A Letter From Lana

Back in September, we optimistically emailed Lana Del Rey a bunch of questions about life, love, Twin Peaks, Courtney Love and “intergalactic possibilities”. Three months later the answers turned up. Interrogation by Al Horner. Introduction by Dan Stubbs.

- Al Horner

A recent New York Times article argued that Drake is a human meme, propagated by the internet, feeding off likes and shares, fame growing exponentially. The same might be said of Lana Del Rey, a woman seen more in GIFs and Tumblr posts than in real life. And it’s truer than ever this year, when the 30-year-old New Yorker has retreated to Miss Havisham-like levels of reclusion, giving no direct interviews to the press and choosing to communicate only via admirers like actor James Franco, a man so besotted with the singer he has begun writing a book of conversations, “real and imagined”, with her.

Del Rey’s mutation from shy wannabe Lizzy Grant to hyper-sexualised femme fatale Lana Del Rey was sealed with 2011’s ‘Video Games’, a debut single, like perhaps only Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ before it, that was so arrestingly different from everything else around that it stopped the listener in their tracks and dragged them into its world. It brought her instant fame, but you wondered if she’d be able to sustain success built on the sheer otherness of what she was offering. Her career since – from debut album proper ‘Born To Die’ to the retro-sounding ‘Ultraviolence’ and this year’s desolate, immaculate ‘Honeymoon’ – has been spent walking a tightrope between fact and fiction, and the latter generally gets the upper hand. It’s partly due to the uneasy clashing of Del Rey’s artifice and the real world. In song, her fatalism is part of the dusky world she creates, her search for bad boys and willingness to submit completely to the role. In real life, those lyrics trouble people, and telling a