Lana Del Rey uploaded a short spoken word video to her social media channels late Saturday night. The piece, entitled “Salamander,” is a selection from her just-released album Violet Bent Backward over the Grass, in which Del Rey reads her poems over music beds created with Jack Antonoff. The hardcover book will be released in late September after some delays.
The moody video, which features a chewed-up VHS filter, shows Del Rey reading from large manuscript pages, wearing an unbuttoned plaid shirt over what appears to be a bathing suit in a backyard.
The short recitation begins with the “Young and Beautiful” singer ordering a salamander to get out of her blood, lest she soul-cycle it to death. “I’m a real poet. My life is my poetry,” she continues.
Be forewarned that if you listen to this over headphones there is a loud grey noise at the end that will hurt your ears if the volume is too high.
Half of the proceeds of Violet Bend Backward over the Grass are being given to the Navajo Water Project. Del Rey has referred to this as “my own reparative act.”
A second spoken-word project, Behind the Iron Gates – Insights From an Institution, is also in the works for this autumn, as is a new album, Chemtrails Over the Country Club.
A critic writing for The Observer said her first album of poetry was “great on place specifics and internal assonance, less so as [Del Rey] wafts on about her own gentle nature.”
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