Keith Girard
Lana Del Rey has a Rolling Stone cover under her belt and talks about her new single ‘Honeymoon’ from her upcoming album. (Photo: Theo Wenner for Rolling Stone)
Lana Del Rey, the moody, much derided singer, has gone from her disastrous “Saturday Night Live” debut to the cover of Rolling Stone. Last year it proclaimed her “Rock’s Saddest, Baddest Diva.” It was a long-time coming.
Although landing on the music magazine’s cover doesn’t mean as much as it used to, it’s still a signal that an artist has arrived.
Oddly, it wasn’t something she was looking forward to. According to the magazine, she tried to talk her way out of it. Maybe she knows, the cover also carries with it a curse.
“I just wish you could write about something else. There has to be someone else to be the cover story. Like, there has to be. Anybody,” she told the magazine.
If the cover does carry with it a curse, Del Rey is probably immune to it by now. Del Rey was pilloried by critics after her SNL performance because she seemed to fall short of the pre-show hype. She was throaty and restrained and stood dead still in front of the mic.
Her anti-style style of singing was a departure from the animated showtune brio of pop stars like Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. But she still owns up to the performance.
“It wasn’t dynamic, but it was true to form,” she says of the show. “Everyone I knew suddenly wasn’t so sure about me. They were like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be associated with her – not a great reputation.'”
While critics were slow to warm up to her here, she was strongly embraced in Europe, where her haunting, nihilistic, style caught on with kids on the Continent. Now maybe she’ll get her long-await due on this side of the pond.
Del Rey’s latest new single, “Honeymoon,” the first from her upcoming album by the same name, is in the same fatalistic style. She explains:
“Well, I feel fucking crazy. “But I don’t think I am. People make me feel crazy. I find that most people I meet figure I kind of want to kill myself anyway. So, it comes up every time.”
Despite it’s cheery title, the song is another dark trip into a world of torture and romance.
“We both know the history of violence that surrounds you.
But I’m not scared,
there’s nothing to lose
now that I’ve found you.”
Her most recent, third studio album Ultraviolence, released in June last year, was her first No. 1 album in the United States. She’d previously hit No. 1 overseas with her second album Born to Die.
Check out her new song below, let us know your thoughts and be sure to follow IM on Twitter for the latest music news.