The 10 best Lana Del Rey songs you may not know yet
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Lana Del Rey once said Leonard Cohen is the only one who “spoke my language”
Lana Del Rey has never shied away from expressing her love of Leonard Cohen and letting the influence of his work shine into her material. She felt like the late singer was a kindred spirit who felt the same way towards music thanks to their identical DNA.
Ever since Del Rey made her emergence a decade ago, she’s always stuck out from the crowd, and she defies all the expectations of a 21st-century pop star. Despite creatively lending from the past and Cohen’s generation, she cleverly added a contemporary twist to her artistry which helped the singer gain an unlikely level of mainstream success.
Similarly to Cohen, Del Rey didn’t immediately become a superstar, and it was a long, complex road full of adversity that led to them becoming recognised for their star power.
While he was a poet who came to music later in life, she knew from school that music was her calling, but it took years of failed projects and a name change before Del Rey finally received her big break.
Her independently-released debut album, Lana Del Ray, was slept on by the masses in 2010. However, after changing ‘Ray’ to ‘Rey’ and the release of 2012’s game-changing Born To Die, she’s never looked back and been on a forceful journey into firmly becoming an iconoclast.
Her raw lyricism is the ingredient at the nucleus of Del Rey’s work, making it alluring. Similarly to Leonard Cohen, her love of literature is engrained into everything she’s ever recorded.
When Cohen passed away in 2016, understandably, Del Rey was beside herself, and she lovingly paid tribute to him on her Instagram page alongside a video of her covering ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’.
In the caption, she agonisingly wrote: “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t kind of break my heart that I never got to tell you how much you changed me,” she wrote underneath. “Not that it would’ve mattered to ya, it’s just that other than Bob and Joan you were the only person I ever really felt spoke my language.”
She continued: “I love you as a real fan and I always looked for a little bit of you in all of my future friends. God bless.”
Although Del Rey never had the opportunity to meet the late poet, which undoubtedly continues to eat her up inside, the ‘Video Games’ singer partially made amends for this faux-pas in 2019.
When her Norman F*cking Rockwell tour rolled through the Jones Beach Theater in New York in 2019 on what would have been Leonard Cohen’s 85th-birthday, Del Rey invited his son Adam to join her on-stage to perform a soul-stirring version of ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’.
Listen to audio from that special night below.
