her uncle taught her how to play. The F chord was too hard, she later told the BBC’s Mark Savage—“Four fingers? Never going to happen”—but she recorded an acoustic album as May Jailer just the same. (That record, Sirens, was never released, though it eventually leaked online.) In 2008, while still in college, she signed a $10,000 record deal with an indie label called 5 Points and moved to a trailer park in North Bergen, New Jersey. index Magazine filmed a giddy interview with her there; she appears in a car mechanic’s windbreaker, her platinum blonde hair tied up with a baby blue scarf, and, when asked about the “very cohesive package” of her musical identity, says, “It has been a lifelong ambition and desire… to have a defined life and a defined world to live in.” During this period, she teamed with David Kahne, a producer for Paul McCartney and The Strokes, and developed a more idiosyncratic sound for her self-penned lyrics, with affected jazz vocals, synthesized orchestra sections and hip-hop drums—an uncanny mix of old and new. Under the name Lizzy Grant, she released an EP, Kill Kill, and recorded an album, Lana Del Ray A.K.A. Lizzy Grant, which sat on 5 Points’ shelf for two years before it was digitally released in 2010. By then, she’d gone brunette with swooping Veronica Lake curls, and was spending time in London in search of another deal. With the help of a newly hired manager and lawyer, she bought back the album rights and pulled it from the market. Henceforth, she would be known as Lana Del Rey.

Laws regulating division of what they call “Asset division,” vary from one state to another. Kentucky legislation requires a division that is fair, implying that it should be reasonable also if it’s not equivalent.

But her past was still there in traces online, the story of a small-town girl with big dreams and the cunning to change herself to make them come true. It’d be an all-American tale, if only she seemed self-made; instead, there was a discomfiting sense of someone else behind the scenes, orchestrating a bait-and-switch with secretly funded videos that only slummed their DIY aesthetic. For an artist who broke online, her father’s background raised red flags—beside selling domain names, he’d worked in advertising and helped market her Lizzy Grant releases. And there was a suspiciously short time between “Video Games,” which was listed by many blogs as a self-release, and the announcement that she’d signed with two major labels. In any case, she was never especially embarrassed about her ambition; rather, she embraced it as a defining trait. On “Radio,” the pluckiest song on Lana Del Rey’s relentlessly downtrodden debut, Born to Die, she sings of success like a taunt: American dreams came true somehow/ I swore I’d chase em until I was dead/ I heard the streets were paved with gold/ That’s what my father said… Baby, love me cause I’m playing on the radio/ How do you like me now? She was a star who announced her own arrival, singing of fame with a wistfulness even as she was just beginning to taste it.

Many critics were bristled by her supposed fraud. The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica pronounced Lana Del Rey D.O.A. in a scathing review, concluding with: “The only real option is to wash off that face paint, muss up that hair and try again in a few years. There are so many more names out there for the choosing.” Pitchfork’s Lindsay Zoladz called Born to Die “the album equivalent of a faked orgasm.” It was an unusual time for music, with major labels chasing the internet’s whims by poaching unproven newcomers off the strength of a viral track and a look. For skeptics, Lana Del Rey became a symbol of puffed-up online buzz itself. (Before Zoladz’s 5.5 review, Pitchfork had notably awarded “Video Games” Best New Track and granted her a Rising profile, ostensibly reserved for artists they recommend.) The Hipster Runoff blogger Carles, a one-man peanut gallery to the indie press, was Lana Del Rey’s most visceral and obsessive critic, but also one of the most insightful, because criticizing her always came hand-in-hand with criticizing himself and the music web’s ceaseless appetite for breaking artists to sell to brands (or take down in think pieces). He called it their “dark, abusive, co-dependent relationship on the content farm.”

But as it turns out, a lot of music fans didn’t care. Today, Born to Die has sold over 7 million copies worldwide, more than Beyoncé’s last two albums combined. Ten months after the LP’s release, her Paradise EP debuted in Billboard’s top 10. Eight months later, Cedric Gervais’ EDM remix of “Summertime Sadness” went platinum; soon after, her song for The Great Gatsby soundtrack, “Young and Beautiful,” went platinum, too. On that last track, a haunting orchestral number, she directly addresses her own status and the position of many a woman, pop idol or not: Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful? Sometimes her songs drag long, and sometimes her self-seriousness can be grating, but in beautiful moments such as that, with her voice situated among an aptly hot-blooded score, Lana Del Rey’s confidence about her own vulnerability transcends melodrama into the realms of great art. In the period since her big authenticity reckoning, one thing has become clear: accusations of constructedness would not crush her. She says they came close, though. Shortly after the release of “Video Games,” she started dating another musician, Barrie-James O’Neill. According to a profile of her in Nylon, he first phoned her out of the blue after his manager sent him the video with the caption “Your future ex-wife.” I ask what he was like during the period of her most pronounced attacks. “He was worried,” she says. “I was, you know, a mess. I totally wanted to kill myself every day.”

