Lana Del Rey is a master at creating new worlds in her music.
In fact, Del Rey is so good at it (case in point: her latest album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, which dropped earlier this week) that sometimes she loses track of what’s happening everywhere else — including the release of a little album called Lover by one Taylor Swift.
As you may recall, Lover dropped exactly one week ahead of Norman Fucking Rockwell!. Both albums are massive releases by major stars produced by Jack Antonoff, one of the most prolific producers working in pop today, especially with women (he also worked on albums by Lorde, St. Vincent, and Carly Rae Jepsen). But Del Rey said that she simply lost track of the calendar — it’s just how she works.
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“My plan is having no plan, pretty much all the time, which actually works out very well for me. But I do have to sometimes snap out of it and be like, oh, music changes, culture changes,” she told The New York Times. “Sometimes people want more from you than what you are giving, so let me step up to the plate a little bit and show up for my songs.”
She joked that it made her think more about what she was doing with her life. “I wasn’t really thinking about the Taylor album and then it came out and then I was like, ‘Oh wow,’” Del Rey said. “I didn’t really realize these were a week apart.”
It’s not at all a sign of any bad blood. Rather, it’s a sign that Del Rey is as committed to her new music as Swift is. Del Rey told the Times that she really values musicianship, and she thinks that’s also why so many artists (and many of them women) are drawn to working with Antonoff.
On her part, Swift has mentioned her appreciation for Del Rey’s work — fans even speculated a collaboration might be in the works after Swift featured Ryan Reynolds as the painter Norman Rockwell in the music video for “You Need To Calm Down.” In May, Swift also told Entertainment Weekly that she is an avid listener of Del Rey’s music. “Anything that she puts out I’m going to not only listen to but do a full read-through of the lyrics,” Swift said.