Lana Del Rey says when she’s not writing, she’s “just at Starbucks, talking shit all day”

Lana opens up about the creative process behind Norman Fucking Rockwell! in a new interview

August 22, 2019
Lana Del Rey says when she’s not writing, she’s “just at Starbucks, talking shit all day” Santiago Bluguermann/Getty Images

As of today, we're one week away from the release of Lana Del Rey's long anticipated fifth album Norman Fucking Rockwell! Yes, there is officially an exclamation point in the album title now. Though Lana's already offered a sizable chunk of the album through the four singles she's released over the past year (two more are due this afternoon), her new Billboard cover story reveals a bit about how the record came together.

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Specifically, she talks in length about her songwriting and how she wasn't "in the mood" to write the follow-up to 2017's Lust For Life until Jack Antonoff convinced her to do so: “[Jack] wanted me to meet him in some random diner, and I was like, ‘You already worked with everyone else; I don’t know where there’s room for me.’" Elsewhere in the piece, she describes writing as her "muse," saying, "I feel very much that writing is not my thing: I’m writing’s thing. When the writing has got me, I’m on its schedule. But when it leaves me alone, I’m just at Starbucks, talking shit all day.”

Though the piece doesn't reveal too much about what the album sounds like, it does explain the haphazard single covers leading up to its release, most of which were taken on Lana's phone: “Every time my managers write me, ‘Album art?,’ I’m just like, send! And they just send the middle-finger emoji back to me.”

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Norman Fucking Rockwell! is out August 30.

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Lana Del Rey says when she’s not writing, she’s “just at Starbucks, talking shit all day”