Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (born June 21, 1985), known professionally as Lana Del Rey, is an American singer-songwriter. An influential figure in alternative pop music, Del Rey's songs are noted for their melancholic exploration of romance and glamour, with frequent references to pop culture and 1950s–1970s Americana. She is widely considered one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the 21st century.
Del Rey grew up in upstate New York and moved to Manhattan in 2005 to pursue a music career. After signing with Polydor and Interscope, she released her first major-label album, Born to Die (2012), which featured a cinematic, hip-hop-inflected sound and garnered a cult following. It holds the record for the longest charting album by a woman in the history of the US Billboard 200. She explored psychedelic, orchestral, and folk genres on her next albums Ultraviolence (2014), Honeymoon (2015), and Lust for Life (2017). Rolling Stone ranked her sixth album, Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019), among the 500 greatest albums, while her subsequent albums Chemtrails Over the Country Club (2021), Blue Banisters (2021), and Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (2023) received further critical acclaim. The latter's single, "A&W", was ranked among the 500 greatest songs by Rolling Stone.
Del Rey is the recipient of various accolades, including an MTV Video Music Award, three MTV Europe Music Awards, two Brit Awards, and two Billboard Women in Music awards, in addition to nominations for 11 Grammy Awards. For her contributions to visual media soundtracks, she received a Satellite Award and nominations for two Critics' Choice Movie Awards and a Golden Globe Award. She also wrote and directed the musical short film Tropico (2013). In 2020, Del Rey published the poetry and photography collection Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass.
Early life and education Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was born on June 21, 1985 ; ; in Manhattan, to Robert England Grant Jr., a copywriter at Grey Global Group, and Patricia Ann "Pat" Grant (), an account executive at the same organization. She has a younger sister, Caroline "Chuck" Grant, and a younger brother, Charlie Grant. She grew up Catholic and is of Scottish and English descent. When she was a year old, the family moved to Lake Placid, New York. In Lake Placid, her father worked for a furniture company before becoming an entrepreneurial domain investor; her mother worked as a schoolteacher. There, she attended St. Agnes School in her elementary years and began singing in her church choir, where she was the cantor.
She attended the high school where her mother taught for a year, but when she was 14 or 15, her parents sent her to Kent School, an Episcopal boarding school in Kent, Connecticut, to get sober from alcoholism. Alcoholism, along with drugs, had been a problem that started in her teenage years and had become so serious that her entire family, including Grant herself, was worried. Grant shared in an interview: "That's really why I got sent to boarding school aged 14—to get sober." Her uncle, an admissions officer at the school, secured her financial aid to attend. According to Grant, she had trouble making friends during much of her teenage and early adult years. She has said she was preoccupied with death from a young age, and its role in her feelings of anxiety and alienation:
Grant later dropped out of school to go to rehab; she has been sober since 2003. She spent a year living on Long Island with her aunt and uncle and working as a waitress. Grant, also briefly worked as a model, signed to Ford. During that time, Grant's uncle taught her to play guitar and she "realized [that she] could probably write a million songs with those six chords". Shortly after, she began writing songs and performing in nightclubs around the city under various names such as "Sparkle Jump Rope Queen" and "Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena". "I was always singing, but didn't plan on pursuing it seriously", she said:She originally attended State University of New York at Geneseo, but dropped out to take a gap year. In fall 2004, at age 19, Grant enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York where she majored in philosophy with an emphasis on metaphysics. She has said she chose to study the subject because it "bridged the gap between God and science... I was interested in God and how technology could bring us closer to finding out where we came from and why."
Career 2005–2010: Career beginnings and early recordings
In spring 2005, while still in college, Del Rey registered a seven-track extended play with the United States Copyright Office; the application title was Rock Me Stable with another title, Young Like Me, also listed. A second extended play, From the End, was also recorded under Del Rey's stage name at the time, May Jailer. Between 2005 and 2006 she recorded an acoustic album, Sirens, under the May Jailer project, which leaked on the internet in mid-2012.
At her first public performance in 2006 in the Williamsburg Live Songwriting Competition, Del Rey met Van Wilson, an A&R representative for 5 Points Records, an independent label owned by David Nichtern. In 2007, while a senior at Fordham, she submitted a demo tape of acoustic tracks, No Kung Fu, to 5 Points, which offered her a recording contract for $10,000. She used the money to move to Manhattan Mobile Home Park, a trailer park in North Bergen, New Jersey and began working with producer David Kahne. Nichtern recalled: "Our plan was to get it all organized and have a record to go and she'd be touring right after she graduated from college. Like a lot of artists, she morphed. When she first came to us, she was playing plunky little acoustic guitar, [had] sort of straight blonde hair, very cute young woman. A little bit dark, but very intelligent. We heard that. But she very quickly kept evolving."
