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Lana Del Rey Won’t Be Singing In Front Of An American Flag Anytime Soon

'It would feel weird to me now — it didn’t feel weird in 2013'

Lana Del Rey is no stranger to diving into darkness in her music, even if the songs we've heard so far from her new album, Lust For Life, lean on the rosier side of romance.

In a new interview with Pitchfork, Lana didn't shy away from talking about the tough stuff, at all — depression, abusive relationships, life, death, and confronting both in song. She reveals that her fans adore her to the point where they don't really get boundaries and cross some truly serious lines at times ("Someone stole both my cars. All the scary shit. I’ve had people in my house for sure, and I didn’t know they were there while I was there"). She also unpacks her love for Americana and the patriotic, nostalgic images she's previously worked into music videos and projections that are incorporated into her live show.

Thanks to the drastic change in the political climate between the country Lana was living in when she wrote Ultraviolence and Born to Die and the one she found herself in while working on Lust For Life, the tour visuals she'll use this time around have way less of an emphasis on the stars and stripes she used to embrace. She's still pulling from American icons for inspiration — the Hollywood Sign is her fictional home for this album cycle, for example, and she poses in front of a vintage pick-up truck on the album cover — but she's definitely felt an "uncomfortable" shift in regards to unraveling them.

"I feel less safe than I did when Obama was president," she told Pitchfork. "When you have a leader at the top of the pyramid who is casually being loud and funny about things like that, it’s brought up character defects in people who already have the propensity to be violent towards women. I saw it right away in L.A. Walking down the street, people would just say things to you that I had never heard."

She goes on to stress that she's definitely re-worked her tour visuals, but that the emphasis on American identity and cultural turmoil remains.

"I’m not going to have the American flag waving while I’m singing 'Born to Die,'" she continued. "It’s not going to happen. I’d rather have static. It’s a transitional period, and I’m super aware of that. I think it would be inappropriate to be in France with an American flag. It would feel weird to me now — it didn’t feel weird in 2013 ... All the guys in the studio — we didn’t know we were going to start walking in every day and talking about what was going on. We hadn’t ever done that before, but everyday during the election, you’d wake up and some new horrible thing was happening ..."

Read the (doozy of a) Pitchfork interview in full here. Lust For Life will see its release on July 21. (Don't illegally download it, you little fuckers.)

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