Magic Of Meghan

Album: Sweet Princess (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • Dry Cleaning is an English post-punk band comprising vocalist Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton.

    Buxton, Dowse and Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years when one Sunday in 2018 they invited their university art lecturer friend Shaw for a casual jam. They immediately realized that she should be their frontwoman and Shaw agreed, thinking it would be a fun extension of her artwork. By March of the following year, they had all given up their day jobs to devote themselves full time to the band. This song is their debut single.
  • When Dry Cleaning started rehearsing with their new frontwoman, Shaw, who had no previous musical experience, knew the onus was on her to produce lyrics. She came up with a positive song about Meghan Markle as she felt people in the public eye such as her get a lot of criticism.
  • Shaw wrote the song after ending a long-term relationship. She moved out of her former partner's apartment the same day Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced they were engaged. She explained to the Scottish newspaper The National that as she struggled to come to terms with the breakup she found comfort in reading all the pictures and interviews about the royal couple.

    "I get quite obsessive about certain topics, and I became invested in their story. It was the tabloid coverage of their engagement and relationship that fascinated me - the veiled references to her race, and her life - it creeped me out," she said. "I think how she has been portrayed is shockingly old fashioned, despite the subject of the royal family and whether they should be there as a whole. She is a human being and also a woman and the way that women are written about in the press generally quite often is really disturbing."
  • Shaw took many of the cut-and-paste lyrics from different articles she was reading at the time of Harry and Meghan's engagement. "They're kind of little half sentences and sort of little couplets of words that I took from articles and rearranged and stuck together," she told ABC News. "So, a line will be half something of mine and a half something from a magazine."

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