Oh, what’s that? For once, a Toronto magazine got a scoop? Well then BOOM! Suck on them tasty nuggets, America, because your geographical hat just one-upped ya! In a new interview with NOW magazine, Lana Del Rey talks about how she nearly quit music a couple months back, and how the music video viral sensation Video Games brought her back from the brink.
Speaking over the phone from London, del Rey is articulate and effusive about music, but nervous giggles intrude when the conversation turns personal. She says she’s never had it easy as a musician and wrote Video Games ten months ago at a time when she’d nearly given up on music to focus on other things. Two months after song went wild on the web, she signed her deal.
“I never had huge ambition in terms of being a singer, but I did always hope that I’d be able to tour Europe and have a career making records whose sounds I liked,” she says. “It wasn’t as easy as I thought, and a lot of people actually want that same thing.
“When I wrote the song, I thought I was gonna keep on playing in New York just for my friends the way I had been,” she adds. “I just decided that was gonna be okay and started doing a lot of other things.”
I know Lana isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and the main argument is that she was basically put together by image consultants, but honestly, who gives a shit? I hate to disappoint you, but art doesn’t live in a money-less vacuum where shelter and food just magically appear on the table. Even da Vinci needed to pay his rent. If you don’t like the song, that’s fine, but don’t bash Lana for having a good marketing team while pretending that your favorite musician isn’t lovingly hand-crafted by focus groups too.