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. 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.”
Apart 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. But one supposes that overt similarity is for her shrink to sort out.
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). 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. 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. 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.”
Hiding, too, has been a long-running motif in Del Rey’s work—so long as she can do it with her Daddy-lover. 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. The demos recorded from around 2007 to 2010 are most telling of where Del Rey’s then early twenty-something head was at. Like on “Trash Magic” a.k.a. “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. I decorated it with tinsel from the Duane Reade up the street and wrote this song. It still makes me happy.”
Another 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.
The sort of persona that relished “old-timey” things—the nostalgia of twentieth century Americana. 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. 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. 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).
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). It’s within the context of this song that she decides to demand, “Tell me a story, Daddy.” This after declaring, “This is like I always wanted/Just like I always knew.” Paired with the self-debasement of the title, it’s in keeping with her “hurt me, treat me rough” aura of this era (“Push Me Down” being another instance in her canon of unreleased songs).
Going for the gold on admitting to her “Daddy Issues,” the up-tempo rhythm of the song of the same name (yes, she had a song called that even before The Neighbourhood) feels like a precursor to “Shades of Cool” as Del Rey talks about a “cool” guy with the nickname “Baby Blue” (which doesn’t really sound all that cool, to be honest, but apparently they call him as such ‘cause blue is his favorite couleur).
Alluding to that well-to-do past (no, it ain’t just part of the persona) Del Rey has tried to downplay more of late, “Go Go Dancer” (recorded in 2010) is her homage to strippers before she could do so visually in the “Body Electric” segment of Tropico. For the first half of the song, we get the impression this is a girl who has to dance for money, but no, we soon find out it’s some “fun” social experiment as she announces, “I never have to work ‘cause my daddy is rich.”
That daddy seems less biological on the aptly named “Be My Daddy” (recorded in 2010). With its surf rock tinge, Del Rey speaks of a rich man (because of course) who she wants to make hers as she urges, “You can be my daddy tonight-night-night/If you’re seeking heaven/Then you wanna come and get it, get it.” Elsewhere, she makes it more Lolita with the suggestion, “Sitting on your lap, singing you my song, ooh-ooh-ooh/Got a lollipop.” Supposedly inspired by the fact that she was wearing a Daddy’s Girl necklace around this time, it is a bit of a wonder that the track didn’t make the final cut for the Born to Die album, but maybe that would have been laying it on too thick with “Carmen” and “Lolita” also present on the record.
Getting more macabre about Daddy than usual on “Kinda Outta Luck” (recorded in 2010), she rehashes her killing spree and, in a truly rare moment, actually mentions “Mom” with the tale, “Is it wrong, Mom, that I think it’s kinda fun/When I hit you in the back of the head with a gun?/My daddy’s in the trunk of his brand new truck/I really want him back, but I’m kinda outta luck.” Note that she only seems concerned about her “daddy” being dead, which plays into the recently referenced source of contention on LDR’s social media (circa Mother’s Day 2020) between her and her real mother.
Wanting to surrender her fate to an older man more intensely than ever on “You Can Be the Boss” (recorded in 2010), Del Rey tantalizes, “You can be the boss, Daddy, you can be the boss.” Allured by his cruelty and roughness, Del Rey remarks, “The liquor on your lips makes you dangerous” and “As close as I’ll get to the darkness/He tells me to, ‘Shut up, I got this.’” That’s all “little” Lana wants in the end, anyway: to be told what to do.
As her music became more “full-bodied” (or, in other words, actually secured production value), Born to Die’s “Off to the Races” would also make for one of her many evocative images about being on the proverbial run with an older man à la Lolita. Which is why she characterizes her boyfriend as “my old man.”
On the EP that followed, Paradise, Del Rey would seek father figures in her idols on “Body Electric,” claiming that both “Elvis is my daddy” and “Whitman is my daddy.” In short, “Daddy, Daddy, someone be my daddy.”
The same album also offered “Cola” and “Yayo” (a track Del Rey initially wrote around 2007, when she first performed it live at, of all places, Union Pool). On the former, Del Rey proudly announces, “I pledge allegiance to my dad,” while the latter finds her seductively insisting, “Let me put on a show for you, Daddy.”
Ultraviolence kept up the momentum of Daddy lust going via “Florida Kilos,” at which time she noted with “Off to the Races” flair, “You like your little baby like you like your drinks, cool/White lines, pretty Daddy, go skiing/You snort it like a champ, like the winter we’re not in.” Another track prior to “Florida Kilos” on this album, “Old Money” also makes mention of Daddy in the blood-related sense with the lyrics, “My father’s love was always strong.” For a while after this, fans might have been led to believe she was going to lay off the “Daddy sauce,” with albums like Lust for Life shifting her focus more toward the political and “adult,” but the trope came back with a more bittersweet vengeance on Norman Fucking Rockwell’s “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it.” Among her most morose tracks, Del Rey lilts, “Calling from beyond the grave/I just called to say, ‘Hi, Dad.’” And one has no doubt that Del Rey would find a way to call her “Daddy” from beyond the grave indeed, should she happen to die before him.
Her penchant for “fatherly depictions” has also cropped up again even as freshly as this year, with one of the songs from her forthcoming Blue Banisters album, “Text Book,” getting quite in-depth about daddy issues (hence, such a title). This is why she admits she seems to have been looking in other men for the father she felt she lost for her entire youth, noting, “I guess you could call it textbook/I was lookin’ for the father I wanted back.” In another section, she highlights being drawn to the things that remind her of her father in other males, pointing out, “You’ve got a Thunderbird, my daddy had one, too/Let’s rewrite history, I’ll do this dance with you.”
Making the term less sexual in the next instance, Del Rey regresses as she sings, “God, I wish I was with my father/He could see us in all our splendor/All the things I couldn’t want for him.” Perhaps because she was too busy resenting him at the time, as indicated by another Blue Banisters single, “Wildflower Wildfire,” allowing her to get deep into therapy mode as she recalls, “My father never stepped in when his wife would rage at me/So I ended up awkward but sweet.” This is the second most recent time (after the aforementioned Mother’s Day comment) that Del Rey alludes to her mother being kind of, well, a cunt. And, in turn, her dad being one for “letting” her behavior persist.
So yes, for all of your fucked up addressments of Daddy issues, Lana Del Rey is your “go-to gal.” For who is a better expert in all things “Daddy”?—apart from another woman besides Marilyn that LDR idolizes, Sylvia Plath.
