As Lana Del Rey gears up to release her brand new album, Norman F**king Rockwell, the singer is discussing her process, her producing partner, and what to expect on the record.
In an interview with Zane Lowe on Beats 1 Radio, Rey, 33, chatted about her second single off the album, the 10-minute-long track “Venice Bitch”, a followup to last week’s “Mariners Apartment Complex”.
“I played it for my managers and I was like, ‘Yeah I think this is the single I want to put out.’ And they were like,’It’s 10 minutes long. Are you kidding me? It’s called “Venice Bitch”. Like, why do you do this to us? Can you make a three-minute normal pop song?'” she said. “I was like, ‘Well, end of summer, some people just wanna drive around for 10 minutes get lost in some electric guitar.'”
Rey brought on longtime friend Jack Antonoff for this record, but they didn’t plan to work together, “That was such a happy accident for me. I knew Jack seven years ago… but I didn’t really reconnect with him until January. He was like, ‘We should definitely sit down and just start doing stuff,'” she explained. “I told him I had three songs for a new record but that I wasn’t really writing music. And we sat down in the studio in New York and he kind of started everything. He would just play chords for hours. He’s so good at piano, some of the stuff he writes just melodically is really kind of classical and in my case it ended up turning more folky. He made it really easy for me to just riff over everything he was doing. In our first week, I had two songs I just thought were maybe two of the best songs I had written. He just has a lot of truth in him.”
But why the title Norman F**king Rockwell? “Working with Jack, I was in a little bit of a lighter mood because he was so funny. So the title track is called Norman F**king Rockwell and it’s kind of about this guy who is such a genius artist but he thinks he’s the sh*t and he knows it and he won’t shut up talking about it.”
She added, “In the song ‘Venice Bitch’ there’s another little reference to Norman Rockwell, which didn’t have to be in there. I don’t even remember if I threw it in there intentionally just to pop that message a little further. I can’t even remember what I was thinking but I think when I was writing this song, it was a more happy take on love and it was just sort of about like, I tour, you write. We make it work… know it’s a crazy title but that’s just the title of the record.”
Norman F**king Rockwell will arrive in 2019.
