Go behind the scenes of Lana Del Rey’s Rolling Stone UK cover shoot

Lana Del Rey has opened up on the evolution of her latest album in an exclusive behind the scenes chat with Rolling Stone UK. You can watch the video below.

Speaking at the LA cover shoot for our March /April issue, the singer explained how the song ‘Kintsugi’, taken from her latest album Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard, was directly inspired by her late uncle.

‘Kintsugi, I started writing naturally when my sister, my dad and I were at my great uncle Dick’s hospice in Manhattan Beach with all 50 of the grand-members”, she said.

“Kintsugi is the art of filling broken pottery with liquid gold in the hopes of making it even more beautiful than it was before. I almost don’t need to explain that metaphor, the idea of falling apart and rebuilding one’s life up more beautifully. But I wasn’t really going for a metaphor when I wrote it, I was actually going for my uncle because he’s a poet of nine books, an inventor and very interesting self-described anarchist.”

Del Rey continued: “Because he’d been in my garden two years before he passed, with my grandmother, two years before she passed, he’d been reading this poem we had filmed called Holding Back The Night. To go from Holding Back The Night in my back yard to being around his bed with all sixteen of my family members singing in fourteen part harmonies, I just thought oh my god, I was always thought I just sang to get out of my small town and then I realised that has nothing to do with it.

“Somehow I went from talking about the family to people, to talking to my dad and it ends with the line ‘let the light shine in’. I think I say that a few times on the record.”

Elsewhere in the chat, Del Rey also opens up on the minutia of everyday life and lessons she’s learnt throughout her career.

“I can’t remember the last time I wrote something from a bird’s eye view perspective,” she adds.

“Why I think it’s important to stay vigilant about keeping the peace around my own heart is because every time I come to a stop light at where I’m living or staying, I wanna feel present in that moment and like be present enough to look around and think about how beautiful that building is, or whatever.”

Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd follows Del Rey’s 2021 albums Blue Bannisters and Chemtrails Over The Country Club. It’s released next Friday (24 March).

You can buy the latest issue of Rolling Stone UK with Lana Del Rey on the cover here.