Lana Del Rey says her new music is “angry” and “very wordy” after she used an ultra-fast meditative technique to dictate her songs.
The 36-year-old singer has been experimenting with a new method for capturing her vocals, whereby she sings into her Voice Notes app on her phone to capture the rawness.
Lana told the new issue of W magazine: “I’ve been practicing meditative automatic singing, where I don’t filter anything.
“I’ll just sing whatever comes to mind into my Voice Notes app. It’s not perfect, obviously … when I’m automatic singing, I don’t have the time and leisure to think about things in terms of colours. It’s very cerebral.”
The ‘Video Games’ hitmaker explained how there’s not “colour references” like her previous work and it’s literally like she’s typed out what’s going on in her mind.
Lana – whose real name is Lizzy Grant – continued: “In ‘Honeymoon’, there were so many colour references … for this new music, there’s none of that at all.
“It’s more just like: ‘I’m angry.’
“The songs are very conversational. It’s a very wordy album. So there’s no room for colour. It’s almost like I’m typing in my mind.”
Lana sent her “really raw-sounding files” to producer and songwriter Drew Erickson, her collaborator on last year’s ‘Blue Banisters’, to work his magic.
She added: “He’ll add an orchestra beneath the words, matching each syllable with music and adding reverb to my voice.”
The singer drew inspiration for her “meditative” technique from Beat poetry of the 1960s.
She said: “When I found out that Allen Ginsberg wrote ‘Howl’ in a few days, and then I saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti reciting ’Loud Prayer’, I realised that I didn’t have to go slowly to have something be good.
“I could work fast if I wanted to. I also relate to some of the sentiments from Walt Whitman’s work, and Sylvia Plath’s—she wrote with blatant honesty about the experience of being a woman, and the history of hysteria.”
Lana also said her old influences, including California and her family, are still a huge part of her music.
She added about her father Robert England Grant Jr: “My dad is a deep-sea shark fisherman—he has been for 15 years— and he lived on a boat in Providence, Rhode Island, from the age of 15 to 18.
“He was also a storm chaser. In California, earth, wind, and fire are huge. All the elements are taken into consideration with my art, all the time. Which is funny, because people often ask why I sing about California.
“But I usually sing about wherever I am, and it just so happens that California is such a storm centre right now. I mean, I’m from Lake Placid, the coldest spot in the nation. For me, the California landscape never gets old.”
Since releasing ‘Blue Banisters’ in October, Lana has released the standalone single ‘Watercolor Eyes’.
It featured in HBO’s ‘Euphoria’.