(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 22 March 2026 2:00, UK
Lana Del Rey has given her dream countless times over.
More so than her own accolades with her albums and shows, Del Rey has lived her dream by getting to meet the heroes that prompted her entire career. You don’t become an artist as eclectic as Del Rey is without having an eclectic mix of influences.
On her debut album alone, the artist references Lou Reed, Tom Petty, and Snoop Dogg, and across her career, names like Allen Ginsberg, TS Elliot, Joan Baez, Stevie Nicks and more have cropped up in her writing as her landscape of inspirations is broad, encompassing a huge array of genres and styles.
Where possible, when those artists are still alive, Del Rey seems to go on a mission to hunt them down and meet them, desperate to pay her respects to her heroes while she still can, or even sing with them if she could dare to dream it. The most famous example of that has to be the goose chase she went on to try and get Joan Baez to duet with her.
Baez was reclusive and dubious, so set the young singer a challenge: if Del Rey could find her and do the harmonies, she’d do the show, and so Del Rey was driving around San Francisco hunting down the ‘60s icon’s home.
She didn’t mind, “I recently said to her, ‘I just want you to know that I’m keenly aware that, in this lifetime or any other, I have no right to be standing shoulder to shoulder with you’,” Del Rey said to Baez, her now-friend, who replied humbly, “Oh, shut up”. But it’s clear that Del Rey truly worships her heroes like gods; when it comes to the absolute top tier of artists who inspire her to not end, she wants to pay her respects.
Sadly, though, one was lost too soon. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t kind of break my heart that I never got to tell you how much you changed me,” she wrote on social media, speaking directly to the memory of Leonard Cohen. Under a picture of the writer and musician, Del Rey said, “Other than Bob and Joan, you were the only person I ever really felt spoke my language”. In her eyes, those three are the leaders, especially as she turns to the powerful trio for guidance.
But with no way to meet Leonard, she turned to the closest thing, his son. In 2017, Del Rey collaborated with Adam Cohen to sing his father’s song ‘Chelsea Hotel No 2’ at a special tribute concert to him in Montreal. At the show titled, ‘Tower of Song: A Memorial Tribute to Leonard Cohen’, Del Rey sang the tune that had always been her favourite of Cohen’s and that she’d recorded and released her own version of in 2013 as the only way she could think to honour her hero.
Back in 2013, she likely hoped the cover might reach him, maybe hoping it might lead to a meeting as she’s been lucky enough to have with so many of her other heroes, but as he died a few years later, and all Del Rey could do to convene with her idol was sing his words.
