For the second week in a row, Lana Del Rey has dropped a new single: “Venice Bitch.” Just like last week’s “Mariners Apartment Complex,” the track was produced by Jack Antonoff and released alongside a music video.
At nearly 10 minutes long, “Venice Bitch” is Lana’s longest track ever. In an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1, she said that her team wasn’t particularly thrilled at the idea of such a lengthy song. “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?’ Lana said. “It’s called ‘Venice Bitch.’ Like, ‘Why do you do this to us? Can you make a three minute normal pop song?’ I was like, ‘Well, end of summer, some people just wanna drive around for 10 minutes get lost in some electric guitar.'”
Working with Antonoff allowed Lana to be “in a little bit of a lighter mood because he was so funny,” she said. The “Bleachers” frontman and producer has collaborated with the likes of Taylor Swift, Lorde, and St. Vincent.
It was Lana’s light mood that led to her picking “Norman Fucking Rockwell” as the title track for her upcoming album — which currently has 11 tracks — she said. “It’s kind of about this guy who is such a genius artist but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it and he won’t shut up talking about it,” Lana told Lowe.
She continued, “So often I ended up with these creative types or whatever and, you know, they just go on and on about themselves, and I’m like, Yeah, yeah. But there’s a little bit of merit to it also. They are so good. I just like the title track so much that I was like, OK, I definitely want the record to also be called that.”
Lana said she even references Norman Rockwell in “Venice Bitch.”
“I don’t even remember if I threw it in there intentionally just to pop that message in 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,'” she told Lowe. “And also you know I love having painter references because I think sometimes when you’re writing you’re sort of trying to paint these ideas into existence, because I’m very visual too. So yeah, I don’t know. I know it’s a crazy title, but that’s just the title of the record.”
Lana also said that she wants to release a book of poems and short stories, which she expects to title something along the lines of “Violent Bent Backwards Over the Grass.”
Until her album comes out — it’s currently slated for a 2019 release — Lana is working on getting a pilot’s license and learning to sail. A truly multifaceted queen.