Lana Del Rey‘s strategy around her upcoming album Lust For Life seems to be sitting down and gabbing with her heroes. It’s a good gig, if you can get it. Following up her chat with Courtney Love, LDR talked to Stevie Nicks for a piece in V magazine, and the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman got Lana to talk about the suddenly optimistic stripe that runs through her new releases.
Nicks asked Rey how she went from Born To Die to Lust For Life, and the singer revealed that it was entirely unintentional and just an effect of getting older.
‘Yeah, they’re complete opposites, and it’s funny because when I chose the title, I didn’t think about it right away,” Rey said. “It was the title of the first song I wrote for this record. But there are so many things that have gotten me to the point that I’m at now. One of them is just time. And because I do write everything myself, I just wanted to chronicle how I was feeling honestly, in the moment, for each record. So, I had a lot of stories that I wanted to tell that I hadn’t told yet up until this point. And now, through the last four records, I got out a lot of those stories and a lot of those feelings, and for the first time, I’ve caught myself up to real time.”
That feeling of being in the present helps to explain why there’s a more energized feeling to her latest release.
“There’s definitely been a feeling of freedom and lightness being in the present moment,” she said. ‘That brings on that lust for life feeling, when you don’t have all of those feelings about the past weighing you down.”
Del Rey told Nicks that engaging with the present made this album very topical and connected to the world, where before her albums were separate from the zeitgeist in sound and subject.
“This record is really different,” she said. “When there were the women’s marches, I was writing about that. There was enough space in my mind to really absorb everything. I think I was very much in the mix of culture in California over the last five years, but it feels good to feel more connected to a wider world.”
But that doesn’t mean the new album is going to be a downer. Both Nicks and Del Rey agreed that artists need to provide levity and joy.
‘Write your songs, but remember that we’re the ones that are here to lighten, to lighten life, to light the lanterns and the little fairy lights, and try to keep people going,” Nicks said. “We have to have hope. We have to believe that this will all end up okay and that we’ll all end up okay. Because if we don’t do it, then who the hell is gonna do it?”
Give the whole interview a read over at V.
