Lana Del Rey’s New Album Was Almost Called Bird World
Not only did Lana Del Rey release one of the best albums of the year, but she also happened to drop one of the best-named albums of the year. Her latest effort’s moniker, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, will go down in the pantheon of great album titles, right alongside The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of The Moon. But as Lana recently revealed, the genius that is NFR almost never came to be.
In a video posted to Twitter, Lana and her producer, the prolific Jack Antonoff, can be heard discussing album titles, and let slip that the genius NFR, was almost called Bird World. Not even Birdland, like the famous jazz club. Just Bird World, like the most boring park in the Westworld complex.
Now that’s an alternate universe we definitely don’t want to live in. Thankfully, we don’t have to. Instead, we have the masterpiece that is NFR, and everything that comes with it, which includes the genius line “Kanye West is blonde and gone,” from the song “The Greatest.”
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Lana explained her intention behind the lyric. “No,” she said when asked if Kanye had responded since the song’s release. “Gratefully, no. Here’s the thing: I don’t want to elicit a response. You never feel better for having written something like that.”
“But Kanye just means so much to us,” she continued. “And by the way, I’m grateful to be in a country where everyone can have their own political views. I’m really not more of a liberal than I am a Republican — I’m in the middle. But it was more like the mood and the vibe around, Yo, this man is the greatest! Really? The greatest? It hurt me. Did I have to say anything? No. But it’s more just a line that represents a lot of things.”
