Lana Del Rey discusses upcoming album in conversation with Billie Eilish
In a new feature for Interview magazine, Lana Del Rey discussed her forthcoming album with fellow pop sensation Billie Eilish. The pair have long professed their deep admiration for one another, and when asked who she wanted to talk to for her promotional conversation, it was between Eilish and John Waters. “I was nervous about the interview because when me and Mel [Ottenberg, Interview’s editor-in-chief] talked about it, I was like, it could only be only Billie or John Waters. When they said you wanted to do it, I was so happy,” Del Ray told Eilish.
As the pair’s conversation began, Eilish reaffirmed her admiration for Del Rey admitting, “You were my lock screen on the first phone I ever got,” adding, “I knew for months before I got my first iPhone that it was going to be that fucking photo of you with the bee on your lip.”
Eilish also revealed that, although she was home-schooled, she “still had talent shows even though we didn’t have a school. I was all up in the talent show singing your stuff.”
“Do we have any footage?” Del Rey asked.
“Oh yeah,” Eilish confirmed. “I sang “Brooklyn Baby” at the last one I did. I’d film myself covering your songs and pretend that I was gonna blow up on YouTube from them, and then they’d get two views.”
For worries that the conversation could enter an irrecoverable tangent, Eilish eventually interjected playfully, “Lana, please. We’re here to talk about you for the love of god. You’re putting out another album [Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd]. How are you feeling? Are you dreading it? Are you excited? Are you nervous?”
“All of it, as usual,” Del Rey admitted. “At first, I was super excited because I started it with Mike Hermosa, a DP and cameraman who, as far as I knew, was not a musician. Every Sunday morning, he’d lie around and play these licks on his guitar. One day, I was like, ‘Do you think I could record that?’ Then I’d sit down and start singing. After five months, we went into the studio with the guys I know from Echo Park, like Drew Erickson, Benji, and Zach Dawes.
“Later, I found out they were composing for all these great people like Weyes Blood and Father John Misty and Pink Floyd. Mike was like, ‘I’ve never been in a studio, so I don’t really feel like I should be a session player.’ And I was like, ‘I know it’s a lot to go into that ISO booth and play what we have been playing for fun, but just try it.’ Then Drew would come in and record these beautiful strings.
“I would talk about wanting a little bit of a spiritual element, and we talked about working with Melodye [Perry] and Pattie [Howard] and a couple of women who had toured with Whitney Houston, which was just unfathomable to me that I could be in the same room with them. So that started building one element of the sound for maybe one-fifth of the album.”
“For those nine months, I was as comfy as could be,” she continued. “Then, things started leaking, and I wasn’t sure how. It brought back all this weird tension of, ‘I know it’s not about money, but what else are they seeing if they can somehow transcribe all the words in the song?’ I started getting nervous about peripheral things, and then I told everyone I wanted to wait until August because I wasn’t feeling ready. Then, as things started to leak, I thought, ‘You know what? It has been done for a year, so I’ll just move ahead with it.’”
“This has been done for a year?” Eilish quizzed.
“September 2022 was the very last song I wrote,” Del Rey replied. “It’s a song called ‘Margaret,’ about Jack Antonoff’s fiance [Margaret Qualley]. I was like, ‘You know what? I want to write a song for him.’ It lands right in the middle of the album. It’s funny; this album felt totally effortless. When I did Norman Fucking Rockwell! it was about world-building, whereas this was straight vibing.”
Del Rey will finally release her ninth studio album and follow-up to 2021’s Blue Banisters, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, on March 24th. So far, it has been previewed by the eponymous lead single. Hear below.
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