Here’s Why Lana Del Rey Worked a Shift at an Alabama Waffle House

Lana Del Rey‘s fans are fascinated with pretty much everything the “A&W” singer does, especially when they get a rare chance to interact with her offstage, in the wild. That’s why when she popped into a Waffle House in Florence, Alabama in July and worked a shift pouring coffee and chatting the patrons up — she even had an official “Lana” name tag — it briefly broke the internet.

“I wish my album had gone as viral. I woke up to, like, 10,000 texts the next morning — some from folks I had not heard from for 10 years,” Del Rey said of the intense interest in her unexpected food service foray. “’Saw your picture at the Waffle House!’” I was like, ‘Did you hear the new album?'”

At the time, neither Del Rey nor her team would give any explanation for the odd shift work, though sleuths did note that she name-checked the Alabama city on the song “Paris, Texas” on most recent album, this year’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.

Now, in a feature interview with The Hollywood Reporter, writer Mikey O’Connell reveals that Del Rey actually never meant to work that shift. “But after seven days of seeing the same faces during a visit to Florence, Alabama, and a July morning’s worth of shooting the s–t with her brother and sister in the same plastic booth, the singer-songwriter found herself wearing the Southern chain’s familiar uniform: a polycotton, working-class blue button-up garnished with a name tag bearing the crudely stickered letters L-A-N-A,” he wrote.

“We were on our third hour, and the servers asked, ‘Do you guys want shirts?’ ” Del Rey explained. “Hell yeah! We were thrilled.” Though the video of the superstar breakfast blitz was only 10 seconds long, it blew up after the restaurant’s manager posted it to Facebook and some selfies Del Rey took with patrons made their way to social media. Was it some kind of elaborate, mysterious promo for her album, or a peek at some weird fast-food fetish?

As it turns out, O’connell said, is that Del Rey simply has family ties in the small town (pop. 40,000), is good at making fast friends and just loves hanging at diners. “This guy, a regular, comes in every day and orders two things, so they were like, ‘Just go get it for him!’ I brought him a Coke. No ice. And an empty cup,” she said, miming that the second cup was for the man’s tobacco spit juice.

In the wide-ranging interview, Del Rey also touched on why she has refused to publish her lyrics, whether she’d ever perform on Saturday Nigh Live (or any other TV shows) again and how she feels like an “older sister” to younger singers such as Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo.