Lana Del Rey is featured on the Italian magazine of L’Uomo Vogue – October issue.

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“The first time I listened to Kurt Cobain I was 11, he was the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen and even though I was very young, I could hear his sadness and as the philosophy and metaphic.”

Full interview here.

Rolling Stone learned a lot about Lana Del Rey in the two days they spent with her for their cover story. There was a lot that didn’t make the final cut, so they decided to share some other things that the singer told; her penchant for older guys, intense relationships, Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” the lyric her parents freaked out about and much more.

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Del Rey just turned 29 – not 28, as it’s usually reported – but she denies responsibility for shaving off a year.
“People have said different ages,” she says with impressive vagueness.

She never met Lady Gaga, although they were part of the same downtown scene.
“Her manager, Bob Leone, was a confidante of mine, and he gave me a two-month scholarship to a songwriting class and put me on a list of Monday night lineups at the Cutting Room. We played a couple of shows together, but never met.”
As for the early leaked Del Rey song “So Legit,” which comes off as a direct attack on Gaga (“Stefani, you suck”)? “That was a misunderstanding,” she says. Or maybe it was just not supposed to be heard by anyone? She just laughs.

Read more here.

Lana Del Rey is on the cover of Rolling Stone USA. It features a new photoshoot by Theo Wenner! You can find it on newsstands now, so keep an eye out and feel free to send us the scans if you get a copy! Below you can find the shoot:

Photoshoots > 2014 > For Rolling Stone by Theo Wennerx— 03 Pictures were added —x

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The elusive Lana Del Rey makes her first appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone in our next issue (on stands Friday), photographed by Theo Wenner – but at one dramatic point during her interviews, she tried to cancel the whole thing. “I’m not sure if they should run this story,” she tells senior writer Brian Hiatt. “I feel like maybe we should wait until there’s something to talk about. You know? I just wish you could write about something else. There has to be someone else to be the cover story. Like, there has to be. Anybody.
But before she hit that point, Del Rey had plenty to say in her interviews, which mostly took place in the Greenwich Village townhouse owned by her apparent new love interest, Italian photographer Francesco Carrozzini.
“Well, I feel fucking crazy,” she says. “But I don’t think I am. People make me feel crazy.” She blames her much-publicized “I wish I were dead” quotes on leading questions, but adds, “I find that most people I meet figure I kind of want to kill myself anyway. So, it comes up every time.”

On how she wants people to hear lyrics like “he hurt me and it felt like true love”: “I just don’t want them to hear it at all,” she says. “I’m very selfish. I make everything for me, kind of. I mean, every little thing, down to the guitar and the drums. It’s just for me… I don’t want them to hear it and think about it. It’s none of their business!”

On her Saturday Night Live performance: “It wasn’t dynamic, but it was true to form,” she says, though former Interscope Records head Jimmy Iovine reveals that he worked with her afterwards on the use of in-ear monitors. In any case, Del Rey says music-biz friends pulled away from her post-SNL: “Everyone I knew suddenly wasn’t so sure about me,” she says. “They were like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be associated with her – not a great reputation.'”

This Tuesday, July 8, Lana Del Rey gave an interview to BBC Radio 1 with Zane Lowe and was asked about her confidence during the writing process of ‘Ultraviolence’ and the success, production of it.

While being in Paris, Lana Del Rey gave an interview with Swiss source, 20 Minuten, where she talked about breaking up with Barrie James O’Neill, her performance at Kim Kardashian’s wedding and much more. Read the original interview here.

Lana, you recently performed at Kim and Kanye’s wedding. How was it?
Good! I’ve only played three songs, including «Young & Beautiful». This is their song.

How were they?
Very relaxed. Even their invitation was relaxed. Kanye just said: «Just come and sing».

Would you like to get married?
I’d love to. And I would like to have children. Hopefully it will happen one day.

At the beginning of the year there were rumours that you and your boyfriend were engaged?
We are currently not together.

What do you mean by currently?
He is a wonderful man. But there are certain things he has to overcome with. I will not give details. It was hard for our relationship. I was no longer feeling free. Let’s see how things go on from here.

