Lana Del Rey recorded some “beautiful” songs with Jon Batiste that he hopes will see the light of day.
The 36-year-old musician appears on ‘Candy Necklace’ and the ‘Jon Batiste Interlude’ on the ‘Video Games’ hitmaker’s latest LP ‘Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd’, while Lana, 38, returned the favour and is featured on his song ‘Life Lesson’ on his new record ‘World Music Radio’, which is out on Friday (18.08.23).
Asked how they came to work together, Jon told NME: “We had a great first meeting after our mutual friend and musical collaborator Zach Dawes introduced us because he thought we would have a great creative spark. We met and it just turned into a beautiful collaboration.
“I met Rick Rubin in Italy, and he suggested I go to Shangri-La [Rubin’s studio in Malibu, California]. I told him I was inspired to create a new album and I was creating with all types of different musicians and producers and in that creative spur, I had a lot of things that I was recording with Lana, and I recorded a lot of things with Lana that no one has even heard yet. But two of those things ended up on her last album [2023’s ‘Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd’] and ‘Life Lesson’ on my album is like the palate cleanser after the credits roll in the movie. It’s a spiritual relative of the album sessions.”
Asked if we will ever hear the other tunes they recorded together, he said: “It’s some incredible, really great, beautiful stuff we’ve made together. We’ve talked about doing something together. But this music, I mean, hopefully, at the right time, I don’t want to say too much, but I hope one day I have more to say about what will happen with it [laughs].”
Elsewhere, Jon spoke about performing with late music legend Prince and how the ‘Purple Rain’ hitmaker has inspired him.
He recalled: “Oh it was so real [laughs]. I was literally in my dorm room in the year before meeting Prince and I was studying recordings. I was trying to dissect his album, ‘Dirty Mind’. I made a few songs inspired by that album and his approach to [making music], his own Prince style. The next year, I get the call. Prince had heard our band playing in a club: he’d been at the show the whole time – I didn’t know he was even in the audience! He said he wanted to take the band to do a collaboration on one of his tours and we ended up doing that. The first time I ever performed in a stadium aged 19 was with Prince and seeing how he curated his show, how he presented his music and just being around that was really inspiring.”
Sharing the advice he got from the ‘Raspberry Beret’ singer, Jon said during a recent appearance on ‘Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen’: “I was a kid. I was about 19 or 20, so I wasn’t having a dialogue with Prince. I was with Prince, but it wasn’t like we were having a conversation. But whenever we did speak, I tried to get some nuggets of wisdom out of him. And he said, ‘Privacy,’ and I remember that because he was talking about more than just music.”