How Lana Del Rey became a darling of the Right

Wonder if her father was Lester? No seriously.

Looks like no..

DAD:
https://people.com/thmb/skGJrKuGGsc7THLerm9A7u_kU9Y=/4000x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(574x0:576x2)/Rob-Grant-02-060823-cbd4c5602b2a40899a440554b0c20e2c.jpg

I’ve never seen her perform live, but have known of her music since 2014 and the haunting song “Summertime Sadness”.

To see what she looked like on stage in 2014 in a white blouse and cutoff jeans (with the album track synced in, replacing the lesser quality of the live sound)....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgWO8vk6xqo

9,257,824 views
Singing, smoking, and chewing gum, Sexy!

Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness Live - Bråvalla Festival 2014-06-26

Lana Del Rey Performs “Video Games” | Letterman Feb. 22, 2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r3qSKV8TZw

She even covered the Sublime song, Doin’ Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qolmz4FlnZ0

Yes, she has had a conversion to MAGA since 2018…..but don’t try to convince the purists who reject anyone who was once a Trump hater….their hearts are closed.

“She’s a low talent well-marketed pop star. Inconsequential.”

More of a high talent, not marketed, indie star. But still inconsquential.

She more of the cute girl with a good voice that sings folk rocky songs, from the little I’ve heard.

You sure about that?

Say the name Lana Del Rey and a particular image of the United States materialises: one of rusted trucks and faded flags, a waitress curling her hair before the breakfast shift, the smell of petrol in the heat, the hum of late-night television in a room where no one is really watching. For more than a decade, despite being from New York City, the singer has been the patron saint of small-town melancholy, the US’s emblem of heartbreak. Somewhere along the way, she gained a new congregation: Republicans. Or at least the kind of wistful traditionalists who do not mind being labelled as such.

So perhaps it is perfect that her next album is called Stove, a title so plain it feels almost revolutionary in a world allergic to sincerity.

While other pop stars go big and glitzy, naming their albums things like The Life of a Showgirl, Brat or Radical Optimism, Del Rey, never afraid to go against the grain, has gone full kitchen appliance. Stove clangs with the sturdy, unpretentious weight of real life – just look at the title of the forthcoming album’s new single. Released on Tuesday, White Feather-Hawk Tail Deer Hunter sounds more like an advertisement for Bass Pro Shops than a pop song.

Naturally, critics have been searching for irony. Is she mocking the “tradwives”? Commenting on capitalism? Is it all, somehow, a feminist statement? There has been the inevitable liberal backlash. Social media users lined up to express their horror that a woman might name an album after a household object. “You really doubled down on ‘feminism isn’t interesting to me’ with that title,” one commenter wrote, capturing the general tone of panic. Others concluded that it must be a Sylvia Plath reference. The American poet, you know, who died by putting her head in a stove. The idea that a pop star could find poetry in the domestic, or beauty in the ordinary, was apparently too much to bear for some.

But Del Rey is not mocking or moralising. She is doing something far riskier: being sincere – something that now seems to qualify as a political act, and something that definitely codes Right. She is married to an alligator-tour guide from the South named Jeremy Dufrene and lives in a modest Louisiana home he built himself – a detail so quaint it feels like a joke, except it is not.

Lana Del Rey performs live on stage at Principality Stadium on June 23, 2025 in Cardiff, Wales
Lana Del Rey’s evolving style mirrors the sincerity of her forthcoming album Stove Credit: Joseph Okpako/Getty Images for ABA
The 11-time Grammy nominee has always been a mirror for the national mood. When the US was ironic, she was tragic. When it was miserable, she was sublime. Now that the country is drifting Rightward, nostalgic for its own myths, suspicious of progress and quietly yearning for permanence, Del Rey is already there, humming in a gingham dress. She is not trolling liberals or flirting with conservatives; she is not campaigning for President Trump or appearing on controversial podcasts hosted by Nick Fuentes or Joe Rogan. She is simply paying attention. The cleverest woman in pop does not fight the culture war – she wins it by refusing to play.

In a W magazine profile last August, Del Rey’s transformation appeared complete. Gone was the dishevelled Tumblr siren, with her bright red lipstick and flower crown. In her place stood a 1930s Hollywood apparition: dusky pink gown, immaculate curls, eyes full of weary glamour. She spoke about her new favourite pastime: what she calls “parking-lot time” with her husband. “We spend so much time in parking lots,” she said, “just reading or talking in the car. Sometimes you think you’re the only one who loves a particular thing, like sitting in an empty Macy’s parking lot. But then you find another soul who feels the same way.” In a culture addicted to noise, there is something radical about her quiet contentment.

