Mariners Apartment Complex’ is the album’s first public cut, a classically Lana Del Rey smoulder of silken acoustic country music and orchestral washes. “This song is kinda about this time I took a walk late at night with the guy I was seeing and we stopped in front of his friend’s apartment complex,” Lana told Annie Mac, “and he put his hands on my shoulder and he said ‘I think we’re together because we’re both really similar, we’re both really messed up’.
Lana has suggested she’ll be releasing a book of her own poetry. “I think I’m just going to self-publish it and put it out beforehand,” she told Annie Mac last year. “It’s kind of random. Which is kind of another one of those things I just want out there just for me. I literally might just drop these little books off at some bookstores in Silverlake and beg them to sell them.
“It’s been really cool for me ‘cause I was having a little bit of writers’ block with the music last Fall and so I just sat down to write some words without music and I realised there was just a couple of things I wanted to say through some poems, which is funny. I feel like I’m in the 19th Century.”
At the end of 2018, Del Rey also confirmed that the new record had been completed. In an Instagram live video, she said that it was “completely finished”, while teasing the next song to be released.