Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Thu 1 October 2026 0:30, UK
Lana Del Rey is the definition of a no-fucks-given kind of musician.
If it isn’t random shifts at Waffle House diners in rural America, or kicking huge headline festival sets off some 30 minutes late, Del Rey is promising on albums that don’t even exist and disappearing off into the dark of night with an alligator airboat tour captain from Louisiana.
All of this to say, the woman is a mystery, an enigma, a complete and utter question mark when the industry demands creatives to be transparent, to be exclamation marks, always oh so happy to be serving themselves up like a meal for the insatiable masses. This means that the biggest clues we have to access her internal world are through the influences she has referenced, for the artists she opts to spend her time with, those whose own timbres seep into her velvety smooth vocal.
We might’ve guessed from her song ‘Old Money’ that Del Rey would’ve had a soft spot for Frank Sinatra. On the track, she pulls us back to the glamour of Hollywood aesthetics, soaring through vignettes of old-world luxury: “Blue hydrangea, cold cash divine, Cashmere, cologne and white sunshine, Red racing cars, Sunset and Vine”.
Who else epitomises this so effortlessly as Sinatra himself? As Del Rey once explained, “When I heard his voice for the first time, I couldn’t believe it was real; it was just the most… He had a golden voice, like a golden tone on his voice”. She went on to christen him with the epithet “master of vocals”.
But Sinatra isn’t the only Hollywood figure that the star has centred her work around. In 2023, she released a ten-minute music video for ‘Candy Necklace’, presenting a behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood history filtered through her own world of glamour and pain, soundtracked by the song from Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
Her collaborator, Jon Batiste, appears alongside her, tinkling on the piano, as she recreates the platinum-blonde Marilyn Monroe look, as well as the dark story of Elizabeth Short, also known as ‘The Black Dahlia’, who lost her life in 1947 and whose murder became one of Hollywood’s most disturbing and well-known unsolved cases.
Further reading: From The Vault
No doubt that listening to the timelessness of Sinatra did these concerns start to take hold: how could a man singing in such a self-assured, soothing way be so deceptive, himself riddled with such isolation and loneliness as was symptomatic of the highs and lows of the lights and the stage? It is these paradoxes at the heart of Del Rey’s magnifying, mythical work.
You can hear this lifted lounge-singer style elsewhere in her work, as Del Rey sings comfortably and raunchily about topics that would otherwise make a dead man turn over in his grave. “Master of the vocals,” she said, not just for his dripping, oozy timbre but also for his ability to deceive his listener into a false sense of hope, until reality became fiction and the world he sang about became the truth.
Del Rey’s complicated relationship with her platform also echoes Sinatra’s, who formally announced his retirement from show business in June 1971 before reappearing in 1973.
Who else do we know who’d do such a thing?
