The origin of Lana Del Rey
There is a shrouding myth and mystery that surrounds Lana Del Rey, and it’s one that she built on purpose. For the first decade of her career, she seemed to be a professional storyteller, writing herself like a starlet in a fictional universe full of glamour, money, literature and lust. As she lent her voice to the figure of Lana Del Rey, the real person of Elizabeth Grant got lost within, turning mystery into misconception.
The standard belief about Del Rey is that she was raised like a socialite on daddy’s money. From solely listening to her music, you’d probably think she was born in Hollywood and stayed there, navigating the bright lights and parties. From her earlier albums, it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that her life has followed a line of wild recklessness, drug deals, questionable relationships and worrying power dynamics. Perhaps the most insidious belief about her – pulled baselessly from her Americana aesthetic – is that she’s a conservative woman with a real dedication to old-school, misogynistic beliefs that women should be submissive. Amidst her lyrical world, the lines between Del Rey’s truth and her fictionalised tales have been blurred to create a soft-focus veil between us and her.
But recently, she seems to be reaching a hand through that veil. In her latest releases, Del Rey has been speaking from the heart from Norman Fucking Rockwell onwards. She’s let the world in more and more. “I just needed two seconds to be me,” she sings on ‘Fingertips’, a track on her newest album that traces the darkest lines of her biography and inner workings with previously unheard, outright honesty. The truth behind the figure is really much simpler than her stories would make out. Elizabeth Grant was a creative young girl, born and raised in upstate New York, trying to make something of herself.
There are elements of Del Rey’s early songs that soundtrack her life. While not quite the wild heart-shaped-glasses-tinted Lolita carnage she writes of in her works, pieces like ‘This Is What Makes Us Girls’ give an insight into her teenhood recklessness. Ending with her getting set away to a boarding school as her relationship with her mother broke down, she was cast off as a kind of lost cause, singing in ‘Fingertips’, “What kind of mother was she to say I’d end up in institutions?”
In the isolation of her school, Del Rey started world-building. Mixing her own rebellion and inner spirals with the literature she was escaping into, the romanticism that colours her music was born early. But it was hard won as the singer said of her youth, “I was unhappy for some time. I got into a lot of trouble. I used to drink a lot. That was a hard time in my life.”
From boarding school, she made her way to Long Island. “When I was a waitress wearing a tight dress,” she sings of her days here, adding, “It made me feel, made me feel like a god.” Gathering some cash for her next move, this was the turning point as she taught herself guitar. She said she “could probably write a million songs with those six chords” and got started on that mission.
Not even 19 yet, her various older pseudonyms were born in these early years. Across the internet, in differing quality levels, you can find music by Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena, Sparkle Jump Rope Queen and a scattering of other names, all immortalising the blossoming talent that would become Lana Del Rey. Dedicated fans know these early tracks well as songs like ‘Kill Kill’, ‘Mermaid Motel’, ‘Queen Of Disaster’ and ‘Pawn Shop Blues’ are direct preludes to the sound and lyrical style that would make her name.
For a long while, that’s how it was. The musician moved to New York to study a philosophy degree, worked doing community outreach with addicts after getting clean and sober from her own dependencies, and then spent her evenings recording rough demo songs and uploading them to the void of the internet from her apartment in the Bronx and then a trailer in New Jersey. Embedding herself in the city’s DIY music scene, there are plenty of videos and soundbites of these early performances to be found as she began fostering a tight, cultish following.
During these years, one producer, David Kahne, met her at the time and was keen to make her a star. “Our plan was to get it all organised and have a record to go, and she’d be touring right after she graduated from college,” he said. But their plans couldn’t keep up with her swift growth and evolution as an artist. “Like a lot of artists, she morphed. When she first came to us, she was playing plunky little acoustic guitar, [had] sort of straight blonde hair, very cute young woman. A little bit dark, but very intelligent. We heard that. But she very quickly kept evolving.”
Lizzy Grant never worked because Lana Del Rey was always on the horizon. That blonde-haired, guitar-playing girl would always give way to something grander. When you combine Del Rey’s strict boarding school days and teenage rebellion, her lifelong interest in literature and poetry, her philosophy degree and her vast tastes in film and music, it feels inevitable that a bigger character would emerge. Before anyone could ever hook onto Lizzy Grant or her other pseudonyms, Lana Del Rey was born.
Allowing her to escape her upstate youth or her broke days in the Bronx, she wanted to become a more glamorous figure. “I wanted a name I could shape the music towards,” she said of the decision, crafting a moniker that was inspired half by Hollywood starlet Lana Turn and half by the classic Americana, blue-collar car, the Ford Del Rey sedan, perfectly merging her lofty inspirations with her roots.
Another insidious myth about Del Rey is that she seems to blow up out of nowhere or that she had her career purchased. The actuality is that her breakthrough came much later than most. Even after adopting her now-famed name and continuing to chug along with recording and occasionally releasing demos with her distinctive sound more than solidified, Del Rey was 26 by the time people took notice. The breakthrough itself was a simple act of fate. After uploading a self-made music video made of stock footage of vintage clips to her song ‘Video Games’, the world discovered a star.
“I just put that song online a few months ago because it was my favourite. To be honest, it wasn’t going to be the single, but people have really responded to it,” Del Rey said of the move when fame suddenly swept her up. After years of working away, that one YouTube video earned her ‘Next Big Thing’ status, a record deal and a budget, allowing her to finally bring Lana Del Rey to live in her full glory.
The rest, as they say, was history. With the scope to now make music on the cinematic scale she had been working towards for years, Del Rey came to total fruition on her 2012 debut album Born To Die. From that moment on, her lyricism has weaved a complex image of literary and cultural references, glamourised fiction and shrouded facts that will forever have people wondering who she really is. Remaining relatively shy to the limelight, the only clues remain in her lyrics as she returns to herself on ‘Fingertips’: “Sunbather, moon chaser, queen of empathy / I give myself two seconds to breathe / And go back to being a serene queen / I just needed two seconds to be me.”
