About the Album:
Singer/songwriter Lana Del Rey was born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant in 1985 in New York City. She released her self-titled debut album in 2010 but it got pulled from stores after the label was unable to properly fund it. She then signed with Stranger Records in 2011 and released the song Video Games, which she described as “Hollywood sadcore.” WK After the video went viral it was released as a single and eventually reached the top 10 on the UK charts.
Her major-label debut, Born to Die, followed in 2012. It was her first of six #1 UK albums as of 2023. In the United States, the album reached #2, the first of eight consecutive top-ten albums through 2023. The album became only the second by a woman to spend more than 500 weeks on the Billboard album chart.
Del Rey said most of the album was written about her experiences with alcohol. She was sent to boarding school in Connecticut at age 14 to get sober. She said, “I would drink every day. I would drink alone…A great deal of what I wrote on Born to Die is about these wilderness years…I feel like I’m writing about alcohol because that was the first love of my life.” WK Albumism’s Chris Lacy called it “a realistic portrait of addiction, sexual obsession, abnormality and fear.” WK
Del Rey cited Britney Spears, Elvis Presley, and Antony & the Johnsons as influences. WK AllMusic.com’s John Bush called her ”a femme fatale with a smoky voice.” AMG Born to Die has been characterized as “a predominantly baroque pop and trip hop album.” WK The album was praised for its “distinctive sound” WK while also criticized for “repetitiveness and melodramatic tendencies.” WK NME’s Alex Denney said the album “marks the arrival of a fresh – and refreshingly self-aware – sensibility in pop.” WK
Off to the Races is “a freak show of inappropriate co-dependency” that “recalls Sheryl Crow’s ‘down and out drunken loner persona’ in her 1994 single ‘Leaving Las Vegas’.” WK Her vocals on Million Dollar Man were compared to those of “a highly medicated Fiona Apple.” WK About.com’s Bill Lamb said National Anthem has a “rousing yet graceful arrangement that solidifies the song’s point of view as a clever critique of a society that is just as messy as these words.” WK
A dance remix of Summertime Sadness with French DJ Cedric Gervais proved to be the biggest hit from the album. “Lana is cruising down the coast with her bad boy beau by her side, but she is sad” SF because she fears losing him. She penned the song with Rick Nowels, who also has credits on Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” and Dido’s “White Flag.” SF
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