Del Rey graduated from Fordham with a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy in 2008 after which she released a three-track EP, Kill Kill, as Lizzy Grant, featuring production by Kahne. She explained: "David asked to work with me only a day after he got my demo. He is known as a producer with a lot of integrity and who had an interest in making music that wasn't just pop." Meanwhile, Del Rey was doing community outreach work for homeless individuals and drug addicts; she had become interested in community service work in college, when she "took a road trip across the country to paint and rebuild houses on a Native American reservation".
Of choosing a stage name for her feature debut album, she said: "I wanted a name I could shape the music towards. I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba—Lana Del Rey reminded us of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue." The name was also inspired by actress Lana Turner and the Ford Del Rey sedan, produced and sold in Brazil in the 1980s. Initially she used the alternate spelling Lana Del Ray, the name under which her self-titled debut album was released in January 2010. Her father helped with the marketing of the album, which was available for purchase on iTunes for a brief period before being withdrawn in April 2010. Kahne and Nichtern said that Del Rey bought the rights back from 5 Points, as she wanted it out of circulation to "stifle future opportunities to distribute it—an echo of rumors the action was part of a calculated strategy". She met her managers, Ben Mawson and Ed Millett, three months after Lana Del Ray was released, and they helped her get out of her contract with 5 Points Records, where, in her opinion, "nothing was happening". Shortly after, she moved to London, and moved in with Mawson "for a few years". On September 1, 2010, Del Rey was featured by Mando Diao in its MTV Unplugged concert at Union Film-Studios in Berlin, Germany. Also in 2010, she acted in a short film, Poolside, which she made with several friends.
2011–2013: Breakthrough with Born to Die and Paradise
In 2011, Del Rey uploaded self-made music videos for her songs "Video Games" and "Blue Jeans" to YouTube, featuring vintage footage interspersed with shots of her singing on her webcam. The "Video Games" music video became a viral internet sensation, which led to Del Rey being signed by Stranger Records to release the song as her debut single. She told The Observer: "I just put that song online a few months ago because it was my favorite. To be honest, it wasn't going to be the single but people have really responded to it." The song earned her a Q award for "Next Big Thing" in October 2011 and an Ivor Novello for "Best Contemporary Song" in 2012. In the same month, she signed a joint deal with Interscope Records and Polydor to release her second studio album Born to Die. She started dating Scottish singer Barrie-James O'Neill in the same year. The couple split in 2014 after three years together. Del Rey performed two songs from the album on Saturday Night Live on January 14, 2012, and received a negative response from various critics and the general public, who deemed the performance uneven and vocally shaky. She had earlier defended her spot on the program, saying: "I'm a good musician ... I have been singing for a long time, and I think that [SNL creator] Lorne Michaels knows that ... it's not a fluke decision."
Born to Die was released worldwide on January 31, 2012, to commercial success, charting at number one in 11 countries and debuting at number two on the US Billboard 200 album chart, although critics at the time were divided. The same week, she announced she had bought back the rights to her 2010 debut album and had plans to re-release it in the summer of 2012 under Interscope Records and Polydor. Contrary to Del Rey's press statement, her previous record label and producer David Kahne have both stated that she bought the rights to the album when she and the label parted company, due to the offer of a new deal, in April 2010. Born to Die sold 3.4 million copies in 2012, making it the fifth-best-selling album of 2012. In the United States, Born to Die charted on the Billboard 200 well into 2012, lingering at number 76, after 36 weeks on the chart. As of February 3, 2024, Born to Die had spent 520 weeks (10 years) on the Billboard 200, making Del Rey the second woman to reach this milestone, previously achieved only by Adele. Billboard credited the album as "one of the main catalysts for pop's mid-2010s shift from brash EDM to a moodier, hip-hop-inflected palette."
In September 2012, Del Rey unveiled the F-Type for Jaguar at the Paris Motor Show and later recorded the song "Burning Desire", which appeared in a promotional short film for the vehicle. Adrian Hallmark, Jaguar's global brand director, explained the company's choice, saying Del Rey had "a unique blend of authenticity and modernity". In late September 2012, a music video for Del Rey's cover of "Blue Velvet" was released as a promotional single for the H&M 2012 autumn campaign, which Del Rey also modeled for in print advertising. On September 25, Del Rey released the single "Ride" in promotion of her upcoming EP, Paradise. She subsequently premiered the music video for "Ride" at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, California, on October 10, 2012. Some critics panned the video for being allegedly pro-prostitution and antifeminist, due to Del Rey's portrayal of a prostitute in a biker gang.