Over the years, four themes have come to define her lyrics, whichever the persona: indecisiveness, submissiveness, reverence for American icons and self-destructiveness, both within herself and the men she idolizes in song. It’s a lot of “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss),” and in fact, she quotes that infamous song unwinkingly on the title track of Ultraviolence, before continuing, You’re my cult leader, I love you forever, I love you forever. The consistency at which these four themes appear in her music suggests not quite a foxy con artist, but rather someone moving superficial pieces around themselves—a name, a look—until they find a comfortable identity, much like anybody navigating young adulthood. So I ask her what she was up to with those old Lizzy Grant videos, when she’d don a Marilyn Monroe wig, drape herself in the stars and stripes and blow the webcam a kiss. “Honestly, I feel like it’s more of a girl thing,” she says. “I was just kind of playing, and, literally, I’m still playing. For me, being this way and dressed like this isn’t different than being out in a wig. It’s all the same to me. It’s all nothing, it’s all everything. I could really go any way. I’ve lived a lot of different lives. I lived down in Alabama with my boyfriend, I lived here in Brooklyn and in Jersey. I’ve been a lot of different people, I guess.”

There’s a monologue that opens her “Ride” video, which she tells me is autobiographical. Part of it goes like this: “I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me I had a chameleon soul. No moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality. Just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.” In the video, she has sex with a 40-something biker on a pinball machine. In “National Anthem,” she’s married to A$AP Rocky, who portrays a black president who likes to shoot dice. In “Tropico,” she runs with a Hispanic crowd. In a number of others, she’s with a scrawny white guy with tattoos. The men change but sex is constant; Lana Del Rey embodies searching for yourself in someone else. “I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she tells me at one point. “I’m trying to do what feels right. I tried a lot of different ways of life, you know, things I never really talk about, just because they are kind of different. I didn’t really have one fixed way that I could envision myself living. Going from a good relationship to a good relationship—I thought that was healthy.” You need a motivation or a life coach to improve your mind set. becoming a life coach is not an easy task, Specially when your client is depressed or sick.

Her portrayal of those relationships, though, has prompted mixed reviews among feminists. Some criticize the way she seems to idealize powerlessness and servitude, while others appreciate her fluid embodiment of different identities, as well as her candor about both her desire and her weakness. In any case, her comments on the subject will be disappointing for both camps: “For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept,” she says. “I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities. Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, god. I’m just not really that interested.” Fortunately, her ambivalence about politics doesn’t undo any subversiveness that may be embedded in her work (though, nor does it excuse any ill it may cause). When pressed, she adds, more illuminatingly, “My idea of a true feminist is a woman who feels free enough to do whatever she wants.” I ask her why she’s always being choked in her videos, and she gives a fitting answer: “I like a little hardcore love.” That raises an important point: she’s the one willing these scenarios into existence, romanticizing the very things that hurt her. She writes her own songs and music video treatments, and a similar self-mythologizing applies to her interviews, too. In a Lizzy Grant-era piece for the Huffington Post, she told a reporter, “Strangest performance: Alone in a basement for a handsome record executive. Strangest [song] ever written: Back at his office while I was making out with him.” When I ask her if she regrets joking like that, given how often people perceived her as a puppet of some executive team, she says, no, the story was true: “I had a seven-year relationship with the head of this label, and he was a huge inspiration to me. I’ll tell you later when more people know. He never signed me, but he was like my muse, the love of my life.” Rather than shying away from the snake pit that is sex and power, she walks right in. On Ultraviolence, there’s a song called “Fucked My Way Up to the Top.”

But is she happy now that she’s there? No matter what, her singing voice seems so sad. In an essay called “The Meaning of Lana Del Rey,” a French academic named Catherine Vigier offers one explanation: “She is representing and speaking to a contradiction facing thousands of young women today, women who have followed mainstream society’s prescriptions for success in what has been called a post-feminist world, but who find that real liberation and genuine satisfaction elude them.” Vigier goes on to argue that, for women living under capitalism, there can never be happiness—not through money, nor celebrity, nor even love—and she says the music makes this point clear. So there you have it: a post-feminist, socialist reading of Lana Del Rey. There’s a queer reading available, too, if you consider her identity-play synonymous with dressing in drag, as Christopher Glazek did in Artforum, calling her a “great queer performance artist.” With Lana Del Rey, everybody’s a critic, and any interpretation is possible.