You’ve just released your new album «Ultraviolence» – which is a great success. What do you expect more of this year?
Not much right now. The album is finished, it took a long time and demanded a lot from me. I have done what I wanted to do. After the last festival the whole thing is finished for me. What will come after? Completely open.

Is the song «Fucked Up My Way to The Top» ironic to understand?
I will say: It is a mixture. First, there is some bitterness toward what people think about me. Second, the lyrics are about different experiences that have influenced my life.

Your songs and your music are heavy and gloomy. When was the last time you felt really happy?
When I held my new album in my hands. Even if it sounds a little cliché. It seemed a manifestation of all the excitement and beauty of the past few years. Otherwise, I am happy when I drive down the Pacific Highway listening to The Eagles loudly.

Lana Del Rey sat down with Scott Simon from NPR today to talk about her new album, her influences much more. You can listen and read to it below:

Lana Del Rey is one of the biggest names in music right now. She packs venues around the world, sings in the new Disney movie Maleficent — all of this from a woman who used to be known as Lizzy Grant, and remade herself in part with a viral video sensation called “Video Games.”

Del Rey is about to embark on a European tour, but first, she spoke with NPR’s Scott Simon.

SCOTT SIMON: Allen Ginsberg was an early influence?

LANA DEL REY: Yes, he was an early influence — the whole beat poetry movement, and Vladimir Nabokov, and Walt Whitman.

Do we hear this in your music, do you think?

I think the thing I really got from Ginsberg was that you can tell a story through kind of painting pictures with words. And when I found out that you could have a profession doing that, it was thrilling to me. It just became my passion immediately, playing with words and poetry.

Not everybody has thought it’s a good idea to have lines like “He hit me and it felt a kiss.”

Definitely. But that’s been the theme of my career. The thing about me is, coming from an alternative music background and singing for nine years, being basically invisible, I’m so used to writing for myself — and at the end of the day, I do it because I feel like I have to. So when I’m recording or writing, I don’t have other people in mind. It’s not always comfortable for me, but I don’t not say what I want to.

You’re perfectly entitled to say, “Listen to the song” by way of answering this, but since this is an interview, what are you trying to say in a song like “Ultraviolence”?

There are so many things, really. I guess one of them is a personal experience I had with a person who believed in breaking you down to build you back up again. And although that mindset didn’t really agree with me, there was something freeing in letting go, for me, [with] this particular sort of guru-esque character. It’s a little bit about being in love with the act of surrendering, about being confused whether that’s a good idea.

There are some people who are very uncomfortable with the idea of women surrendering.

I know. It’s just that I don’t feel uncomfortable with it. The act of surrendering sort of puts me in a different mindset that allows me to be more of a channel — because I’m not holding on so tightly to things, I’m letting go, and I find that in letting go I become more of a channel for life to really happen on life’s terms. I mean, maybe that sounds sort of metaphysical, but that’s honestly how I feel.

I want to ask about another song: “Pretty When You Cry.”

The way you heard it recorded is the way I freestyled it. I made it up on the spot with my guitar player and left it as it was with that session drummer, and just called it a day on that song. Like the vocal inflection has its own narrative, it’s not all lyric drive, it’s just kind of moments in time that are meaningful to me left as they were, kind of untouched. The fact that I didn’t go back and try to sing it better is really the story of that song, because that’s sort of me revealing to you a facet of myself: I don’t care that it’s not perfect. That’s why that song is more important in that way than what I’m actually saying.

Is Lana Del Rey a character played by Elizabeth Grant?

No. Lana Del Rey is exactly who she’s supposed to be: Free enough to be her own person, and that’s exactly who I am. I’m not like a persona. I’m not a caricature of myself.

When you have a gift — and even people who can be a little exacting with what they think of as your lyric content, part of it is they believe you have a great gift. Do you feel it’s something you owe to yourself, you owe to the world, to keep in good repair and to give people something?

Not really. I feel a strong relationship with God and I feel my ties are with him. That’s how I honestly feel. Everything I do, I do it for somebody I’ve never met before, something in the great beyond. That’s my primary relationship, really, is with something divine. I feel a connection as real with that as I’ve ever had with anybody on this earth.

