Lana Del Rey: She Does It For The Girls

After a decade of feeling unexcited after the critical response to her debut album Born to Die, the greatest American songwriter of the 21st century is finally inspired about her career and life again. Rolling Stone UK meets her in LA to discuss the "overculture", romance and her new album, Did You know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd

- By Hannah Ewens. Photography by Chuck Grant

Lana Del Rey had not felt enthusiastic for more than a decade. Her career wasn’t animating her like it used to. Everything felt like an endurance test. This went on for a terribly long time, she says, but it’s over now. It ended three months ago, actually. She and her younger brother Charles, with whom she is highly energetically in tune, went to a mall in the Valley with their sister Caroline’s baby. It was a slow day of total serenity. They breezed through the aisles with their face masks on, invisible to people. After they pulled out of the parking area in separate vehicles, Charles called her and said, “Do you feel like something’s different?” And Lana Del Rey took an emotional and metaphysical reading of her atmosphere and said, “That’s so funny. I really, really do.”

There was no obvious logic to why this change occurred. “That’s the funniest thing about life,” she tells me in her breathy Old Hollywood voice, sitting on an outdoor sofa in a backyard in Los Angeles. “You can pray and pray and pray to feel unburdened, but for no explanation for why and when, all of a sudden everything lifts.”

Del Rey’s persistent lack of excitement began with the scathing critical reception of her 2012 debut album, Born to Die. Despite its hit status with the public and immediate cult relevance to fans, the hip-hop-inspired orchestral pop album was initially misassessed by music journalists and bloggers.