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Lana Del Rey · S1 E1
The Girl from Lake Placid
Born in Manhattan, raised in an Adirondack mountain town of 2,500 people
Lake Placid, New York, 1999. A fourteen-year-old named Elizabeth Grant stands at the front of St. Agnes Catholic Church, singing as cantor, her voice filling a stone building in a town where everybody knows everybody and nobody ever leaves.
"Love" (Lana Del Rey, 2017). Young people floating through space, untethered from gravity and expectation. Lana wrote this song about the teenagers she sees at her shows, the ones who remind her of herself at fourteen in Lake Placid: dreamers with nowhere to put all that feeling.
Born in Manhattan, Raised in the Mountains
Elizabeth Woolridge Grant is born on June 21, 1985 in Manhattan, to two copywriters at the Grey Group ad agency who meet on the job and marry. When Lizzy is barely a year old, the family trades the city for Lake Placid: a frozen Adirondack hamlet of 2,500 people, two hours from the nearest real city, famous for exactly one thing: the 1980 Winter Olympics.
Sources
Wikipedia
Britannica
Biography.com
Lake Placid, New York
The Adirondack mountain town where Lizzy Grant grew up singing in church, writing poetry, and dreaming about somewhere else.
Love, Lana Del Rey (2017)
The production is lush and open, built around a vintage drum machine and a synth pad that sounds like a sunrise. Rick Nowels co-wrote and produced the track, giving it a warmth that Lana's earlier work deliberately avoided. Listen for the chorus: "Look at you kids with your vintage music, coming through satellites while cruising." She's singing to her teenage fans, but she's also singing to the girl she was in Lake Placid, the one who hadn't found her way yet.
Sources
Lust for Life liner notes, Interscope / Polydor, 2017
“I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality.”
— Lana Del Rey, Ride monologue, 2012
TAP TO REVEAL: What was Lizzy Grant's first creative obsession?
This Is What Makes Us Girls, Lana Del Rey
From Born to Die (2012). This is Lana's most directly autobiographical song about her teenage years: the drinking, the sneaking out, the girls she ran with, and the feeling that the recklessness was the whole point. "We were born to die" isn't a philosophy here, it's a Friday night in Lake Placid.
This Is What Makes Us Girls, Lana Del Rey (2012)
"Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice" and stolen cars. Follow the lyrics: this is the Lake Placid origin story set to music, the teenage recklessness before anyone was watching.
What was Lizzy Grant's first creative ambition before she ever pursued music?
At 14, Lizzy Grant is drinking every day, and her parents are running out of options. Next: they send her to Kent School in Connecticut, where a teenage alcoholic discovers Ginsberg, Whitman, and sobriety.
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