Lana Del Rey — whose album Ultraviolence turns 10 today — didn’t win any Grammys this year, but she’s still been racking up awards lately, and she’s been getting things off her chest while accepting them. At a pre-Grammy industry event, Del Rey announced plans for her country album Lasso. At last month’s Ivor Novello Awards, discussed domestic violence while receiving an award, and she also mentioned her rejected Bond theme. Last night, Del Rey received another award and made another speech.

Last night, the National Music Publishers’ Association held its annual meeting in New York, and NMPA CEO David Israelite talked about the group’s current battle against Spotify, which plans to pay less in songwriting royalties by bundling audiobooks with its music streaming. As Time reports, the NMPA is filing an FTC complaint about Spotify, and Israelite spoke about the issue: “Before Spotify’s ‘bundling’ betrayal, we may have been able to work together to fix this problem, but they have chosen the hard road by coming after songwriters once again.”

After Israelite spoke, Lana Del Rey accepted the NMPA Songwriter Icon Award. She seemed a little surprised and moved by Israelite’s speech, and she took a moment at the beginning of her own speech to praise him: “Thank you for reminding me that there are people who still speak in sentences that I understand, that resonate with how I feel, say things I don’t wanna say about things I feel really strongly about that I forget that I feel strongly about.”

On her off-the-cuff six-minute speech, Del Rey talked about her origin story — growing up in the freezing upstate New York town of Lake Placid, switching from studying business to philosophy at Fordham, reading self-help authors like Napoleon Hill and Esther Hicks. In self-help terms, she talked about what’s ahead of her: “It took a lot of imagination. I didn’t have to fake it till I made it. I had to really feel it. That’s something that’s really hard now, as life has gotten more complicated. I’ve heard that the further you go down a path, the path gets more narrow. And so it’s up to me to try and widen that path.”

Watch the speech below.

Lana Del Rey accepting ‘Song Writer Icon Award’ at the NMPA Annual Meeting in NYC! ❤️ pic.twitter.com/ehEWrkZV00

— LDR Crave (@LDRCRAVE) June 12, 2024