Lana Del Rey Announces New Country Album Lasso
This weekend, Lana Del Rey is up for a whole pile of Grammys for Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, the album that she released last year. Last night, at Billboard‘s pre-Grammys Power 100 Party, Del Rey announced her next album. It’s coming out in September, it’s called Lasso, and it’s a country music record.
At the Billboard function last night, Lana Del Rey was speaking in tribute to her regular collaborator Jack Antonoff, who’s up for the Producer Of The Year Grammy. (If he wins on Sunday, Antonoff will become only the second producer, after Babyface, to win that award three years in a row.) As Billboard reports, Del Rey told the crowd, “If you can’t already tell by our award winners and our performers, the music business is going country. We’re going country. I knew it, I said it, it’s happening. That’s what’s happening! And that’s why Jack has followed me to Muscle Shoals, Nashville, Mississippi over the last four years — to write our album, coming out in September, called Lasso.”
At the moment, we don’t know anything else about the forthcoming record. Lana Del Rey has long had a fascination with country music. She’s covered songs like John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” and she, Nikki Lane, and Sierra Ferrell have performed an unreleased song called “Prettiest Girl In Country Music.” Del Rey is obsessed with ideas like Americana and femininity, and country plays a role in that. If Del Rey is making the record with Jack Antonoff, then she’s not fully diving into the country thing and working within that system. (Antonoff has dipped his toes in country, producing the Chicks’ 2020 album Gaslighter, but that’s different from working with a full-time country producer.) It’ll be fascinating to hear Del Rey and Antonoff’s take on the genre.
