Lana Del Rey covers New York Times T Magazine Women’s Fashion Spring 2020 issue photographed by Terry Richardson. In the interview, the beautiful 25-year-old songstress talks about all the accusations on the internet saying that her millionaire father backed her career, that she has undergone different plastic surgeries in order to get those sexy lips, or that she is some sort of industry creation. “I mean, I met everyone who is anyone in the music industry over the last six years and I was unsignable,” she says. “That’s what I was told by everyone. I would play my songs, explain what I was trying to do, and I’d get, ‘You know who’s No. 1 in 13 countries right now? Kesha.’”
Nothing Lana has written follow the rules of a pop song nor has a regular length for radio. “‘Video Games’ was a four-and-a-half-minute ballad. No instruments on it. It was too dark, too personal, too risky, not commercial. It wasn’t pop until it was on the radio,” Del Rey told the magazine.
Speaking about all the rumours speculating that her voluptuous, seductive lips are in fact the result of a plastic surgery, Del Rey says in the interview with T Magazine that, “It’s fine. They’re real lips, I mean. In real life my lips don’t look that big. I think because I cartoonized the footage of myself in the video for ‘Video Games’ things look exaggerated.”
On the anxiety she feels performing on stage, the songstress confesses that, “I’m not by nature a showstopper. I love to write and play songs, but onstage, all these things come into play. I’m always saying to myself, Don’t mess up. Don’t mess up.”
When she was just 19, a small indie label signed her as Lizzy Grant for $10,000. “It was amazing. I got my own place to live. I lived on that money, finished school. At that point I envisioned having a very nice career touring small clubs, continuing my studies in philosophy and volunteering. It’s actually the same vision I have today. I have a serious life here. I have a really big family. You know, I’m needed here,” she told the magazine.
In the interview with T Magazine, the songstress also opens up and talks about love and loss. “I felt the same way for a really long time, and then I met someone who I guess I fell in love with,” she says. “I just didn’t know I could feel differently. That time with him became sort of a place that I fell back to in my memory.” As on breakup, Lana admits that, “Well, I mean, the breakup is a part of it in the way that in the midst of loss you try to still look towards the light and not fall to pieces or do self-destructive things.”
Asked about where she lives, Del Rey tells the magazine that she’s looking for a place, but for now she is living on her ex-boyfriend’s couch in Williamsburg. “Staying with my ex-boyfriend. I live on his couch,” she coolly confesses in her interview with T Magazine.
Photos courtesy of T Magazine
