I’m a ‘nepo daddy’ and proud of it: Lana Del Rey’s pop releases album
You’ve heard all about nepo babies — the pejorative term for Hollywood offspring who magically wind up following in their celebrity parents’ footsteps.
Now, meet the world’s first nepo daddy.
As a former advertising copywriter, it’s possible that 69-year-old Rob Grant, piano man and father to Lana Del Rey, might have eventually come up with the term as a way to market himself and his debut album, “Lost at Sea.”
But someone on social media beat him to the verbal punch.
And he loved it.
“I first saw it in my comments, and I thought, ‘Holy smokes, that’s a beautiful brand!’ ” Grant told The Post.
“So I went out and registered the domain NepoDaddy.com, and then I called the guys at Decca [Records, his label,] and said, ‘We’ve got to do merch around this … I love kind of being the first nepo daddy out there.’”
Grant has his 37-year-old firstborn — whose alt-pop allure has led her to six Grammy nominations, including an Album of the Year nod for 2019’s “Norman F—king Rockwell!” — to thank for his new nepo-daddy notoriety. And with Father’s Day just a week away, he’s one proud papa about working with his famous daughter on his first LP.
“For over a decade, she has persevered,” said Grant of Del Rey, born Elizabeth Grant, who made her major-label debut with 2012’s “Born To Die.” “She’s stayed totally true to her own unique style of music. And she’s now arrived at a point, culturally, where I think she’s at her apex. You know, so many artists look up to her. Her music is loved around the world. So that’s really wonderful for me as a father to see.”
Getting Del Rey to add her signature sultry vocals to two “Lost at Sea” tracks — the title tune and “Hollywood Bowl” — Grant made new discoveries about his daughter.
“One thing that I really learned and I really appreciate about Lana is she is remarkably intuitive,” he said.
Father and daughter first collaborated on “Sweet Carolina” — the final track on Del Rey’s 2021 album “Blue Banisters” — while he was visiting her at her home.
“That came about because she had been listening to me playing the piano … and she yelled down, ‘What is that?’ And I said, ‘I’m just improvising,’ ” said Grant. “She came down, and she said, ‘Can you create a bridge?’ And I did. And right away she began to sing. It was very spontaneous. And within I’d say 30 or 40 minutes we had composed that lovely piano ballad. And honestly, that’s how all of our songs since then have been composed. It’s really a remarkable process, where she hears something that I’m playing and she begins to sing lyrics literally on the fly.”
On the mostly instrumental “Lost at Sea,” Grant displays a penchant on the keys for the same kind of moody melancholy as his daughter.
“It’s somewhere in our DNA, way down deep,” he said. “I love the minor chords. I love that haunting, melancholy sound. And so does Lana.”
The video for the new single is even more of a family affair.
“My other daughter, Caroline, was a director, and then Charlie, my son, was very involved in the production,” said Grant. “We found these old VHS tapes that I had 30 years ago with the kids growing up, and we decided to intersperse the video with those beautiful, very nostalgic pieces of film. It makes it so sweet.”
With “Lost at Sea,” Grant has found a new career as a retiree who has worked in advertising, real estate and domain investment. And as a nepo daddy, he is also standing up for the nepo babies of the world.
“The whole nepo baby thing was, you know, basically an attempt to undermine all of those kids who had come from celebrity parents,” he said. “And that’s the problem with our culture today. We live in a very cynical world, and nobody wants to give anybody credit for doing anything.”
