Lana Del Rey is about to release her excellent sophomore album, Ultraviolence, and to promote that record, she is giving some kinda provocative interviews. First was the “feminism is not an interesting concept” interview she did with FADER. She then told Clash she considers quitting music every day (“It’s still not really worth all the bullshit”). Today, the Guardian posted their piece on LDR, which opens with the singer saying, “I wish I was dead already.”

Quotes like that, presented out of context, are often more harmless than they first appear — maybe she was kidding! Maybe she was really hung over! — but that quote is followed by an exchange that only sinks the knife deeper:

Don’t say that, I say instinctively.

“But I do.”

You don’t!

“I do! I don’t want to have to keep doing this. But I am.”

Do what? Make music?

“Everything. That’s just how I feel. If it wasn’t that way, then I wouldn’t say it. I would be scared if I knew [death] was coming, but …”

Ultraviolence is a dark, sad, weird record, so it makes sense that LDR is in a dark, sad, weird place, but you rarely see a subject go to those places in a newspaper interview. Here are a couple more choice exchanges:

“Family members will come on the road with me and say: ‘Wow, your life is just like a movie!'” she says at one point. “And I’m like: ‘Yeah, a really fucked-up movie.’

and

I ask how long she got to enjoy the success of Video Games before the backlash arrived and she looks surprised. “I never felt any of the enjoyment,” she says. “It was all bad, all of it.”

There’s also a pretty bizarre anecdote about Lou Reed, who, Lana claims, was supposed to appear on the Ultraviolence track “Brooklyn Baby,” but as soon as the two were about to begin work together … he died.

[Reed] had wanted to work with Del Rey and so she’d flown over to New York to meet him. “I took the red eye, touched down at 7am … and two minutes later he died,” she says.

It’s not a lot of fun to read this stuff. Here’s hoping she doing better today than she was when she talked to the Guardian. Check out the full story — which doesn’t end with the quotes above — here.

UPDATE: Check out this New York Times interview for additional morbid thoughts. “I love the idea that it’ll all be over,” she tells Jon Pareles. “It’s just a relief, really. I’m scared to die, but I want to die.”

UPDATE 2: Lana’s responded via Tweet to the Guardian profile:

i regret trusting the guardian- i didn't want to do an interview but the journalist was persistent. Alexis was masked as a fan

— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) June 19, 2014

but was hiding sinister ambitions and angles Maybe he's actually the boring one looking for something interesting to write about.

— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) June 19, 2014

His leading questions about death and persona were calculated.

— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) June 19, 2014

[Photo by Neil Krug.]