When it comes to Lana Del Rey’s “Daddy,” for once it actually refers to her real father. You know, the man who “gave his seed” to create her. Literally as opposed to metaphorically. Though many are still of the belief that Rob Grant’s “web domain money” helped bankroll Lizzy Grant’s early musicianship attempts (along with her expensive education at Fordham) and “mold her” into what she would become circa 2012. But, per Del Rey on “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing,” “I know they think that it took thousands of people/To put me together again like an experiment/Some big men behind the scenes/Sewing Frankenstein black dreams into my songs/But they’re wrong.” In other words, Del Rey maintains her “persona” has always been entirely her own. And perhaps if anyone is trying to create one right now, it’s her, um, Daddy.
More specifically, Rob Grant has, for whatever reason, decided it’s his time to shine musically. Leading one to believe that perhaps this was part of the Faustian pact Lana made with him to get him to give up the cash necessary to support her 00s dreams of being a singer. If that’s the case, she seems only too enthusiastic to pay up, offering her vocals to “Lost At Sea,” the first single from Grant’s debut album of the same name. But Grant seems anything but lost in his determination to “rebrand” himself for his septuagenarian era. This after already relishing former careers as a copywriter (for the well-known Grey Group), a “rustic” furniture hawker, a restaurant owner, a real estate daddy and a web domain investor. It was the latter career with which he made some surprisingly big bucks (and still is). And that “entrepreneurial spirit” seems to endure with his approach to stardom, as he told The Face, “I went out and registered the domain nepodaddy.com. And we’re going to come out with a whole line of merch that’s Nepo Daddy-branded… I’m all for Nepo Daddy. And I also registered nepomommy.com. You know, I’ll listen to what the kids are saying… in the comments on Instagram or Twitter. I just crack up. Another one is Robert Fucking Grant!, after Norman Fucking Rockwell! So I went and registered that name, too.” Clearly, the man knows how to develop careers.
And his latest is, per his Twitter bio, “pianist/composer.” Del Rey is happy to help secure his transition by lending her vocals to not one, but two tracks on the album, including another called “Hollywood Bowl,” which serves as the finale. She was also on hand to give Daddy Grant (a.k.a. Papa Del Rey) some advice on how to pose for his first big magazine feature in The Face. But, based on “Lost At Sea,” it would seem Del Rey has spent most of her life taking her father’s advice (despite certain betrayals). As evidenced in the lyrics, “Once you told me/Look for the north star, then you’ll see/Heavenly, I hear/Found my way to the beach /And there were waves over me/I was lost at sea/Till you found me, till you found me/Ha-ha-ha-ha, happily/Happily, happily I was found lost at sea.” For Del Rey, being “found lost at sea” can allude to so many moments in her life, not least of which is being found lost in a sea of alcohol during her early teenage years—prompting the decision for her to be “sent away” to boarding school (yes, it’s all very Serena Van Der Woodsen).
A decision, it appeared, that was mostly backed by Del Rey’s mother. And yes, both of Del Rey’s parents have proper, important-sounding names (from a white world perspective): Robert England Grant and Patricia Ann Hill. It was Patricia whose opinion served as the most clout-laden one in “transferring” young Lizzy to the Kent School in Connecticut (thanks to some help from Lana’s uncle in the admissions office). Patricia likely wanted Lizzy out of the way more eagerly than her husband as a result of Lizzy “acting out” toward teachers and skipping school. The school where Patricia also happened to be a teacher as well. And, if we’ve gleaned anything from Del Rey’s lyrics, it’s that Patricia was and is a woman very concerned with image. Hence, her choice to swiftly exile Del Rey to boarding school rather than trying to understand what was causing her daughter’s behavior or attempting to seek help for it with her still at home.
With Patricia’s slight, Del Rey felt similarly slighted by her father who didn’t step in to protect her. Ergo, the lyrics on “Wildflower Wildfire” that go, “My father never stepped in when his wife would rage at me/So I ended up awkward but sweet.” Traces of her contention with Mother are peppered throughout her discography, including on the works that were “pre-Lana Del Rey,” namely “My Momma” (“Me and my momma, we don’t get along”) and “Raise Me Up (Mississippi South)” (“I can talk what I want, how I wanna/I don’t have to talk taste for you, mama”). Then there’s her references to the coldness she was met with as a youth on “Bare Feet On Linoleum” from Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. Del Rey recites, “Would standing in front of Mount Rushmore feel like the Great American homecoming I never had?/Would the magnitude of the scale of the sculptures take the place of the warm embrace I’ve never got?” One can feel that lack when she described how, even in the summer, when boarding school was no longer in session, she was still forced to stay away from home. The summer of her sixteenth birthday she was sent to live with a host family in Spain, recalling, “I wasn’t allowed to come home so I went straight to Spain, to Santander. I remember on the plane ride there they gave me a little cake that said ‘Sweet 16’ because I’d turned sixteen in the air. And I was like, ‘This is cool’ but it’s also like, ‘Am I ever, like, gonna go home?’” Alas, as Thomas Wolfe warned, “You can’t go home again.” Especially not when your mother is a bit frigid and doesn’t want to deal with your Lolita ass.
