In January 2012, as she embarked on press interviews in support of her hugely-anticipated second studio album Born To Die, Lana Del Rey was asked by presenter Eoghan McDermott of XFM radio which song she would listen to if the world was ending tomorrow and she could only listen to one of the album’s tracks.
“I would say, probably hands down, Summertime Sadness,” replied the 26-year-old Del Rey, who up until that point had been living at the house of one of her managers in London’s East End. “It’s just my favourite. It’s about nothing but I like to put it on in the car, driving along by the ocean. It’s just heaven for me. I absolutely love it.”
The song was the fourth single on Born To Die, a stirring and sumptuous modern masterpiece of an album that spanned trip-hop, baroque pop and grandiose cinematic melodies. The album was imbued with themes of doomed romance and toxic relationships, all set within the faded glamour of a dark Lynchian-style ’50s and ’60s America.
Summertime Sadness is one of the album’s defining tracks, a sultry ballad that is poignant, evocative and packed with emotional depth. It remains one of the album’s real highlights.
By the time Born To Die was released on 27 January 2012, Del Rey was already a viral sensation on the back of the song Video Games, which she had uploaded to YouTube back in May 2011.
But she was also the subject of a vicious backlash, after various journalists and media outlets unearthed her ill-fated first album A.K.A. Lizzy Grant, which had been released digitally in 2010.
This first album was light years away from the hip-hop beats, orchestral strings, electronica and sleek, cinematic sheen of Born To Die. By contrast, A.K.A. Lizzy Grant was folky, acoustic and featured compositions that Del Rey – using a title derived from her real birth name Elizabeth Woolridge Grant – would perform in coffee houses and open mics in and around Brooklyn, while she was enrolled studying philosophy and metaphysics at Fordham University in New York City.
The key criticism from the press was that Del Rey had sought to hide her previous persona and album and that by doing so, she had demonstrated a lack of authenticity.
Del Rey was forced to defend claims that it was all a marketing ploy, that she had had facial surgery and that her parents were wealthy and had bankrolled her career.
By the time that Born To Die was released, the criticism had intensified, fuelled by an appearance on the late-night TV comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live on 14 January 2012, when her live performances of Video Games and Blue Jeans were critically panned.
In many ways, Del Rey’s reinvention was no more calculated than any emerging artist seeking to hone their style and their sound. As Alexis Petridis put it in a review of Born To Die in The Guardian in January 2012: “It’s hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for Lana Del Rey. She’s hardly the first pop star in history to indulge in a spot of pragmatic reinvention that muddies her comfortable background, but you'd certainly think she was.”
But when the dust settled – and it took some time – it was difficult to ignore the fact that Born To Die was an impressive major label debut and Summertime Sadness was one of its undoubted high points.
Del Rey co-wrote the song with Rick Nowels, a veteran songwriter who would co-write numerous songs on future Lana Del Rey albums in the years ahead, such as Ultraviolence (2014), Honeymoon (2015) and Lust For Life (2017).
Nowels’ songwriting credits had included Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth (1987), Madonna’s The Power Of Goodbye (1998), New Radicals’ You Get What You Give (1999), Dido’s White Flag (2004) and John Legend’s Green Light (featuring Andree 3000) (2008).
“I met Lana in summer 2011,” Nowels told Billboard magazine in 2013. “I had heard some of her songs on YouTube and I loved what she was doing. When we wrote it, I realised that she was a brilliant songwriter and a magical artist. She writes the kind of music I want to listen to. She has consistently released high-quality songs with artistry and vision. People are starving for real artistry.”
The first inklings of the song came to Del Rey in 2011 during a trip to California, which directly inspired the lyrics.
“Summertime Sadness is a song that I love, because I didn’t compromise when I wrote it at all,” Del Rey told Super Super magazine. “I wrote exactly what I felt, and put a melody to it that was perfect for the words.
“I was staying in Santa Monica, California with my composer and best friend, Daniel Heath. I would sit under the telephone wires and listen to them sizzle in the warm air while he went to work. I wanted to take the electricity and absorb it so it would make me feel alive and electric again.
“I felt happy in the warm [weather] and started writing about how sad and gorgeous the summertime felt to me.”
The song’s lyrics directly reflect this time in Santa Monica. “Telephone wires above are sizzlin' like a snare/Honey, I'm on fire, I feel it everywhere.
Summertime Sadness is essentially a trip-hop ballad, written in the key of C#m and recorded at 125 bpm.
Sweeping orchestration blends effortlessly with stuttering trip-hop beats and Twin Peaks-style twangy guitar, while Del Rey’s lush, sultry voice with its cinematic flourishes, sounds warm, vast and resonant, with every nuance of her voice elevated in the mix.
For all its grandeur, the song boasts a wonderfully simple chord structure – F-Am-G-Dm on the verses and chorus when played with a capo on the fourth fret, while the chords Em and Gsus4 feature in the bridge and outro.
Del Rey had specific ideas for the orchestration, which she relayed to Larry Gold, the main string arranger, composer and conductor on most of the Born To Die album.
“I wanted him to try and get the feeling of the American Beauty soundtrack mixed with early Bruce Springsteen in the summertime,” Lana told XFM. “And he did it.”
Summertime Sadness was largely written and recorded in Santa Monica when Del Rey was staying with Heath, who also plays flute on the track. The song’s beautiful, melancholic feel reflects the balmy, laidback atmosphere.
Rick Nowels co-produced the song with Emile Haynie, who worked with numerous prominent artists such as Kanye West and Eminem. The Cutting Room in New York City was the facility used for the production.
Lyrically, the song explores the bittersweet feeling of intense love, fleeting happiness and inevitable endings, but it has also reportedly been perceived as being a tribute to a friend who died from suicide, with listeners pointing to the line: “Think I’ll miss you forever”.
The song’s sepia-tinged video, directed by Kyle Newman, reflects this premise and features Del Rey and actress Jaime King as two lovers who choose to end their own lives.
Summertime Sadness was released on 22 June 2012 by Interscope Records and met with widespread acclaim. The song charted across Europe, performing particularly well in Eastern Europe, where it reached No.1 in Poland and No.3 in Bulgaria..
Trap and house remixes helped Del Rey to break into the US Hot Dance Club Songs chart and in the spring of 2013, the song became a sleeper hit when it was remixed by French DJ and producer Cedric Gervais.
At first, Del Rey’s labels – Interscope for the US market and UK-based Polydor for the international market – turned down the remix. It wasn’t until Gervais’s manager invited Interscope A&R John Ehmann to a performance at the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas that Interscope got behind the release, after Ehmann reportedly heard 60,000 people singing along to the new remix of Summertime Sadness.
When the song gained significant traction after being showcased on BBC Radio 1 and Sirius XM, Interscope pushed it to Top 40 radio play in the US and later cleared the song for official release. The remix became a hit, going on to peak at No.6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No.3 on the UK's OCC Top 100 charts, making it the highest charting solo song of Del Rey’s career.
Listening to Summertime Sadness nearly 15 years on, there is a beautiful, enigmatic melancholia running throughout. Its relatable themes of lost love or friendship have helped ensure that this signature track, with its sultry vocal delivery and cinematic flourishes, endures.
In the months leading up to the release of the Born To Die album and beyond, Del Rey was forced to weather the significant criticism over her backstory. But with tracks such as Summertime Sadness, it was clear to even her most vocal detractors that here was an artist with profound creative vision and talent.
She would go on to become one of the most uniquely gifted and influential artists of the 21st century.
