Hey there whatcha doin? Thanks for poppin by for some fun facts about the biggest songs we play on K103.
Today’s song, from 2013 from a British artist often compared to Amy Winehouse, was thought to be about the Royal Family. But according to today’s singer, the inspiration for this song came from a picture in National Geographic. She said: “I had this image from the National Geographic of this dude [Kansas City’s George Brett, with his team's name emblazoned across his shirt] just signing baseballs.”
This picture of Brett in the baseball shirt influenced her so much that she wrote the entire song around that idea. She wrote the entire song in thirty minutes and recorded it during her lunch break from school.
She even came up with one of the lines from the song when she was 11 or 12 by writing in her diary: “We’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams.”
Despite the success of this song, she DOES NOT think is is a good song, or at least HER version of it, “I listen to people covering the song and putting their own spin on it, and I listen to it in every single form except the original one I put out, and I realize that actually it sounds horrible. It sounds like a ringtone from a 2006 Nokial...but for the same reason, in the context of the way I released it, it just worked out."
Not everyone agreed with her. The song brought her two Grammy awards, for Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance in 2014. In 2018, it was included in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songs of the Century (so far) list, ranking at #9.
This is a very unusual song and an unlikely hit, but some of the structural elements it employs also showed up in other hits of the time. The prominent finger snaps are certainly different, but hand claps were big at this time, appearing in Pharrell's "Happy" and Katy Perry's "Dark Horse."
The song climbed to #1 on Alternative Songs making this singer the first solo female to top that particular chart in 17 years. The last solo female to lead the tally was Tracy Bonham, whose "Mother, Mother" topped the charts on June 8, 1996. That was five months before today’s artist was even born.
FUN FACT: At 16, She was also the youngest artist to top the US charts overall since Tiffany (who was also 16) reached the summit with "I Think We're Alone Now" in 1987
It’s Lorde...Royals...I Know That Song!