The same brain that once wrote “My pussy tastes like Pepsi cola” now appears to be deeply invested in small-engine repair. Reports surfaced late Tuesday that Lana Del Rey was seen repairing a tractor in a back-lot mechanic shop in Jamaica Plain. Ignoring the obvious (where does one even find a tractor in Boston?), the larger mystery was what was taking her so long.
She looked the part.
Blue Jeans. White Shirt. A hat that felt racist but wasn’t. Oil stains stretched across her shirt. An ice-cold Diet Mountain Dew rested precariously between her long, acrylic nails. A sold-out stadium tour loomed in Edinburgh next Friday, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way she blew mango vape into the machine’s rusted gears. The scene felt almost domestic, like a Norman Rockwell painting rewritten by someone on cough syrup.
When pressed for comment, Del Rey said nothing. The closest we got was her spelling “ANAL” backwards in paint thinner on the floor. As the fumes evaporated, she passed out cold. Thirteen and a half hours later she awoke with jet-black hair, sighed once, and returned to work on the tractor.
Her silence did not extend to her music.
We can confirm her next album will arrive next month: a 12 ¼-track conceptual doo-wop record narrated by Judge Judy, humbly titled iPhone contains magnets that may interfere with medical devices. See Important Safety Information in the iPhone User Guide. The record reportedly includes covers of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and Sisqó’s “Thong Song”, along with fourteen minutes of hidden silence. Early reports describe it as “audacious,” “unlistenable,” and “literally more important than air.”
This was not her first detour.
Before the release of Blue Banisters, her eighth studio album, Del Rey worked an unpaid shift at Waffle House, frying breakfast for the happy residents of Florence, Alabama. The tractor, then, feels less like a stunt and more like an evolution; an artistic evolution of someone totally in their own lane.
If a global pop star can chase her dream of small-engine repair, what excuse do the rest of us have? Fall in love with someone older. Throw out your microwave. Try consent. Start a band. Anything your heart aches for, you can attempt—and maybe fail at beautifully.