Ten!” she says, in a daffy sing-song, not unlike Diane Keaton murmuring, ‘la di da’ in Annie Hall. “You’re funny! Today is a good day.” Today she chooses life? “Yeah, today I choose life.” So, like a one? “Ten. Then she lets out a delicate snort of amusement. Her big, brownish-green eyes widen even further. She seems so carefree - bubbly, even - that within 10 minutes, it seems safe to break the ice: “So, on a scale of one to 10, how much do you wish you were dead right now?” Del Rey is four days away from her 29th birthday (for reasons she can’t explain, she’s usually reported to be a year younger), but looks, at the moment, like a college junior home for the summer. She’s wearing false eyelashes, but not much noticeable make-up. She’s all but giddy over having her album out, uncompromising, spooky, guitar-laden, hitless thing that it is: “It’s what I wanted.” Today’s V-neck tee is powder blue, nearly matching the self-applied pastel polish on her longish nails, over pale, strategically shredded jeans, cuffed just below the calves, that are familiar from another magazine’s photo shoot. Her laugh, fizzy and girlish, is coming easily. “I’m Lana, nice to see you,” she says, offering a soft handshake and a big, white, hopeful smile, one that instantly suggests everything you think you know about her is wrong that you’ve read too much into the consecutive placement of songs called “Sad Girl” and “Pretty When You Cry” on the new album that you’ve taken certain recent interview quotes (mainly, “I wish I was dead already,” which earned her a Twitter scolding from Frances Bean Cobain) too seriously that it’s a mistake to assume her aloof stage manner has anything to do with her actual personality. On a cloudless, offensively hot, mid-June afternoon in New York, the release day for Del Rey’s second major-label album, Ultraviolence, she answers the green wooden door of the Greenwich Village town-house where she’s staying.
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Still, a day earlier, it all feels different. (On the same spot on the other hand: Paradise.) And then there’s the tattoo on the side of her right hand, just below the pinkie, inked in neat black cursive: Trust No One. Del Rey’s brand of pop stardom is self-thwarting, ambivalent, precarious: at her clouded core, beneath the considerable glamour, she is more Cat Power or Kurt Cobain than Rihanna or Katy Perry, complete with a mysterious, Kurt-like stomach ailment that plagues her on tour. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a shock, landing here.
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There has to be someone else to be the cover story. “You know? I just wish you could write about something else. “I feel like maybe we should wait until there’s something good to talk about,” she continues, in an airy tone that turns pleading. At times, it even seemed like it was going well. She has, by this point, spent a good seven hours talking with me. “I’m not sure if they should run this story,” Lana Del Rey will say, sprawled out on a soft brown couch in tiny denim cut-offs and a white V-neck tee, blowing pensive little gum bubbles.
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She goes to a dark place, in the end, and won’t come out of it.