Y
OU’VE GOT TO CLIMB THE HILL BEHIND
the Chateau Marmont to get to the
office where I’m meeting Lana Del Rey,
which feels appropriately on the nose
on this early-August day: The hotel
is Hollywood’s ultimate nexus of glamour and
doom, the keeper of 90 years of celebrity secrets
that touch everyone from Bette Davis to Britney
Spears. It shows up in the homemade visuals for
Del Rey’s breakout single “Video Games” and in
the lyrics of songs like “Off to the Races.” She lived
here while writing her Paradise EP in 2012. Sharon
Tate and Roman Polanski lived here, too, in Room
54, before moving to Cielo Drive where — exactly
50 years ago, as of midnight tonight — the Manson
Family arrived.
But these kinds of connections are standard
in the Lana Del Rey multiverse, where nods
to Bob Dylan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elton John
and Henry Miller can coexist in a single chorus
and not feel overdone. (No, seriously: Play her
2017 duet with Sean Ono Lennon, “Tomorrow
Never Came.”) And if the Lana of five years ago
radiated significant Sharon Tate circa Valley of the
Dolls energy, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter
has more of a Summer of Love thing going on
now. The songs she has previewed from her fifth
album, the exquisitely titled Norman Fucking
Rockwell, are far more Newport Folk Festival
than femme fatale — meandering psych-rock jam
sessions and slippery piano ballads that shout out
Sylvia Plath. The narrative thread throughout all
of this can lead listeners down an endless rabbit
hole of references, but you can sum it up like so:
The music Lana Del Rey makes could only be
made by Lana Del Rey.
That means songs like the nearly 10-minute-
long “Venice Bitch,” the most psychedelic tune
in her catalog, or the title track, a ballad rich with
one-liner gems like, “Your poetry’s bad, and you
blame the news” — songs that represent the best
writing in her career yet have almost zero chance
of radio play. Norman Fucking Rockwell, out
Aug. 30, is a “mood record,” as Del Rey describes
it while perched barefoot on a velvet couch in
the new office of her longtime management
company, an airy pad way up in the Hollywood
Hills with platinum plaques scattered about that
no one has gotten around to hanging up yet.
There are no big bangers, just songs you can
jam out to during beach walks and long drives.
This is not exactly a surprise: Del Rey’s only
top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 was a raving
Cedric Gervais remix of her song “Summertime
Sadness.” But in the streaming era, when success
often means getting easily digestible singles
on the right playlists, making an album that’s
meant to be wallowed in for 70 minutes isn’t just
inspired — it’s defiant.
Yet it’s an approach that has worked for Del
Rey: Her songs, even the long, weird ones,
easily rack up tens of millions of streams, and
overall they have amassed a solid 3.9 billion
on-demand streams in the United States,
according to Nielsen Music. Collectively, her
catalog of albums has sold 3.2 million copies
in the United States, and all of her full-length
major-label studio albums have debuted on
the Billboard 200 at No. 1 or No. 2. The first of
those, 2012’s Born to Die, is one of only three
titles by a woman to spend over 300 weeks on
the Billboard 200. (The other two: Adele’s 21
and Carole King’s Tapestry.) Born to Die also has
spent 142 weeks on Billboard’s Vinyl AlbumsAUGUST 24, 2019 | WWW.BILLBOARD.COM 49PREVIEW 2019
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