The resentment that would brew within Del Rey over her mother’s callousness reached another crescendo in 2020, as she made mention of “rifts with blood mothers” on Mother’s Day and further announced, “I am the way I am because of the women along the way who have taught me everything I needed to know and loved me unconditionally. I’m also the way I am because of the women I have encountered in this life who have put conditions on their love and are steely in their nature.” Major shade. In the meantime, Del Rey had long ago made amends with Daddy Grant, who perhaps did funnel some dough into her career kickstart out of a sense of guilt for casting her out of the house due to the “peer pressure” of his wife. While Del Rey has clearly forgiven her father, she remains openly icy in any allusion made to her mother. For example, “I’m not friends with my mother, but I still love my dad” on “Black Bathing Suit” or “What the fuck’s wrong in your head to send me away never to come back?/Exotic places and people to take the place of being your child” on “Fingertips.”
And so one can surmise that whatever “healing” transpired between Lana and Rob obviously hasn’t happened between her and Patricia. As for the Daddy issues Del Rey has suffered over the years, “Text Book” addresses it all pretty comprehensively in lines such as, “I guess you could call it textbook/I was lookin’ for the father I wanted back” and “Then there was the issue of her/I didn’t even like myself, or love the life I had.” This again coming across as a thinly veiled dig at her mom. In contrast, her father is characterized as warmer and more understanding, particularly when Del Rey sings, “And there you were with shining stars/Standin’ blue with open arms.” Of course, when Del Rey is potentially speaking to a romantic interest in this song, she could also just as easily be talking to her father. Because when it comes to Del Rey and Rob Grant, things are nothing if not Freudian.
Del Rey’s closeness with her father has now only been further cemented via their shared passion for music, complete with filming a video for “Lost At Sea,” directed by none other than Chuck Grant. And where else could it be filmed but in the waters of Marina Del Rey? Wherein their shared passion for sailing (if the aesthetic for Norman Fucking Rockwell was any indication) is also showcased. A moment Grant characterized as “an extraordinary experience filming onboard a 55-foot ketch in the Pacific in extremely rough seas and high winds.” In short, the metaphorical embodiment of the rocky relationship he had with Lana in her youth. While on the boat, we see scenes of Grant doing “hot daddy” things like taking control of the wheel and tying knots with his big, strong arms. Effectively, being the protector steering Lana’s ship safely to harbor that she always wanted him to be back when it might have spared her from a fate like teenage exile.
Grant additionally opts to include home movie footage featuring him and his children (Chuck and Charlie, in addition to Lana). Notably scant in that footage, of course, is Patricia. Surely not a coincidence. In any event, Grant stated, “The final video is very personal and interspersed with rare family footage of the Grant family growing up (including images that have never been seen before).” When that isn’t happening, Del Rey and Daddy Grant are giving faux-wistful smiles to the camera as though to indicate their relationship has transcended to a new level. One that hasn’t quite exonerated LDR from being accused of having something of an Electra complex. This also made evident in a line from “Text Book” where she asks, “Do you think if I go blonde, we could get our old love back?” For it was when she was still blonde as a little girl, as shown in Grant’s “From the Vault” home movies, that he hadn’t yet “turned against her” with her mother. Now, even as a brunette, it appears Del Rey has gotten that “old love” for her father back and then some.
[…] would have also helped her matriarch out with any potential entertainment industry goals. But her Electra complex seems to be partially at play here in terms of ensuring Rob lives out his “rock star” fantasies […]
[…] Nonetheless, as mentioned above, Jewel gradually realized that her mother was the true villain of her narrative. Which is part of how she came to forgive her father on the 2015 album Picking Up the Pieces, a bookend to Pieces of You. The song that would offer up the exact opposite message to “Daddy” was “My Father’s Daughter,” a title that can be interpreted with as many dark meanings as positive ones. Per Jewel, “The song is about forgiveness. It’s about my dad and [my] relationship; it’s about the fact that all of us owe everything that we are to the sacrifices of the generations that came before us. In this case, my grandmother and my father.” In this sense, Jewel is certainly a long way away from Plath’s 1962 state of mind at this juncture. Though there was clearly a time when she embodied the same headspace with regard to her feelings on Daddy. And yes, like Jewel, Plath’s relationship with her mother was not, at its core, a very positive one, with the poet addressing it in both “Medusa” and “The Disquieting Muses.” For one might argue that a contempt for Daddy inevitably leads to a contempt for Mommy because she deigned to marry him (though the aforementioned Lana Del Rey has not yet come to that conclusion—quite the opposite, in fact). […]