The best songs on “Honeymoon” are about helplessness in the face of a forced conversion: the kind of change incited by a breakup, or by any sort of sudden, unfixable loss. The most explicit homage here is the track “Freak,” in which Del Rey, in her languorous, trembling voice, encourages a lover to relocate, to find his truth out West: “Baby, if you wanna leave, come to California, be a freak like me, too.” On “Honeymoon,” Del Rey sings often of California. I am sucked into a long gallery of Los Angeles cult figurines, and cult people, up all night like vampires and bikers.”įranco’s characterization of his adopted hometown (he was born in Palo Alto) is its own kind of invention-one wonders exactly what sorts of “figurines” he’s referring to-but he’s right that Del Rey is inextricably of her time and place. “When I watch her stuff, when I listen to her stuff, I am reminded of everything I love about Los Angeles. “She grew up on the East Coast but she is an artist of the West Coast,” James Franco wrote of Del Rey in the new issue of V Magazine. “Lana” was inspired by Lana Turner, a titan of red-lip, Old Hollywood glamour “Del Rey,” which translates from Spanish as “of the King,” is a neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles.ĭel Rey’s California-which is the California of our collective unconsciousness, a dream song-is preoccupied with glamour and love and fame and anguish and loneliness and hunger. Even her taken name conjures a golden terrain. The video for the single “High by the Beach” features Del Rey pacing anxiously about a Malibu mansion in her nightclothes (she eventually fetches a rocket launcher from the sand and explodes a paparazzi helicopter that’s been hovering nearby). There she is, on the cover of “Honeymoon,” her third album, slouched atop a Starline Tours convertible, wearing dark sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat.
There she is, brooding, adjacent to a succulent, in a “Hollywood” T-shirt knotted off at the navel. Del Rey’s transformation is not singular, but mirrors the precise kind of aesthetic reinvention (a name change perhaps some cosmetic surgery the acquisition of many, many gossamer frocks) that aspiring starlets have been enacting since the advent of the studio system.ĭel Rey relocated to California in her mid-twenties, and it’s now challenging to find a promotional photograph of her that does not, in one way or another, suggest a deep allegiance to the state. In 2015, there is no better embodiment of California’s dizzying, orphic appeal than the singer and songwriter Lana Del Rey, herself a myth, the present-day iteration of Lizzy Grant, a girl who was born in New York City in 1985 and came of age in Lake Placid, a former Olympic boomtown deep in the Adirondack Mountains. There is no better embodiment of California’s dizzying, orphic appeal than Lana Del Rey.