Rise to Fame
A homemade video of a girl in a flower crown, sitting on a swing, watching her boyfriend play video games. That was the entire pitch. Uploaded to YouTube in May 2011, Video Games made Lana Del Rey famous before she had a label deal, a debut album, or a publicist. The music felt like a lost artifact from a glamorous, melancholic past that never existed. She'd spent years failing as Lizzy Grant; the persona shift to Lana Del Rey unlocked something the industry couldn't manufacture: a mood that felt genuinely her own.
In the Spotlight
The critical consensus took about a decade to catch up with her. Pitchfork gave Born to Die a 5.5 when it dropped in 2012; they revised it to 7.8 in 2021. Norman Fucking Rockwell! earned a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. Rolling Stone UK named her the Greatest American Songwriter of the 21st Century in 2023. Now she's deep into a country pivot, with her 10th album Stove expected in 2026, and she married an alligator tour guide from Louisiana in 2024. Neither of those things is out of character.
Side Notes
Before she was Lana Del Rey, she was Lizzy Grant, cycling through stage names that included 'Sparkle Jump Rope Queen' and playing to near-empty rooms. Her 2010 debut album got pulled from retail when the label couldn't fund distribution. She bought back the masters herself. The name 'Lana Del Rey' reportedly came from a Miami trip, partly for its coastal resonance. She was living in a New Jersey trailer park when she wrote Video Games. The SNL performance that critics called a disaster in January 2012 turned out to be the opening scene, not the ending.