To her older fans, it felt like rebellion disguised as domestic bliss. Their sad-girl oracle had gone quiet. The woman who once sang about getting high by the beach now seems happiest waiting for her husband to get home. Progressives call it regression, conservatives call it sanity, but what it really is is normal – particularly for a 40-year-old woman. In 2025, to be a famous woman who marries an ordinary man and retreats into private life is practically an act of sedition. The modern feminist script demands that women be restless, aggrieved and relentlessly public. Del Rey has chosen stillness, affection and obscurity, and that, apparently, codes Republican.

Del Rey with her husband, Jeremy Dufrene, a swamp guide from the American South
Del Rey with her husband, Jeremy Dufrene, a swamp guide from the American South Credit: REUTERS
This is not her first brush with controversy. In 2020, Del Rey came under fire for saying she had been unfairly criticised for having “sexy” and “submissive” lyrics when her female peers often sang about the same themes. Critics seized on the fact that those artists were women of colour and accused Del Rey of racism. The following year, when she was criticised for the “all-white” cover of her album Chemtrails Over the Country Club, she clapped back: “In 11 years working I have always been extremely inclusive without trying to. My best friends are rappers, my boyfriends have been rappers.” For a while it looked as though Del Rey had become persona non grata, a liberal lightning rod. Who could forget the furore over her mesh face mask, worn to an event during the Covid pandemic?

A few years on, her 2024 marriage to Dufrene, 50 – who spends his days sailing down the bayou in search of alligators rather than attending celebrity parties – confounded fans. How could the most glamorous woman in pop settle down with a man who owns waders? How could someone who once dated rock stars and photographers, and spoke the language of doomed romance, end up happily married in a house with a porch swing in the Deep South? For the coastal press, this was near blasphemy.

A decade ago, when the US was less polarised, liberals would hum along to Del Rey’s hymns about blue-collar America without blinking, despite the fact that her father, Robert Grant, is a multimillionaire raised on the east coast who has been largely credited with getting her career off the ground. She could sing about heartbreak under the stars and wrap herself in the American flag in the video for Ride, and no one thought to ask which party she voted for. Now, sincerity reads like propaganda and nostalgia looks like nationalism.

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Her headline set at the country music festival Stagecoach last April only made the divide clearer. Dressed in a gauzy prairie gown, she sang a cover of Stand By Your Man to a crowd that was half glamorous Coachella castaways – both festivals are held on the same site in Indio, California – and half country conservatives. They adored her. The same fans who once cried to chart-topper Born to Die were now belting Tammy Wynette without irony, while those on the Right who had previously dismissed Del Rey as just another vapid pop star were finally seeing her true colours.

Then came the inevitable internet feud to split her fans in two, the kind that reveals more about the audience than the artist. Last August, she posted a snippet from Stove (set for release later this year) to Instagram, tagging producer Jack Antonoff and teasing a song fans quickly dubbed “All About Ethel”, widely construed as taking aim at the transgender indie singer Ethel Cain.

“Ethel Cain hated my Instagram post,” she sang, “Think it’s cute re-enacting my Chicago pose.”

Within hours, the think pieces began. Was this Del Rey’s first diss track? Was she targeting a younger, openly trans singer? Was it meant to be political?

In truth, it was not about politics at all. It was about manners. Del Rey eventually deleted the post, but not before commenting that she had written the line only because Cain had spent years posting side-by-side images of her on social media next to “unflattering creatures” and making jibes about her weight. “Then when I heard what she was saying behind closed doors,” she wrote, “and started inserting herself into my personal life, I was definitely disturbed.” It was not a culture war – simply one woman finding another rude. But in this day and age, rudeness and ideology are indistinguishable online, and every celebrity disagreement becomes a referendum on democracy.

Lana Del Rey fans at Wembley on July 4 2025
Fans display the Stars and Stripes at a Lana Del Rey concert at Wembley in July 2025 — a living snapshot of her Americana
That, more than anything, explains why Del Rey fascinates and unsettles people. She refuses to play by the new moral physics of celebrity, where silence is guilt and neutrality is treason. She does not moralise or grovel. She creates something beautiful, then disappears, leaving the culture to argue about what she meant. The very act of not performing has become her rebellion.

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Stove might seem an odd title for a pop record, but it is perfect: warm, functional, unpretentious, the quiet heart of a home. Del Rey has always understood that the US’s story is not revolutionary; it is domestic – a nation forever tending its fire, trying to keep the lights on.

That is why she endures. She does not chase the zeitgeist; she lets it spin itself out, then holds up a mirror. And when we look into it, what we see is not Lana Del Rey turning conservative. It is the rest of the country finally remembering what ordinary used to look like.

Yes some of the nuts on Free Republic need to have the same convo with Jesus that Lana has apparently had

In the real world, it’s actually more important to believe in our Lord and Savior and love Him and His redemption of our sins — than it is to be MAGA.

Ideally, one would be both!

“Never heard of her.”

Me neither.
Sounds like she had a really smart dad.