This isn’t to say every song she has ever recorded is a downer, or that she hasn’t displayed a knowing sense of humor about her reputation. In the past, Lana has become famous for themes that are, at times, hopeless: toxic romance, violence, drug use, despair, aging, death. The new record is a departure in key ways, though. Lust for Life draws from folk and hip-hop, two genres that she says she loves because they both privilege real storytelling. On each album, the skeleton remains more or less the same while she infuses her work with stylistic elements from different genres, from rap to rock to jazz. She says her main criteria is whether or not a song sounds like it will transport listeners to somewhere else in their minds. Most pop stars rely on reinvention to retain relevance, but her output is remarkably consistent. Front and center in the mix is her voice, which has a crooner’s tone and an especially wide range, from deep and low to high and sharp. The album, like all of her work, is fastidiously and emphatically Lana in its sound and atmosphere: a haze of lazy pacing and flowery melodies, conjuring a foreboding backdrop for lyrics about summer and antique celebrity icons and dangerous, dissatisfying relationships. She has a familial rapport with not just Nowels, but engineers Dean Reid and Kieron Menzies, who she credits again and again for making her work better, and the four of them ruminate on mastering, making jokes about Lana’s perfectionism when it comes to the final cuts of her songs. As we sit down to listen to Lust for Life, she is clearly at home: Like a good host, she offers me her comfy leather singing chair and instead curls up on a blue velvet couch nearby. “If I get a great melody in my head, I know it’s a gift,” she says. Nowels tells me that even though the new album isn’t out yet, she’s already making new music. She says a day that she works is better than a day that she doesn’t. Lana is a studio junkie- Lust for Life is her fourth album in about five years. “Everyone is so obsessed with saying ‘no’-they break you down to build you up.” “ I went through a hundred and eleven producers just to find someone who says ‘yes’ all the time,” she says. When she finally met Nowels, he didn’t want to change a thing. Gearing up to record what would become Born to Die, Lana had met with a number of producers who all tried to tell her what she should or should not sound like, with some encouraging her to ditch the breathy vocal style that would become her signature. Nowels has more than 20 years on Lana, who is 32, and he inhabits something of an uncle role, making the songwriter a bit bashful when he sweetly refers to a ballad called “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing” as a “masterpiece” for its lyrical message about the importance of finding ways to have fun, even in the Trump era. He has come down today to listen to the album with us, a pair of sunglasses firmly on his face. The studio is owned and operated by Rick Nowels, her longtime producer. She likes that the studio is by the beach, where she’ll sometimes go to listen to mixes of songs on her iPhone. “I get red light fever in the booth,” she says. (“I always have Tammy there,” she says of the country singer best known for her ode to everlasting devotion, “Stand by Your Man.”) This chair, and not the actual booth in the front of the room, is where Lana sits to record her vocals. In the center of the room is a scratched-up leather club chair with a Tammy Wynette album cover facing it. It looks a bit like how you’d expect Lana Del Rey’s workplace to look: vaguely and warmly retro, with dark wood cabinets and a mid-century-looking painting with interlacing geometric shapes hanging on the back wall. It is a beautiful room filled with sun coming in from a skylight and two windows, the opposite of the average dank music studio. She has recorded here since 2012’s Born to Die, her major label debut. Right away, she invites me through a side door into the inner sanctum where her brooding songs are created.įor Lana acolytes, this is a mythic place. She is not dressed like the glammed-up mystic you see in music videos and photographs: her hair, long and brown, is tied functionally behind her neck, and she is in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, with cream canvas sneakers and white ankle socks on her feet. It is the week before her new album, Lust for Life, will be released, but she seems unhurried and relaxed when I ask if she’s been busy in the leadup to such a big day, she says “no” with a laugh, as if she knows she probably should be. Famous artists are notoriously late, but when I arrive about 20 minutes early for an interview at Lana Del Rey ’s Santa Monica studio, she is ready for me, offering a handshake and a smile.
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