Lana Del Rey talks “angry” and “conversational” new music

Del Rey says she's been practicing "meditative automatic singing" directly into her phone's Voice Notes app

Lana Del Rey has discussed the creative approach she’s taking to the new music she’s working on at the moment.

In an interview with fashion magazine Wthe singer-songwriter said she had been practicing “meditative automatic singing, where I don’t filter anything”, singing directly into her phone’s Voice Notes app. “It’s not perfect, obviously,” she said. “There are pauses, and I stumble.”

Del Rey says she’s been sending these “really raw-sounding files” to producer and songwriter Drew Erickson, who Del Rey collaborated significantly with on last year’s ‘Blue Banisters’. Erickson has songwriting and production credits on the songs ‘Arcadia’, ‘Black Bathing Suit’, ‘If You Lie Down with Me’, ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Violets for Roses’. He also played piano on multiple tracks, as well as bass and synthesiser, and is credited with composing selected horn and string arrangements on the album.

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“He’ll add an orchestra beneath the words, matching each syllable with music and adding reverb to my voice,” Del Rey explains in the W piece. As a point of contrast, Del Rey says that while her 2015 album ‘Honeymoon’ featured many references to colour, her new music contained “none of that at all”.

“It’s more just like: I’m angry. The songs are very conversational. For the first song, I pressed record and sang, When I look back, tracing fingertips over plastic bags, I think I wish I could extrapolate some small intention or maybe get your attention for a minute or two.’ It’s a very wordy album. So there’s no room for color. It’s almost like I’m typing in my mind.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Del Rey discusses poets she’s inspired by. “When I found out that Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl in a few days, and then I saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti reciting Loud Prayer, I realized that I didn’t have to go slowly to have something be good,” she told the publication. “I could work fast if I wanted to.

“I also relate to some of the sentiments from Walt Whitman’s work, and Sylvia Plath’s – she wrote with blatant honesty about the experience of being a woman, and the history of hysteria.”

Since releasing ‘Blue Banisters’ last October, Del Rey has released one new single, ‘Watercolor Eyes’. The song arrived in January, featuring in an episode of HBO‘s Euphoria and appearing on its second season soundtrack.

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Later that month, she performed a new song titled ‘Prettiest Girl in Country Music’ – with country singers Nikki Lane and Sierra Ferrell – during one of Lane’s shows in Austin, Texas.

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