What You Need to Know About the Lana Del Rey Interview Magazine 2023 Issue
The Interview Magazine 2023 feature on Lana Del Rey is a fairly standard celebrity profile piece, but it has some specifics that trip people up if they're looking for the full thing. I ran into this when a reader asked me where the complete interview was, since the print version gets paywalled and the digital version moves around on the website depending on how Interview handles their content rotation. The interview was photographed by Rankin and conducted over phone calls and in-person meetings in Los Angeles. It covers her album Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, her creative process, her relationship with Rob Reynolds, and a few other topics she doesn't typically discuss in press runs. The piece ran in the spring 2023 issue and was also posted digitally on interviewmagazine.com around April or May of that year. If you're trying to access it, here's how it actually works in practice. The print magazine subscription runs about $30 a year if you go through their site directly. But most people just want the article. The digital version lives on their website, and they sometimes gate it behind a register wall. I've found that the Internet Archive has a saved copy of the web article from mid-2023. It's not an official source, but it's readable and the full text is there. Search for "Interview Magazine Lana Del Rey 2023 site:web.archive.org" and you'll find the Wayback Machine snapshot from May 2023.
The photographer's credit matters if you're citing this for anything. It's Rankin, whose full name is John Rankin Waddell. He's done a lot of music photography, and his work on this spread has a specific warm, slightly washed-out palette that he uses often. Don't confuse it with the Steve Haffenden photos that occasionally get misattributed online. Here's the thing beginners miss: the Interview magazine archives are messy. They frequently redirect old URLs, and the 2023 issue pages sometimes get reorganized without preserving the original links. If you're pulling this for research or citation, take a screenshot or save the PDF locally before you finish reading. I learned that the hard way when I went back to quote a specific line from the interview six months later and the page had been archived differently with only the opening paragraph remaining publicly visible. The interview itself is roughly 2,500 to 3,000 words depending on which version you read. It touches on her songwriting routine, which she says involves a lot of piano work and listening back to old vocal takes. She mentions working with Rick Nowels and other collaborators. There's also a section about her film career and the projects she's attached to, which she seems genuinely excited about. Nothing earth-shattering, but it's one of the more substantive pieces she's given in that cycle.
If you want the highest quality version, the print issue is your best bet. You can find single copies on eBay for around $8 to $15 depending on condition. The digital version is fine for casual reading, but the typography and photo layout get compressed on the website. The magazine PDF that circulates on forums is usually a scan from someone's personal copy, and the image quality varies wildly depending on the scanner. I'd also note that some sites republish parts of this interview without attribution or with modified text. If you're seeing quotes from it floating around social media, cross-check them against the archived version before using them. I caught at least two instances where a music blog had taken a sentence out of context and changed the meaning entirely. The original is pretty clear once you read it in full. The main downside to this whole situation is that Interview Magazine doesn't make this easy to find consistently. Their search function is mediocre and their URL structure changes periodically. Bookmark the archive page if you plan to reference it again. And if you're writing about this piece yourself, make sure you note the photographer and the date properly, since that information doesn't always carry through when the article gets shared across platforms.
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