By the time of Ultraviolence’s release, those infinite opinions have long since canceled each other out, leaving room for listeners to take up a more subjective relationship with her music without the pressure of coming up with something clever. Compared to Born to Die, the new album sounds far more like straight-up rock music, recorded in live takes with a Nashville band assembled by producer Dan Auerbach. She’s withdrawing from contemporary pop, a space in which she says she never felt comfortable; gone are the genre-blurring samples that gave her debut the impression of trying too hard to be trendy. The album feels like a sprawling American desert, devastatingly huge, windswept by shrieking electric guitars. Lana Del Rey is surrounded by ghosts and completely alone, the last lines of her verses reverbed out and leading nowhere forever. We could go back to the start, she sings on the title track, but I don’t know where we are. Certainly the rock ballad suits her retro preoccupation; the lead single “West Coast” evokes the opening riff of The Beatles’ “And I Love Her” and the chord progression from The Stooges’ proto-punk “Dirt.” She seems to have found confidence in psych-rock and narcotized swing.

One of the most telling lines from Born to Die was on the song “Off to the Races”: I’m not afraid to say that I’d die without him. Within the self-contained world of that album, this was both a low-point and a high-point, with Lana copping to utter reliance on men but also having the self-awareness to say so. On the Ultraviolence standout “Brooklyn Baby,” she exalts her band-leader boyfriend for a few verses, then lands on this uncharacteristically self-assured gem: Yeah, my boyfriend’s really cool/ But he’s not as cool as me. I ask her about the line, and she says, “That wasn’t even supposed to be there, and I kind of sang it with a smile, and Dan was looking at me and laughing. I’m just kind of fucking around.” She’s already convinced everyone else of her worth, but here she seems to have finally convinced herself.

In that Lizzy Grant interview with Huffington Post, she spoke of her love of American icons: “All the good stuff is real but isn’t, myself included… Whatever you choose to be your reality is your reality.” You can be the president’s wife, as in “National Anthem,” and you can be his mistress; you can be a stripper and you can be Eve, as in “Tropico”; it doesn’t matter which version of yourself came first when you can be everything at once. That’s a powerful thought, and I’m not sure she even completely understands it. “My career isn’t about me,” she tells me at one point, lamenting the misunderstandings about her that she says have riddled her critics’ attacks. “My career is a reflection of journalism, current-day journalism. My public persona and career has nothing to do with my internal process or my personal life. It is actually just a reflection on writers’ creative processes and where they’re at in 2014. Literally has nothing to do with me. Most of anything you’ve ever read is not true.” We don’t know who she is, but you know what? Neither does she.

As she moves from one character to another in her music videos, and from one type of man to another, from one recording alias to another, Lana Del Rey performs not just existential crisis but the power to blindly push through it. On Ultraviolence’s “Money Power Glory,” she sings, My life it comprises of losses and wins and fails and falls, a line immediately followed by more self-sacrifice: I can do it if you really, really like that. Even if she’s only adapting to curry favor, isn’t that what we all do? We perform identity every day, tweaking ourselves for a boyfriend and a boss. Using the very idea of malleability, Lana Del Rey has fashioned herself a superstar, setting to music the human drama of altering yourself to survive and rise. Still, she’s enamored with self-destruction, and perhaps shapeshifting is also about precisely that: you play so many characters that you lose any stable sense of yourself, so that when you’re standing in front of a crowd, for example, and they’re screaming your praises, your response is confusion and tears.

At shows these days, she takes breaks between songs to sign things and take pictures with fans. A recent reviewer described the crowd’s reception as hitting “approximately jet-engine volume”; a music executive who saw her said it was like she was The Beatles. But talking to her, reality bends until only sadness seems like an appropriate response. That raincloud-eyed, tattooed guy who always appears in her videos, from “Blue Jeans” to “West Coast”—his name is Bradley Soileau. Toward the end of our talk, I ask her why she has used him so much. “I like Brad because I respect him that he’s free enough to use his body as a canvas,” she says. “He has a quote about war written across his forehead. I like that he knew that alienated him from society in a way that he couldn’t work regular jobs. He made a conscious decision and manifested it physically that he was going to be on the periphery. I like what that symbolizes.” That sounds a lot like what happens to someone when they become a famous musician, I tell her. There’s no going back for her either. “That’s true,” she says. “It’s pretty fucked up.” A stray cat tip-toes across the fence surrounding the backyard, and Lana Del Rey lights another cigarette. I ask her what she misses the most. “I miss everything.”

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Arquivado em: News

Moroder

Earlier this year, some rumors popped on the web about Lana Del Rey working with Giorgio Moroder. The legendary producer isn’t in Ultraviolence but this collaboration might actually happen. During an interview with In the Mix, Moronder revealed that he is looking to work with Skrillex, Avicci and Lana.

I may – but this is all may – but I may work with Lana Del Rey… Whenever she has time we may come together and sit down.

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Arquivado em: Candids , Photos


Lana Del Rey was seen arriving at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles this Sunday, June 1st. Check the candids below:

Candids > Arriving at Chateau Marmont (June 1)
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Arquivado em: Candids


Lana Del Rey was spotted arriving at LAX Airport in Los Angeles this Thursday, May 29.

Candids > Arriving at LAX (May 28)
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