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Lana Del Rey · S1 E3
Sparkle Jump Rope Queen
A philosophy student plays open mics under a dozen names nobody remembers
It's a Tuesday night in 2006 at a Brooklyn open mic, and a girl who calls herself Sparkle Jump Rope Queen takes the stage in front of seven people. Four of them are other musicians waiting for their own slot.
"Shades of Cool" (Lana Del Rey, 2014). The woman in this video is composed, confident, submerged in blue water and completely in control. Years before this existed, a girl called Sparkle Jump Rope Queen was playing to seven people in a Brooklyn bar. The journey from that bar to this video is the story of Season 1.
Shades of Cool, Lana Del Rey (2014)
Produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, this track swaps the electronic sheen of Born to Die for live guitar, real reverb, and a vocal that sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of the ocean. Listen for the way the guitar solo in the second half builds slowly, then collapses into distortion. Every open mic in Brooklyn was building toward this: a singer who finally sounds like she owns the room.
Sources
Ultraviolence liner notes, Interscope / Polydor, 2014
The Double Life
In 2004, Lizzy Grant enrolls at Fordham University in the Bronx. She chooses philosophy with an emphasis on metaphysics, telling interviewers she was interested in "the gap between God and science." But the real education happens at night, when she takes the subway downtown to play every open mic and songwriter night she can find.
Sources
Wikipedia
Lana Del Rey Wiki
IMDB Bio
“I was a singer, not a very good one, who already had a seven-year head start on the 'moment' that everyone thinks started with Video Games.”
— Lana Del Rey, The Guardian, June 2014
The Many Names of Lizzy Grant
Fordham University, The Bronx
The Jesuit university where Lizzy Grant studied philosophy from 2004 to 2008 while secretly building a music career in downtown Manhattan.
TAP TO REVEAL: What happened to the album Lizzy recorded under the name May Jailer?
Off to the Races, Lana Del Rey
From Born to Die (2012). The opening line is lifted straight from the first page of Nabokov's Lolita: "Light of my life, fire of my loins." This is where Lizzy Grant's philosophy education crashes into Lana Del Rey's dangerous persona. Every literary reference in her career traces back to those Fordham nights.
Off to the Races, Lana Del Rey (2012)
Nabokov, the Chateau Marmont, "my old man": every line is a building block of the mythology she was constructing in those open mic rooms. The girl reading Lolita at Fordham is writing her own dangerous fiction.
What was the name of the full unreleased album Lizzy Grant recorded under a secret alias?
In 2008, a producer named David Kahne picks up the phone. Next: the man who made records with Sublime and Sugar Ray hears something in Lizzy Grant's voice, and for the first time, someone in the music industry is paying attention.
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