Cruel World

Album: Ultraviolence (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This melancholic, bluesy slow-burner is about a self-professed crazy girl who's just ditched her drug addict loser of a boyfriend. "I shared my body and my mind with you," she croons, "but that's all over now."
  • Del Rey told Clash magazine this is her favorite track on Ultraviolence. "I went down to the beach and I was thinking about everything, personally," she recalled. "The verse is thoughtful and laid back, but then the chorus falls into this world of chaotic and heavy sub-bass. The juxtaposition of those two worlds, the peaceful beginning and the chaotic chorus, it summed up my personal circumstances of everything going easily and then everything being f---ed up. It felt like me."
  • Del Rey recorded several of Ulltraviolence's tracks with producer Dan Auerbach at the Black Keys vocalist's Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. Auerbach is also co-credited with claps on this song.

    Auerbach admitted that he didn't have to do very much work on the tracks Del Rey brought into the studio: "Her demos were so good, her songs were so strong that I wanted to get my musicians in who I love and get my sound that I get here with her songs and that's it. I didn't want to mess it up," he told Rolling Stone. "She sang live with a seven-piece band. That's the whole record – a seven-piece band with her singing live. It was crazy."

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