Lana Del Rey Leads With Her Heart

Lana Del Rey is one of the most influential songwriters of the 21st century and also one of the most misunderstood. But there's a fine (and radical) art to learning to let go.

- By Chloé Cooper Jones. Photographs by Collier Schorr

Lana Del Rey points a red vape at a set of lounge chairs in her backyard. "When I bought those," she tells me, "I was stoked."

I'm skeptical. The chairs look untouched, and unused. A telltale line bisects their fabric, marking where the fence has cast a shadow over half of the material. There, in perpetual shade, the vibrant green pattern is preserved, but above it the fabric is exposed, bleached by the sun, nearly to white.

"We had a firepit," Del Rey says, gesturing first to a place in the yard that doesn't seem to have ever had a firepit and then to a dilapidated daybed. "Despite its state, this daybed, I'm proud of this," Del Rey tells me. "I got it from Living Spaces. They brought it in the morning and assembled it by four. That's amazing."

Is it? I wonder. Is this quick assembly of a now waterlogged and forgotten daybed amazing to Lana Del Rey, one of the most successful and influential singers, songwriters, and forces in popular music over the past decade? Some of my doubt manifests in relation to her house, which seems more set design than home, conceived to persuade me that I'm in the presence of the world's most down-to-earth multimillionaire.