Amid the excitement of her upcoming collaboration with Taylor Swift, “Summertime Sadness” singer Lana Del Rey said she’s facing “bit of a roadblock” with her own work.
Addressing fans in a video posted Wednesday to her supposedly secret Instagram account, Del Rey revealed that she lost her in-progress album and a 200-page draft of a book she was writing for publisher Simon & Schuster.
“A few months ago, I parked my car on Melrose Place and I stepped away for a minute. And the one time I left my backpack inside my car, someone broke all of the windows and took it and inside of it was my computer and my three camcorders and my hard drives,” she said in her since-deleted Instagram Stories Wednesday.
The singer said that she did not have any of her work backed up to the cloud and wiped her computer. She added that with her laptop, the thief could remotely access her phone and “leak our songs and personal photos.”
Del Rey, who scrubbed her social media accounts in September 2021, said she’s confident in remaking her new album.
“I really want to persist and make the best art I can, even if I have to start over with my book,” she added. “I won’t ever leave anything in the car again, even if it’s just for a moment.”
Del Rey said she’s recently experienced security and privacy issues and expressed concern over “what’s going to be out there” as a result of the theft.
“I just want to bring it to light that it is hard and there’s really nothing to be done,” she said. “I can’t really make my devices any safer.”
In the multipart Instagram video, Del Rey said she doesn’t “really like to share things that are going not to plan” and repeated that she prefers to remain private on social media. While the promise of new music from the “Norman F— Rockwell” artist may entice some fans, she had one request.
“Please don’t listen to the music if you hear it, because it’s not coming out yet,” she said.
“That is an update that I would obviously normally not give, but I’m worried about it,” she said. “Now that it’s like the third time this has happened, I just wanted to address it. So that’s that. Onward and upward.”