With a new album just released, now is the perfect time to look back at the career of Lana Del Rey. Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was born on 21 June 1985, in Manhattan, New York City, and was the eldest of three children. When she was one year old, the family moved to Lake Placid, New York, and while attending St. Agnes School she began singing in her church choir, where she was the cantor. She had trouble making fiends during her teenage years, and this, combined with her obsession with death, caused her to drink to excess, and by the age of 14 she was an alcoholic. Her parents sent her to Kent School to get sober, and after graduating from Kent School, she spent a year living on Long Island with her aunt and uncle and working as a waitress. During this time her uncle taught her to play guitar, and she was soon writing songs and performing in nightclubs under various names such as Sparkle Jump Rope Queen and Lizzy Grant And The Phenomena. In 2004 she enrolled at Fordham University in The Bronx where she majored in philosophy, with an emphasis on metaphysics, and at the same time she was still writing, and even recorded an album called 'Sirens' under her stage name of May Jailer, which leaked onto the internet in mid-2012. At her first public performance in 2006, she met Van Wilson, an A&R representative for 5 Points Records, and the following year she submitted a demo tape of acoustic tracks to 5 Points, which offered her a recording contract for $10,000. She used the money to relocate to Manhattan Mobile Home Park, a trailer park in North Bergen, New Jersey, where she began working with producer David Kahne, with the plan of having a record ready to go right after she graduated from college. She graduated from Fordham with a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy in 2008, and immediately released the three-track EP 'Kill Kill' under the name Lizzy Grant as planned. It was at this time that she was thinking of changing her stage name, and as she was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, and speaking a lot of Spanish with her friends, she wanted an exotic Latin-sounding name. She therefore combined Lana from the actress Lana Turner with the Brazilian-produced Ford Del Rey sedan, and became Lana Del Rey, although initially she used the alternate spelling Lana Del Ray for her self-titled debut album, which was released in January 2010. However, after being available on iTunes for just four months it was withdrawn from sale, with Del Rey reported to have bought the rights back from 5 Points, as she wanted it out of circulation to "stifle future opportunities to distribute it". It has therefore become something of a rarity in her discography, and so as I've already posted the May Jailer record, the logical place to start these posts is with the 'Lana Del Ray' album, also subtitled 'a.k.a. Lizzy Grant', but which I've simply called 'The Lizzy Grant Album'.
Track listing
1 Kill Kill
2 Queen Of The Gas Station
3 Oh Say Can You See
4 Gramma (Blue Ribbon Sparkler Trailer Heaven)
5 For K Part 2
6 Jump
7 Mermaid Motel
8 Raise Me Up (Mississippi South)
9 Pawn Shop Blues
10 Brite Lites
11 Put Me In A Movie
12 Smarty
13 Yayo
Track #11 is entitled "Little Girls" in the version I downloaded from Mega, but the lyrics also use filmmaking metaphors, so is it possible that's the right track under a different name?
ReplyDeleteIt certainly is, as if there's one thing that Lana Del Ray does is that she recycles her songs a lot, changing lyrics and titles whenever she has a new idea.
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