Lana Del Rey is featured on the cover of Les Inrockuptibles‘s June issue. It features a new photoshoot by an unknown photographer!

Magazine Scans > 2014 > Les Inrockuptibles (June – France)x— 04 Pictures were added —x

Read the full interview below. Translation by Arwena-320!

The fear of not being able to write, doubt, chaos in her life: after Born to die, it wasn’t a good period for Lana Del Rey. But she comes back with the sumptuous and nonchalant Ultraviolence , always haunted by ghosts and misfortune.

After your last album, you said you were retiring from music. But you’re back with Ultraviolence.
I was unsure of finding inspiration back one day. And I can’t do an album without having an idea about the concept or the narration itself. But in December and January, everything has been unblocked after my first met with Dan Auerbach from the Black Keys. It happened something physical between us, something from the chemical order . When we recorded the Brooklyn Baby’s song, we felt there was something going on. The album was realised in an atmosphere very nonchalant. That was really surprising for me since I have worked with the same people and there , I was with that complete unknown man!

How do you feel in front of a white sheet of paper?
Those last years, I have known long periods when I was unable to write. I was always touring and I thought naively I would write on the road but that was impossible. Finally, in December 2013, I spent some weeks in the Electric Lady Studio in New-York , while I was recording alone my whole album with Blake Stranathan ( her regular guitarist) and a session drummer . My model of sound was the Eagles! At that moment, I met Dan and he said what I made sounds to ” classic-rock ” and then we redid everything in Nashville, in 6 weeks and most of the time live.

The Eagles ‘s influence stays evident on Pretty when you cry. You’re gonna bring back the slow and make it trending!
Nobody does slows any more, I would love to retry, it’s been so long. I love to dance. While the Nashville sessions, at the end of the day, we listened again the work we’ve done and we were dancing like crazy people. Dan made his coming from Brooklyn , we invited people we met on a local shop, Juliette Lewis or Harmonie Korine were around too: I have never worked this way before. It was also the first I met such creative people in studios, the first I open doors too. I am now able keep myself isolate from people around me in the studio when I am experimenting without chains: there is a huge universe inside my mind where I can go shelter. I may not be lucky everyday in my personal life but in my studio life, I am varnished: I am always surrounded by the good persons. The simple fact that a man Like Dan get interested by me did a lot for my self-esteem and my good mood.

How went your relationship in studio?
Dan is versatile: he can be very quiet a day and then very excited. But between us we had a lot of fun. He is a true passionate person, with strict dogmas : he refuses to do some things categorically. That made us brought closer. At the beginning, my album and the Black Keys ‘s one were supposed to be released the same day. After 4 weeks of recording for mine, he was so implied that he began to imagine my album was his and it also influenced his work with his band – he has redone some tracks he didn’t find them up to par! He loves my album, he called me very late at night just for saying : << I don’t know if I am going insane but I feel we’re doing a super disc!>> .

Did you sum up your desire with words before recording?
There it was “fire”. Dan is rather technic, concrete contrary to me , I ma in the imaginary. With him, I used all my own vocabulary to make understand what I wanted to do. I was saying for example that I wanted my album to evoke the flames, but the blue ones, the hottest… I was talking to him of electric blue with red reflects.

What did he changed to your songs?
Me, in a song, I only like the drums and the guitars and he arrived with a double bass player, a saxophonist and some old steel-guitar pro… He loves musicians, he’s a real man, surrounded by 7 guys who are his best-friends, a true alpha-male ! (she laughs) It didn’t bother me : I love men, I had very good moments. Since I am in the music, I only go around with people who are in a band and most of the time they are men. I can become very hoyden in that conditions.

And when you are in studios, do behave like a geek?
Yes, mainly while mixing. I spent 4 weeks in Santa-Monica with Robert Orton [one of the producer]. Because we recorded live in Nashville, on an old console Neve , we had to digitalized everything and it sounded like messy , every instruments were overlapping. We had to restructure, reprocess , we went from spontaneity to meticulously . In studio, I know exactly what I want to hear. Even if it takes weeks, I also end up by hearing the music I had in mind. The same for my videos: everything are there, in my story-boards. Suddenly I can make the executive producer going completely crazy as I may have done with Dan.

