The 1990s singer Lana Del Rey identifies with the most: “I really understood her”
Lana Del Rey might have the vocals of a hummingbird and the aesthetic of a prom queen, but even she can’t escape harsh criticism from fans sometimes.
For Del Rey, the criticism isn’t so much about her work, which provides an echoey, vast, sublime soundscape of love, hate, and all things in between, but rather for the way that the singer delivers her work; more specifically, her stage presence, or lack thereof.
The ‘Summertime Sadness’ singer has a notorious reputation for arriving significantly late to her festival sets, such as the Glastonbury Festival in 2023, when she arrived half an hour late. “I’m so fucking late they may cut my set. I’m sorry, my hair takes so long. If they cut the power, let’s keep going,” she told the squirming crowd, and sure enough, with the stroke of midnight, her microphone was turned off. She tried as best she could acapella with the front row, but was quickly escorted away.
This isn’t a one-time occurrence; a few weeks later, she was nearly 20 minutes late to her British Summer Time set. A year later, as I stood on my tiptoes in a near-frenzied crowd to get a glimpse of the superstar, Del Rey was again around half an hour late, and as I watched the rest of the set in a huff, the extra time had allowed the crowd ample time to work themselves into a restless fever-pitch, which was, for lack of a better word, a miserable affair.
We can say all we want about how disappointing this is from a truly original, inspirational artist, but if we try to understand where it comes from, the possible answer came from Del Rey herself, who once admitted that the musician that she identifies with most is Cat Power, because of her relationship with the audience.
When opening up about her early stage fright, the singer-songwriter once admitted, “That’s why I really liked Cat Power, because I felt like I really understood her. She was a person who really meant a lot to me, just knowing that it was okay to start your performance with your back to the audience, at first, if you really couldn’t face it.
She added, “I mean, a lot of the time I just really felt like, ‘I’m not really sure if I can do it.’ But I mean, I’ve gotten better”.
Power famously struggled with the limelight in her early career, alongside issues with alcoholism and depression. Often, she’d come onto the stage with her hair covering her face, being sick into her piano, or angling her music at the drum kit, facing away from the crowd. The shows were famously erratic, with this sheepish chaos making them unpredictable affairs.
Might this ubiquitous tardiness be a continued manifestation of her earlier stage fright, then, and not evidence of some snarky rebellion and overly dramatic hair routine? In her early days, Del Rey would often shake onstage and would sometimes kneel while she sang to stop her legs from giving out. I’m sure Power was late to her sets once or twice for the unshakable fear backstage. In that way, the two are peas in a pod.
