Artist Research

Lana Del Rey

Her Style

Lana Del Rey’s style has been described as a “self styled gangster Nancy Sinatra” and she takes influence from aspects of pop artists from the 1950’s and the 1960’s. In most of her songs, she uses an orchestra (if not a string section) and this combined with her contralto vocal range, which allows her to reach high and lower notes, gives of a highly emotive and cinematic feel to each song. All of her songs are self written and heavily love related.

This is her website, and the first thing you see is a promotion photo for her new album along with the links for where to by it.

Her website also takes you to see news to do with her, her tour dates, her albums and a gallery, as well as taking you to a separate site which is her online store.

Her Albums

‘Born to Die’ was Lana Del Rey’s first album, with the same name as the leading single, was released in the beginning of 2012. Just like many other artists like Lady Gaga, she re-released ‘Born To Die’ with an extra 8 tracks, including her cover of ‘Blue Velvet’, in late 2012 and re named it ‘Born To Die: The Paradise Edition’.

Lana Del Rey released her most recent album, ‘Ultraviolence’ with ‘West Coast’ being the lead single. She recorded the album all over the place including places like London, Nashville and LA. It reached number one in the Billboard 200 charts within it’s first week of sales becoming the first number one album on the chart and best-selling debut week of her career.

Music Videos – Born To Die

The video doesn’t have much variety of shot types other than close ups and mid shots but it does use quite a lot of pans. The video opens with an establishing shot of where the performance happens, which seems to be in a church or cathedral, before it pans downs and zooms in onto Lana Del Rey herself.The lighting throughout the video changes quite a lot, especially during the second verse as the light flashes and pans across quite a lot. The whole video, but especially the end has the cinematic feel to it like it belongs in a film.

Music Videos - Ride

Unlike Born To Die, this video is more like a mini film rather than a music video as it lasts for 10 minutes. It opens with violins playing what could be the main theme from the song. Lana Del Rey then starts narrating over the music about her life. There are several different shot types and the camera mainly focus’ on her rather than anything in each different section of the video that is shown.