1.
2. She's doesn't drink anymore.
Lana is often portrayed as having an idyllic childhood—but when she was 15, it was anything but. She started drinking as a teen, claiming she “thought the whole concept was so f—ing cool.” It became a serious problem, however, and Lana left her home in Lake Placid.
She enrolled at a boarding school in Connecticut and spent the next three years shaking off what was becoming a dependency. Lana's kept things under control ever since, though criticism of her music has admittedly tempted her to relapse.
"I haven't had a drink for seven years," Lana told Vogue in 2012. "Homeless outreach, drug and alcohol rehabilitation—that’s been my life for the past five years."
3.
4. Her relationships with label executives have been more than just professional.
5. Her father is wealthy, but he didn't sponsor her music career.
Lana's first attempts at a music career took place in New York City. As such, they were well-documented. When she started to catch on, Lana was similarly open about the fact she did not grow up poor.
Her father, Robert Grant, is a millionaire who made his money during the dot com boom through domain names. But that didn't mean he was footing the bills for his daughter's music habit. 5 Points Records owner David Nichtern—who first signed the singer back in 2007—is quoted as saying her father never sponsored her creative pursuits:
"I don't know if he was lending her money to live off of, but at least when she was with us, not a penny. I don't know if he's rich or not; I met him and he seemed like a pretty ordinary guy... That whole thing that she was backed by her millionaire dad is a bunch of crap."
6.
7. She's had multiple stage names.
The artist born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant has taken the stage as Lizzy Grant, Sparkle Jump Rope Queen, May Jailer, Lana Del Ray, and Lana Rey Del Mar.
This early take, "Elvis," finds Sparkle Jump Rope Queen with a Southern drawl.
Lana took an acoustic turn and channeled her inner Joni Mitchell as May Jailer:
Here she is way back in the day, performing as Lizzy Grant in 2009 at the Variety Box.
13. She starred in a Keds commercial that never aired.
In 2009, a year before the initial release of "Video Games," Del Rey scored a creative partnership with Keds. The footwear company, which has produced shoes since the 1910s and is currently experiencing a mild resurgence in popularity, enlisted Grant to create her own design. Unfortunately, the partnership floundered.
Whether the relationship fell through or the product idea was shelved is unknown, but their collab never saw the light of day.
Fortunately, a morsel of content survived the fallout: a promotional video starring Lana herself. She wanders the grounds of Coney Island, talking about the importance of legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and her desire to be the best at what she does.
The first version of the visual that surfaced was promptly removed from the web per a request of Grant's publicist. A smattering of clips, however, still reside in YouTube's depths.
15. She (might) pay paparazzi to publish the good pics.
Aside from blasting them out of helicopters in her music videos, Lana Del Rey has found unique ways to deal with paparazzi. During an interview with Beats 1, Lana claimed she sometimes pays paparazzi to publish pictures where she's smiling.
"I bribe them with money to put up the smiling shots and not the ones where I'm flicking everybody off," she told Lowe, laughing. "That's still possible. You can still do that." It's unclear how serious Lana was about the whole thing, but it's not a bad idea.
18.
19. Her tattoos tell the story.
Lana's not exactly a human canvas, but she does boast ink. The tattoos are almost all phrases, words paying tribute to Lana's idols ("Nina & Billie" is on her collarbone, and "Nabokov Whitman" runs down her right forearm) and her mottos ("die young," and "trust no one" mark her right hand).
The side of her left hand reads "paradise." Lana has said that "death and paradise for me are linked. I expect after my death, something that is very calm and relaxed. It can already be described as paradise."
There's also an "M" on her hand for Lana's grandmother, Madeleine. All the tattoos are written in cursive script.
20.
22.
23. Her main interests include space and technology.
During a recent interview with Beats 1's Zane Lowe, Lana shared that she had met inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Musk is, among other things, aiming to make space travel a feasible possibility for everyday citizens, via SpaceX. Lana said the meeting was "one of the best days of my life."
She went on to express her interest in the tech world (gleaned from her father), telling Lowe, “I do have other interests, but they’re not really artistically related. It’s more tech stuff from the last ten years, I kinda got that from my dad. For instance, what Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX, things like that. Just seeing where we’re going, because technologically, we’re advancing so quickly. I don’t want to miss any of it. I feel like we’re on the cusp just the way they were in the ‘60s, but in a different way."
25.
26. She really loves Lolita.
Aside from the blatant references (like her song of the same name), Lana Del Rey's love of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita runs deep. References to Nabokov's pedophilic neuroses are all over her proper debut album Born To Die, diffused through Lana's lens as an innocence lost (see: "This Is What Makes Us Girls," "Cola (Pussy)" and "Gods And Monsters").
The album's second track "Off To The Races" also borrows the novel's opening lines: "Light of my life. Fire of my loins."
28. She still experiences stage fright.
Lana's much-maligned SNL performance came on the heels of her sudden rise to stardom. The song that got her there was "Video Games," but Lana's well-documented stage fright provided plenty of fodder for the howling masses the next day.
Since then, however, Lana has only gotten bigger, and her stage fright seems to have dissipated, for the most part. Nowhere was this more clear than Coachella in 2014, which was immediately hailed as a "star-making performance."
But Lana still gets butterflies. Even throughout her heavy touring, she admits that she still struggles sometimes. Speaking about Cat Power, she told Rolling Stone: "She was a person who really meant a lot to me, just knowing that it was okay to start your performance with your back to the audience, at first, if you really couldn't face it. I mean, a lot of the time I just really felt like, 'I'm not really sure if I can do it.' But I mean, I've gotten better."
30. Lana held her babysitting gig long after her breakout hit.
You'd think a singer on the brink of superstardom wouldn't have time to tend to the children of others, let alone want to.
But during a 2012 interview with the Huffington Post, Del Rey admitted she still babysat just as she had before the release of "Video Games" and the successes that followed. Lana discussed the gig as an example of the quiet life she prefers to lead.
