Lana del Rey: Music becomes 40 years old

Lana del Rey turns 40 on June 21 – and has long been one of the most influential musicians in their generation. Her distinctive style, your voice and texts have shaped modern pop for over a decade. A look at your career, her sound and your life off the big stage for your round birthday.

Lana Del Rey, born as Elizabeth Woolridge Grant on June 21, 1985 in New York City, grew up in tranquil Lake Placid in the state of New York as the oldest of three siblings. She discovered her passion for music early – she learned to play guitar and started writing her own songs. At 17, she started her musical career under the artist name “May Jailer” and recorded her first album “Sirens”, which, however, did not come to the public until 2012. At that time she performed in small clubs in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. Incidentally, she hadn’t expected that Del Rey would be a superstar once years later: “I always sang, but I had no intention of watching it seriously. When I came to New York at 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and loyal fans in the underground scene, but at that time we only played for each other.”

Her second album “Lana del Ray aka Lizzy” was released in 2010 – this time under the pseudonym “Lizzy Grant”. A year later, she made international breakthrough with her first official single “Video Games” and the new artist name “Lana del Rey”. In the same interview, she said about the choice of names in the same interview with the “Vogue”: “I wanted to do a name that I was able to do my music. I was in Miami quite often at the time and spoke a lot of Spanish to my friends from Cuba – Lana del Rey reminded us of the glamor of the coast. It just sounded great when you put it on my tongue.” Her debut studio album “Born to” then sold over five million times worldwide and was one of the five best-selling albums of the year in 2012-the final proof that the underground singer had become a global pop star.

After her international breakthrough, Lana Del Rey published a cover of the Bobby Vinton song “Blue Velvet” as part of an H&M campaign, followed by “Young & Beautiful”-a contribution to the soundtrack of the cinema success “The Great Gatby”. But it did not remain: one success album followed after the other – including “Ultraviolence” (2014), “Honeymoon” (2015), “Lust for Life” (2017) and “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd” (2023). In the meantime, she looks back on a remarkable overall work with ten studio albums, two EPS and a soundtrack. The record “The Right Person Will Stay” only appeared last month.

And her success speaks for itself: Del Rey’s music – often melancholy, nostalgic and inspired by the American zeitgeist of the 1950s and 1960s – inspires fans worldwide. Over 126 million records sold impressively prove this. She also received a number of awards, including several Brit Awards, MTV Europe Music Awards and Billboard-Women-in-Music prices. Known? For her unique sound, Del Rey regularly works with producer Jack Antonoff (41) – a close friend and creative partner of pop star Taylor Swift (35).

The 40-year-old is lovingly celebrated by her fans as the “Queen of Indiiepop”. She once explained why her fans are so loyal to her: “I think because I express the feelings that she feel.” She shares the same pain – but pack it in music, she once explained in an interview.

However, what many do not know: In her music, she often processes experiences from a particularly difficult time. For years, Del Rey fought with an alcohol addiction, as she confessed in 2012: “I used to be a big drinker. I drank every day and I thought it all was incredibly cool. It was wild years. Alcohol was the first love of my life. My parents were very worried. When I liked drinking more than anything else, I knew that I had a problem.” Today she looks back clearly and says: “Alcohol was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

While Lana Del Rey has been running a successful music career for over a decade, she has not been lucky in love for a long time. For three years she was in a relationship with the Scottish singer Barrie-James O’Neill (37) of the band Kassidy. Later, relationships followed with the Italian photographer Francesco Carrozzini (42) and the TV personality Sean “Sticks” Larkin (51). She was temporarily engaged to the musicians Clayton Johnson and Evan Winiker (42) – but these relationships also failed.

In August of last year, she caused a surprise: Del Rey was engaged to the reptile expert Jeremy Dufrene. Since when the singer and the father of three have been a couple, it has not been publicly known – but that they got to know each other on a boat tour in 2019. At that time, Dufrene supposedly didn’t know who was del Rey. Just a month after the engagement became known, the two in the Allemand, Louisiana, said yes in a small circle. Since then, DEL Rey has largely held out her marriage from the public. When asked how things are going on in married life, she said briefly: “It is going well. We are happy.”