While many Vancouverites would have enjoyed listening to Lana Del Rey’s hypnotic melodies at her concert Monday night, not many could say they’ve made the superstar a matcha latte.
Brenden Dixon, who is coincidentally a huge Del Rey fan, was working at Bean Around the World on Granville Street Monday afternoon when the singer stopped by for a quick caffeine fix.
Del Rey was in town for her Norman F*cking Rockwell Tour at Rogers Arena, which Dixon was already extremely excited to go to that night.
“Of all the coffee shops she picked mine,” Dixon said, still shaking from the encounter 30 minutes later.
“Never in a million years did I expect this to happen. She’s been my icon for five years.”
The 23-year-old said he came out of the café’s back room at around 3 p.m. and noticed Del Rey standing in line.
“I came out from the back room and I saw her, and I thought, ‘this isn’t fricking real. She is not right in front of me,’” he told Vancouver Is Awesome.
Not wanting to bring attention to the star, Dixon said he calmly went over and asked what she’d like to order.
Meanwhile, his colleague blurted out that Dixon had tickets to Del Rey’s show that night which sparked a conversation.
“I told her that I literally moved to the West Coast in the hopes that she would come here and she was like, ‘no you didn’t!'” he recalled.
“Then I started panicking, running in and out of the shop trying to find my manager because he loves her. The reason I started coming to this coffee shop, before I worked here, was because he always played Lana Del Rey’s songs.”
Del Rey signed an envelope for Dixon, which he framed minutes after meeting her.
“She was so nice,” he said. “She was very patient considering how long it took me to make her latte.”
While he wasn’t able to get a photo with his icon, he was able to shake her hand — which he said he is “never washing again.”
Speaking the day after Del Rey’s show, Dixon said the concert was “fu*king amazing.”
“She was better than I ever expected live,” he said.
“It was fantastic. She played almost all my favourite songs… she has too many to fit in.”
He said the highlight of the night was when Del Rey sang “Shades of Cool” from her 2014 album Ultraviolence.
“It’s a really psychedelic jazz song and she was singing along with a really bad ass electric guitar player who had a really big solo,” he said.
Del Rey ended the show with her nine-minute-long song “Venice Bitch: off her latest album Norman F*cking Rockwell.
“The final song was truly a Lana Del Rey way to end,” Dixon said.
“They had a big confetti cannon at the end and it was a magical moment.”
Dixon said he was still reeling from all the excitement of the day.
“Yesterday kind of feels like it wasn’t real,” he said.
“I got to make Lana Del Rey a matcha latte.”
