Lana Del Rey has a new album that just dropped this week, and she spoke a bit about what she’d originally intended for it and how fame has proved to have a very ugly side.

The 27-year old singer said that rock legend Lou Reed was supposed to collaborate on the new album–specifically, the single “Brooklyn Baby”–but on the day the musicians were due to meet, he passed away.

“I took the red eye, touched down at 7 a.m. … and two minutes later he died,” she said in a recent interview.

Del Rey has been a frequent target for critics, for everything from her music to her style to the proportions of her face, and even after seeing her debut album Born To Die sell more than 7 million copies–and propel her to superstardom–she says she’s tired of it.

“I don’t want to have to keep doing this. But I am. Family members will come on the road with me and say: ‘Wow, your life is just like a movie!’ And I’m like: ‘Yeah, a really fucked-up movie,'” she said.

When Del Rey’s first single, “Video Games”, arrived online, it immediately went viral and was shared millions of times on Facebook and other social media outlets, with some fans lingering over the faded glamour of old Hollywood that the singer projected in both her looks and the images she chose for the video. Many wanted to know who this singer was, where she had come from, and whether she was the real thing, but the praise came with inevitable backlash. Now, she says, she can look back and say she didn’t get to see the good because the bad was so harsh.

“I never felt any of the enjoyment. It was all bad, all of it,” she said.

After her first album, Del Rey often said she wasn’t sure she would make a second one, but now she says the new songs came from a completely different mood and mindset.

“I was in more of a sardonic mood. Like, if all that I was actually going to be allowed to have by the media was money, loads of money, then f**k it … What I actually wanted was something quiet and simple: a writer’s community and respect.”

Ultraviolence is now available in stores and on iTunes.

Image via Wikimedia Commons