In you work where are your part of pleasure and your part of pain?
Pleasure begins with the conception of the album and ends with its recording. I don’t leave the mixing console until the reset of the tapes, that’s a great sadness. Then arrive the tours painful or the promotion , hard… I feel force to justify , to defend myself though I don’t feel the necessity to do it: my music is good enough for not needing that. I would prefer to keep silence.

Your songs give a strange mix between sadness and wealth, a bit like Roy Orbison…
That’s true! (she sings a bit of Only the lonely). I have the impression to make joyful songs but when I made people listening to them, they tell how sad they are… I can’t escape my life which had been enough tumultuous. I keep on being plagued by doubt, by sadness. I only have blurring and emptiness ahead of me and I hate not knowing where I am going. In my sentimental life, in my homely family, I don’t any sureness… I have now a house in California, where I take care of my sister and my brother but I can’t really talk about a home… When I come back, it’s impossible for me to be readjust to real life… This is why I hate not being able to write because for 10 years writing has been the only stable and soothing element in my life.

What gave Ultraviolence’ s tone?
The first song of the album, Cruel world determined everything. Geographically, it puts the album: Dan’s guitar meets immediately California. There is in the beginning of the text a certain “épure”, a simplicity. And then arrives the chorus with its big drums and electric disorder… This cohabitation between normality and chaos is very symbolic of what I had gone through my life.

The album reminds the nonchalant atmosphere form the sixties and the seventies in Los Angeles, especially the community of musicians settled in Laurel Canyon…
I am very fond of that mythology, Joni Mitchell mainly because loved by my mother. When I lived in New-York, I was looking for that kind of community spirit: a bit like Jeff Buckley succeed in federating people around him in the nineties or like Dylan in the sixties…. But I never found my gang, my family. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I finally met people with whom to talk and play, musicians that have updated Laurel Canyon, as Father Misty Jones or Jonathan Wilson , with who I had begun to do the album… All I was looking for in New-York , I found it suddenly in the West Coast. I drove a house to another one, in my old Mercedes, I had the impression of going back to high-school.

You have grown up in the countryside. Were you already solitary?
I had a very gang of girlfriends, inseparable , we were very similar. That was the first time -and the last- I felt such togetherness. But at 14 , I was sent to boarding school , because we were doing bullshit as making out with older boys or running away for going to parties… And there, I found myself going up to 3 times a week to Church. Luckily, there were stained glasses, I could dream by watching them. In that school, I sympathized with one of the teachers – he was 22 ; I had 15 – and he made me discovering Jeff Buckley, 2Pac or Allen Ginsberg, he became my best-friend. When I came back to New-York at 19 , I tried to find back that lost friendship with people of my age but it was too late , they were all obsessed with their careers , their social successes… I was wondering where were the musicians ready to sacrifice everything , ready to die for their songs.

And you, you were never attracted by that achievement?
I have read a book about that subject: of the necessity for an artists to burn each bridges of every carer possibilities . During years, my life was in my brain, nobody knew nothing about it. It was almost like a double life. For a very long time, nobody else than my room-mate heard my songs. I played very badly guitar , in picking (she sings it). The first time I heard Catpower, it really reassured me because she was also playing simply at her beginnings, very simply. But there was a really spell, music felt on me, literally. Whole songs already made were rushing in my pen and on my notebook. At 20, while nothing happened I took the decision to keep on by hook or by cook , to answer that call. It sounds strangely but I was very fan of music, I have never told my parents I skipped classes, they knew after I was singing. I try to fight against music, I was terrified by the look of the people << who does she think she is?>> I was sure we would thought I didn’t deserve it. Many musicians confessed that they felt discomfort to me. The music is something very personal so we are really afraid of being rejected… Besides, I could have just been a chorister.

