Yet no sooner had the plaudits started rolling in the Guardian voted it the best song of than Del Rey was placed under the intense scrutiny of endless blogposts and think pieces, with critics poring over her past for evidence of fakery: was her carefully studied aesthetic for real?
Was she really just a major label puppet? Had her dad funded a previous bid for fame? Were her lips the result of plastic surgery? Was she really born as plain old Elizabeth Grant rather than emerging from the womb fully formed as the popstar Lana Del Rey? I ask how long she got to enjoy the success of Video Games before the backlash arrived and she looks surprised.
Del Rey says she's not scared to put another record out because she "knows what to expect this time", but during the two-and-a-half years since Born to Die came out, she has often dismissed the idea of a follow-up because she'd "already said everything I wanted to say".
So what changed? This article includes content provided by Spotify. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. From the handful of songs I get to hear at the hotel, it's safe to say the new material has plenty to get the bloggers worked up about again. Sad Girl, for instance, talks about how "being a mistress on the side, might not appeal to fools like you". She laughs when I ask where the inspiration came from: "A good question.
I mean … I had different relationships with men, with people, where they were sort of wrong relationships, but still beautiful to me. It's not clear if Money, Power, Glory was originally written just to rile her detractors but it makes a decent stab at it by warning: "I'm going to take them for all that they've got. Like the woozy soft rock of the album's teaser track West Coast , many of the songs on Ultraviolence are slow-tempo and atmospheric, ditching the hip-hop trappings of Born To Die for what she and her producer — the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach — call a "real narco swing".
Del Rey originally thought she had completed the album back in December, but after meeting Auerbach in a club and dancing the night away with him she realised she needed to record it all over again with his looser techniques — adding a more casual, California vibe to the sound by recording in single takes, with cheap microphones bought from the drugstore.
It wasn't all plain sailing. If the critical sniping had died down, then Del Rey was finding her life invaded by other, more intrusive, means. In , her personal computer was accessed by hackers and all sorts of information started to appear online: pictures, financial details, health records, not to mention her songs.
Indeed, when you start to look closely at Del Rey's past three years, it's not hard to understand why she might feel burned by her experience of stardom. You're also forced to wonder why the pop stars who attract the most vitriol are so often solo female artists. I don't see where the female part comes into it. I just can't catch that feminist angle.
I don't think there's any shock value in my stuff — well, maybe the odd disconcerting lyric — but I think other people probably deserve the criticism, because they're eliciting it. What about her video for Ride , in which she hooks up with a succession of older guys from biker gangs it received criticism for, among other things, appearing to glamorise prostitution? But that was more personal to me — it was about my feelings on free love and what the effect of meeting strangers can bring into your life: how it can make you unhinged in the right way and free you from the social obligations I hope we're growing out of in For all the accusations of being a fraud, Lana Del Rey seems to have lived a more rock'n'roll existence than your average pop star.
She talks of teenage years spent "displaced … I didn't have a home, didn't know my social security number" and says she wasn't in contact with her parents for about six years. Which must have made it extra galling when accusations came in that her career was funded by her father. My dad was a well-loved entrepreneur - he was interested in the early dawning of the internet in - but it wasn't anything that ever translated financially.
So it was interesting that they sort of fictionally put us side-by-side together and involved him in that story. Del Rey likes to describe the more tumultuous periods of her life in romantic terms: she says she'd often spend her nights wandering around New York — "West Side Highway, Lower East Side, parts of Brooklyn" — meeting strangers and seeing where the night took them. I met a lot of singers, painters, bikers passing through.
They were friends, or sometimes more. All people I was really interested in on impact. About half the time they do, half the time they don't.
If they know who I am I can just leave, or I say it's not a big deal, I'm just a singer. When she was 18, Del Rey's darker experiences — she has talked about being alcoholic — prompted her to take up outreach work helping those addicted to drugs or alcohol. It's something she describes as her true calling and something she still does when she gets the chance. It's not just people with mental illness on the streets, but also people who, throughout the years, have lost identification information, that sort of thing.
The nighttime is almost ours To play in the alleys and look at the bars The nighttime is almost ours, ours The headlights from passing cars Illuminate my face then fade into dark The voice of Nirvana says, "come as you are" And I will The nighttime is almost ours, ours The sway of the hips and arms Will hypnotize from afar They swing 'til you're tired and send you to Mars The nighttime is almost ours, ours.
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