Download Lana Del Rey's Born To Die for FREE for a limited time on iTunes right now.
I’ve been obsessed with Lana Del Rey and her seductive voice for several weeks now. It’s been impossible to go a day without playing her music in the car at least once. Among my favourites are “Blue Jeans” and “Born To Die” (which you can download for free right now on iTunes as mentioned above), and not too long ago I declared “Kinda Outta Luck” to be my personal theme song—though I could never do such a thing to my dad (see lyrics).
Lana a.k.a. Elizabeth Grant performed on SNL tonight as the musical guest while Daniel Radcliffe was the celebrity guest. I normally don’t tune in to the weekly show, but I had to catch LDR in her first U.S. TV debut. If you didn’t tune in, well, let’s just say that I was glad my smartphone ran out of battery and that I couldn’t check Twitter for all the #snl and #lanadelrey comments.
As most musical guests do, she performed two songs: “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans”. Within the first verse of the first song, I think most people knew this would not be LDR’s best performance. It’s like she tried to suppress her vocals, push for a deeper pitch and do something different to the song than what’s on the recording. It was a bit of a disaster. Having seen videos of her live performance (e.g. at The Mod Club in Toronto), I knew she was better than that—though my expectation was still relatively low; I just never know what to expect from her in a live setting. Her “Blue Jeans” performance was a tad better, but still far from perfect. I can’t begin to imagine how nervous she must have been. From a recent interview with MTV:
So have you been practicing all week for SNL?
Well, no, I haven’t because I’ve been working. I don’t even know what I’m singing! I know it’s “Video Games” and I think “Blue Jeans,” but I thought it was supposed to be “Born to Die,” so I have to go figure that out. I better fucking figure that out! [Laughs] There’s a lot going on so there’s a lot of catching up to do.
Are you excited?
Yeah … I’m excited if it goes well. If it doesn’t, I’m gonna kill myself! But yeah, what an honor. And who knows why, but it’s really nice for me.
Her album Born To Die comes out on January 31—I already have this date marked on my calendars. Apparently she will be making her next two U.S. television performances in February on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Ellen Degeneres Show. I hope that she will be able to redeem herself and that TV viewers will give her a second chance. After all, that SNL performance was nothing compared to Ashlee Simpson.
