Lana Del Rey says headlining Glastonbury’s Other Stage is ‘unfathomable’

Lana Del Rey has said that it’s “unfathomable” that she is headlining the Other Stage at Glastonbury Festival 2023.

The US singer-songwriter said in a new interview that she was “excited” to reveal the news and can’t quite believe that she’s topping the bill on one of the festival’s key stages.

Del Rey told BBC Radio 1 earlier this week: “I’ve been excited to tell people. I wanted to tell people because as we started to announce some festivals… it’s unfathomable to me to headline the second stage of Glastonbury. I mean, come on!

“They had asked me to play Glastonbury the last three years but we just weren’t ready. I didn’t want to say yes before we had a big band.”

The singer was chatting to the station upon the release of her new single, ‘The Grants’, which appears on her forthcoming album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.

She went on to speak about her Glastonbury debut on the Pyramid Stage in 2014, saying that the show “feels like yesterday”.

“I remember being on that stage vividly because I had never been on a stage where they set the crowd back about a thousand feet,” she told Radio 1. “So every time I tried to come forward past the monitors to get closer to everybody, the feedback would ring through the crowd.

“And I thought, ‘Oh wow, I’m really stuck on this stage – I can’t go down like I usually do and sing with everybody’.”

News of Del Rey’s booking came as Glastonbury organisers announced the first wave of acts for this summer’s festival, which includes Lizzo, Blondie, Fatboy Slim, Lewis Capaldi, Rina Sawayama, Lil Nas X, and many others. Arctic Monkeys and Guns N’ Roses were confirmed to join Elton John in headlining the event on the Pyramid Stage.

Earlier this month on her Instagram, the singer appeared to take issue with her placing on the initial Glastonbury line-up poster, which listed the artists alphabetically – apart from the main headliners and Guns N’ Roses warm-up support, Lizzo.

Meanwhile, Del Rey is this month’s Rolling Stone UK cover star. When asked in the interview why the overarching theme in her work is romantic love, she responded: “Everybody finds themselves in a different way.

“Some people really find themselves through their work, some people find themselves through travelling. I think my basic mode is that I learn more about myself from being with people, and so when it comes to the romantic side of things, if you’re monogamous and it’s one person you’re with, you just put a lot of importance on that.”

Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd follows Del Rey’s 2021 albums Blue Bannisters and Chemtrails Over The Country Club. It’s released next Friday (24 March).