What drew Lana Del Rey to Nina Simone?
Back in 2016, a 30-year-old Lana Del Rey posted a Nina Simone quote to Instagram: “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times”.
Two years prior, Del Rey had covered a pair of songs made famous by Simone, ’The Other Woman’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’, and also got herself a tattoo of her name on her collarbone. Like many of the other heroes Lana has mentioned in interviews or immortalised with body art, including Billie Holiday, Whitney Houston, and Amy Winehouse, the reverence for Simone didn’t appear to be based on any specific desire to follow her lead musically or stylistically; it was more about an attitude, a sense of purpose and confidence in the face of considerable criticism and judgment from the outside world.
Del Rey’s Nina Simone fandom isn’t actually a topic she seems to have addressed specifically very often, if at all, over the years. When she decided to record a cover of ‘The Other Woman’ for her 2014 album Ultraviolence, however, she made it clear it was for a very specific reason.
“I had a long-term relationship for seven years with someone who was the head of a label, and I felt like I was that ‘change of routine’,” Del Rey told Complex at the time, referring to the bridge from the song, which was originally written by Jessie Mae Robinson in 1957: “And when her old man comes to call / He’ll find her waiting like a lonesome queen / ‘Cause when she’s by his side / It’s such a change from old routine”.
Del Rey had taken quite a bit of heat for acknowledging, fairly early in her career, that she had “slept with a lot of the guys in the industry”, leading some to question the legitimacy of her rise to fame. She clarified that none of those men had actually helped her get a record deal, “which was quite annoying”, but listening to Simone’s version of ‘The Other Woman’ communicated the narrative better than Del Rey could in any interview.
“But the other woman will always cry herself to sleep,” Simone sings in her 1959 rendition, “The other woman will never have his love to keep / And as the years go by the other woman will spend her life alone”.
‘The Other Woman’ was the closing track on Ultraviolence, and a year later, when Del Rey released her next album Honeymoon, she again chose to close the record by channelling Ms Simone, this time covering her 1964 single ‘Don’t Let Be Misunderstood’, which many people will also know from prior covers by The Animals and Elvis Costello, among others.
“I wanted to do another cover to wrap up this record,” Del Rey told the Current in 2015, “‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ is definitely one of my favourites that [Simone] sings. Melodically, it’s probably my favourite, and the message, I like that too. ‘Just a soul whose intentions are good’.”
When asked more specifically about her Nina Simone tattoo in 2014, she didn’t say much about Simone as a person or artist, simply answering, “I just like the idea of carrying someone with me on the road, so I like the idea of bringing Nina and Billie [Holiday] on the road”.
The nuances of Lana Del Rey’s admiration for Nina Simone, aside from the obvious reasons that millions of other people admire her as an artist, aren’t necessarily anybody’s business but Lana’s, but the fact that she’s always respected the “divas” who came before her, to use a term Simone seemed to like, does at least suggest that she appreciates the shoulders she’s standing on.
As Simone once said herself, “There’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were”.
