Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey, born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant on June 21, 1985, is an American singer-songwriter whose work pairs melancholy, glamour and romance with references to pop culture and Americana of the 1950s through the 1970s. She grew up in upstate New York and moved to Manhattan in 2005 to pursue music, later recording under names including Lizzy Grant and Lana Del Ray before adopting Lana Del Rey.

Her breakthrough arrived in 2011, when “Video Games” became a viral success and led to a recording contract with Polydor and Interscope. Her second album, Born to Die (2012), brought critical and commercial success with its moody, hip hop-inflected production. The record spawned the sleeper hit “Summertime Sadness,” topped charts in numerous countries, and became the longest-charting album by a woman in the history of the US Billboard 200. Del Rey later topped the US album chart with Ultraviolence in 2014 and Lust for Life in 2017.

Her sixth album, Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019), was nominated for Album of the Year at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards and was included in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” Her ninth studio album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, followed in 2023. Its single “A&W” was named among Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” while “Say Yes to Heaven” became a top-20 hit on the Billboard Global 200 later that year.

Del Rey has also worked extensively with visual media. In 2013, she wrote and starred in the musical short film Tropico and released “Young and Beautiful” for The Great Gatsby, earning Grammy Award and Critics’ Choice Award nominations. She recorded “Once Upon a Dream” for Maleficent in 2014 and the title song for Big Eyes, which received a Golden Globe Award nomination, and later joined the “Don’t Call Me Angel” collaboration for Charlie’s Angels. In 2020, she published the poetry and photography collection Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass. In 2026, she collaborated with James Bond composer David Arnold on “007: First Light,” the title song for the video game of the same name.

Her honors include an MTV Video Music Award, three MTV Europe Music Awards, two Brit Awards, two Billboard Women in Music awards and a Satellite Award, alongside 11 Grammy nominations and a Golden Globe nomination. Variety honored her as “one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the 21st century,” while Rolling Stone placed her on its 2023 list of the “200 Greatest Singers of All Time.”