Lana Del Rey

Elizabeth Grant was born on June 21, 1985, in Manhattan, New York City, to Robert England Grant Jr., a copywriter at Grey Group, and Patricia Ann "Pat" Grant (née Hill), an account executive at the same organization. She has a younger sister, Caroline "Chuck" Grant, and a younger brother, Charlie Grant. She was raised Catholic and is of Scottish descent. When she was one year old, the family moved to Lake Placid, New York. In Lake Placid, her father worked for a furniture company before becoming an entrepreneurial domain investor; her mother worked as a schoolteacher. There, she attended St. Agnes School in her elementary years and began singing in her church choir, where she was the cantor.

She attended the high school where her mother taught for one year, but when she was 14 or 15, her parents sent her to Kent School, an Episcopal boarding school, to get sober from alcoholism. Grant shared in an interview: "That's really why I got sent to boarding school aged 14—to get sober." Her uncle, an admissions officer at the school, secured her financial aid to attend. According to Grant, she had trouble making friends during much of her teenage and early adult years. She has said she was preoccupied with death from a young age, and its role in her feelings of anxiety and alienation: When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal. For some reason that knowledge sort of overshadowed my experience. I was unhappy for some time. I got into a lot of trouble. I used to drink a lot. That was a hard time in my life.

After graduating from Kent School, she spent a year living on Long Island with her aunt and uncle and working as a waitress. During this time, Grant's uncle taught her to play guitar and she "realized [that she] could probably write a million songs with those six chords". Shortly after, she began writing songs and performing in nightclubs around the city under various names such as "Sparkle Jump Rope Queen" and "Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena". "I was always singing, but didn't plan on pursuing it seriously", she said:When I got to New York City when I was eighteen, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn—I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point—and that was it.In fall 2004, at age 19, Grant enrolled at Fordham University in The Bronx, New York City, where she majored in philosophy, with an emphasis on metaphysics. She has said she chose to study the subject because it "bridged the gap between God and science... I was interested in God and how technology could bring us closer to finding out where we came from and why."