Sultrier and jazzier than her usual fare-like in an Amy Winehouse circa Frank way-Del Rey gets even more self-infantilizing on “Come When You Call Me America” (recorded in 2008). But maybe Del Rey is thinking of the British-ified film version of Humbert Humbert, whether played by James Mason or Jeremy Irons (as opposed to the more “nebulously European” book version of him). Which is why she happily describes, “Daddy dearest/You know how I like to take trips/Pops, first stops at the K-Mart, buy me my peach lip gloss,” later adding with her Lolita perspective, “Daddy likes Blackpool Pleasure Beach.” Never mind that Blackpool is a long way from the U.S., and the cross-country trips that go with it. Thus, a song called “1949” (recorded in 2008), wherein she pays homage to one of her favorite authors, Vladimir Nabokov, by creating her own telling of Lolita. The sort of persona that relished “old-timey” things-the nostalgia of twentieth century Americana. It still makes me happy.”Īnother daddy ditty-just getting right to the point by being called “Daddy’s Girl”-declares without shame, “I’m daddy’s girl/D-daddy’s girl/Daddy’s girl, kissing all the pain away/Da-Da-Daddy’s girl.” It smacks of cosplay potential, but then, so does the majority of Del Rey’s early work, for which she did, try as she might to deny it, adopt a persona. I decorated it with tinsel from the Duane Reade up the street and wrote this song. “Trash (Miss America)” (recorded in 2007), during which she pleadingly asks, “Do you like my fake nails, Daddy?” At this point still on her trailer park tip, Del Rey glamorized trashiness (as only affluent white girls can do) for the sake of exploring “a phase.” One that also involved fetishizing sex work/stripping, as Del Rey sings, “We didn’t know much, just worked at night.” Of the writing of the lyrics-and its according motel motif-Del Rey would comment, “I was staying at the Sunset Motel in New Jersey off and on every other couple of weeks. The demos recorded from around 2007 to 2010 are most telling of where Del Rey’s then early twenty-something head was at. After all, “they say that the world was built for two.” Hence, most of Del Rey’s evocative descriptions being poolside with her Daddy du jour. Hiding, too, has been a long-running motif in Del Rey’s work-so long as she can do it with her Daddy-lover. The lyrics being something of a siren song for Del Rey as Rutherford sings, “Go ahead and cry, little girl/Nobody does it like you do/I know how much it matters to you/I know that you got Daddy issues/And if you were my little girl/I’d do whatever I could do/I’d run away and hide with you.” And yes, it’s no wonder Del Rey was all too eager to invite Jesse Rutherford of The Neighbourhood onstage in 2019 to perform the band’s song, “Daddy Issues,” together during The Norman Fucking Rockwell! Tour. Case in point, “Axl Rose Husband” (recorded in 2008), during which she croons, “I said, ‘Daddy, I need you’” and “You’re my one king, Daddy.” As usual, LDR falls prey to conflating a supposedly “paternal” boyfriend with a replacement father figure-not unlike another being of the twentieth century past she romanticizes, Marilyn Monroe. Long before “Ride” or Del Rey’s meteoric rise to being the millennial maven of post-MySpace pop culture, she was already exploring her Daddy obsession in unreleased demos that could easily be repurposed into an entire album called Electra Complex (though perhaps that would be too close to Marina and the Diamonds’ Electra Heart). But one supposes that overt similarity is for her shrink to sort out. So well-known and frequently-cited, in fact, that all the other times she’s mentioned “Daddy” in some capacity or other in her songs has tended to get buried beneath the legend of, “You can be my full-time Daddy, white and gold.”Īpart from the video for “Ride” itself being a kind of love letter to the type of girl who would be mockingly told she has “Daddy issues,” Del Rey’s real-life fascination with older men also most recently played out with Sean Larkin, a forty-something cop (the precursor to his “aesthetic” already explored in the video for “Shades of Cool”) who looks a lot like Del Rey’s own father, Robert England Grant Jr. Despite only one line in Lana Del Rey’s 2012 song, “ Ride,” mentioning anything about a “Daddy” (while also including “father” in the lyrics, “Dying young and playing hard/That’s the way my father made his life and art”), its brevity does not detract from its memorability and iconicness.
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