At what moment did you feel you were right to keep on hooking up?
When recording Born to die. I will never forget my father’s visit at the studio. He had no idea of what I have been doing while 6 years and he didn’t come back of seeing me so sure, directive and fulfilling , asking the producer to play a beat or a symphony… He was in shock, he felt my music was really my passion and he said to me it was one of the most beautiful day of his life. My parents had insisted for not dropping studies to music – I finished my Philosophy studies, I knew it would feed my songs. I had told them very early I wanted to become a singer but they didn’t know how much I was inhabited and serious. My mother was wondering what I was doing in New-York. When my father saw me, he understood ! And it kinda validated 6 years working.

Do you believe in gift , in inspiration?
More for than anything else in my life, I feel a gift for music. But that last years, with that very long periods during the ones I hadn’t writing a single that pleased me, I was praying for my muse to come back… And then last winter, Old money came in a block. Carmen went to me as I was walking down the streets, I had put the rhymes on my steps (she sings). At that time, I used to walk very much, it help me to write. Now, I drive, I go swimming in the Pacific. Inspiration come back with these new rituals, I record myself in my car.

Your music is often like haunted by ghosts and spirits…
If I would talk by myself , people would think I am completely crazy. But it is true. Life has been so hard with me those last 4 years that I looked for some reassurance in beyond… Before recording or going on stage, I was asking to ghosts to come to help me or to accompanied me. I had to face so much the analytical mind of people that I find refuge in the spiritual. I feel deeply connected to a kind of mysticism , I always look for the spirits’s company. I have always thought to death , it obsesses me since my childhood. When I understood what it was, that my parents won’t b there forever , I had an a hysterical crisis and they had to make a doctor come. I remind one day , my father was bringing me to do some shopping for the back to school and I told him : << What’s the point on buying new clothes since we’re all going to die?>> I had chosen to study the Philosophy field and I got passionate by Metaphysics, to try to answer those questions, to ask myself about my presence on Earth, to wave science to that reflection. 10 months, I went through a very hard period and I went visiting Fleur , one of the most known American mediums . She confirmed that many things were haunting. Her assistant made me wrote secretly, questions I wanted to ask to Fleur : << Am I done for this world? Am I supposed to be on Earth? >> I would have been too embarrassed to ask anybody but on another hand I felt completely disconnected from music and my peers. She answered me quickly: << Why are you looking for escape? Plant your feet on the ground and say yourself you were born here and today with a good reason. Look for comfort in the sand, the earth and the water…>> And it was at that time I began to reconnect with the fundamentals of the planet, to walk on the beach or to go to swim. She knew a lot of things about me, about my grandmother , on the jewels she demised me , on my brother for 3 years and whom I take care and on his setbacks or his passage in a specialized institute… It really shaken me because I told nobody and it reassures me in the existence of a beyond.

Many of your icons are ghosts too: Eliott Smith, Jeff Buckley , Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain…
The people I admire seems to be destined to die… Luckily, Leonard Cohen shows the contrary. I don’t like that romanticism around their prematured deaths. Artists are more useful alive than dead.

You mention Lou Reed in Brooklyn Baby…
I dreamt of sharing the sing with him , I thought lyrics could amused him ( my boyfriend’s in a band, he plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed). The day I touched down in New-York for making him listening to the song, he was dead [Lou Reed died the 27th October 2013].

Can you explain the lyrics of Fucked my way on the top ?
Here is a song that won’t be played on the radio… It started with a 2 minutes orchestral workpiece that Dan heat sent me , it inspired me and I began to sing that words on it…. When it became more serious, I called him to say I loved his melody , she had turned into a song and I hope he would forgive me for the lyrics (laughs)… In a general way, the orchestral side is less present than on Born To Die, there are cords only on some songs – synthetic ones. I have considered to to do it without completely. Everybody has asked why I wanted to end Ultraviolence by a cover of The other woman by Nina Simone. Because she says everything, because I love jazz and may be because it could a door for what could be the next album. I could have signed those lyrics… I have listened to another of Nina Simone’s cover Lilac Wine by Jeff Buckley… (she sings) It reminds my apprenticeship of life in New-York.

Lana Del Rey is featured on the cover of Clash‘s 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 Krugx— 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.