Lana Del Rey is a Rockstar

THE BEST SONGWRITER IN MUSIC

The way I see it, there are only a few rockstars left in music and Lana Del Rey is one of them.

I guess I need to define what I mean by rockstar for this to make any sense, so here we go!

Number one: your music can’t sound like anyone else’s. Lana gets full grades on this. No one in music sounds anything like her and it’s been that way since she dropped Video Games.

Number two: You have to stream like a pop star without popular songs. Double check for Lana on this one. Three of Lana’s albums streamed over 500 million times last year. Born To Die, her first album, streamed over 1 billion times while Ultraviolence and Norman Fucking Rockwell both earned about 600 million streams. She gets over 20 million daily streams on Spotify alone and 67 of her songs have over 100 million streams.

To put this in context, Taylor Swift is the only female artist streaming more than Lana this year (most months) and Lana is often top five or ten streamers in all of music during any given month. All of this without any “hit” singles.

Number three: young artists must profess their admiration. Billie Eilish said that Lana’s Born To Die album “changed music…and specially changed music for girls and the potential of what is possible.”

Olivia Rodrigo said, “Lana has raised an entire generation of music lovers and songwriters like me, and taught them that there’s beauty in their vulnerability and power in their melancholy…The first song I ever heard of Lana’s was ‘Video Games,’ which… I still consider that song to be probably the best love song of all time. She captures sadness, anger, and sensuality in a way only the greatest of songwriters ever could.”

Which leads to number four: you have to do something incredibly well; better than most other artists. For Jimmy Hendrix, that was the guitar. For Lana, it’s her song writing. No one knows how to put words together with melodies like Lana. She has a natural instinct for blending deep, thoughtful, storytelling lyrics with pop sensibilities. Rolling Stone UK named her the greatest songwriter of the 21st century.

Number five: You can’t have casual fans. Until this recent surge on TikTok, you couldn’t be a casual fan of Lana Del Rey. You wouldn’t hear her music on the radio or in a store and recognize the song. You needed to be an all out, die hard, cultish Lana stan. And the majority of her fans are still like this. They know all the words to all of her songs, not just the popular ones. Her shows sell out and crowds wave and sing along to her lyrics the entire concert.

The final criteria for being a rockstar is that you had to be hated at some point. Lana’s hate happened at the very beginning of her career. Critics slammed her music, thought she was fake and predicted she wouldn’t last past her first album, which is now one of the most iconic albums of the last two decades.

They said she couldn’t perform, she was pretending to be sad, her songs all sound the same, on and on and on. Now those same critics are the ones cheering for her Artist of the Decade award, which Variety presented to Lana in 2021.

How many times have you felt like your writing wasn’t being appreciated? How many rejections have you received? How many times have you posted something with one like (from a friend) and less than a hundred views?

One thing about rockstars is that they do things their way and let everyone else catch up. The criticism of Lana Del Rey went on for years. I remember it clearly because I was a day one fan. But rockstars don’t let the critics get to them.

You shouldn’t either.

What you need to do is keep getting better, keep learning, keep sharing your work, and most important of all, keep going! Focus on the people who are connecting with your writing and find more of those people. You never know when your time will come, so prepare like it’s your time right now.

Lana puts out an album about every 18 months, sometimes sooner. She’s also released a poetry book and routinely puts out singles that aren’t attached to any album.

Follow that blueprint. Your audience needs to be fed and fed consistently. And while you can define what consistently means, don’t be delusional. You need to produce and share work at a pace that keeps you in the mind of your audience.

Only a few real rockstars are left. You’re witnessing Lana Del Rey in her prime. Enjoy it!