Lana Del Rey: Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass [INTERSCOPE]

Why you'll love it

This gatefold LP puts Lana Del Rey's poetry on vinyl, read in her own voice over Jack Antonoff's piano and strings. It came out as the audio companion to her first book, with half the book's proceeds going to the Navajo Water Project.

This edition

• Gatefold jacket
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Plenty of singers talk about writing a book of poems one day. Lana Del Rey got stuck on the music for Norman F***ing Rockwell!, sat down to write words without a melody attached, and came out the other side with a collection of long poems, a handful of haiku and a plan to bind the book herself and sell it for about a dollar. Simon & Schuster had other ideas and published it properly, and she recorded the whole thing as an album first.

Jack Antonoff, her partner on Norman F***ing Rockwell!, scores the readings with soft piano, drifting synths and the odd swell of strings, leaving plenty of room for her voice. "L.A. Who Am I to Love You" opens with her familiar city, "The Land of 1,000 Fires" turns California wildfire season into something hushed and strange, and "Never to Heaven," "Happy" and "Quiet Waiter Blue Forever" were the pieces she teased on social media long before the book arrived.

It's a late-night record, closer to Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg (her stated heroes) than to radio pop, and the orange-tree painting on the cover is by artist Erika Lee Sears. We file it under music, though the poetry section has been eyeing it with some envy.

Also at Kops: more Lana Del Rey on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Interscope / Polydor (cat# 0742980), the 2020 spoken word album.