Just Like Shakespeare

Album: released as a single (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Just like Shakespeare" is a more optimistic version of the Romeo and Juliet story.

    In Shakespeare's play, the titular characters are star-crossed lovers doomed to tragic deaths. The two teens fall madly in love with each other, but their parents' houses are sworn enemies. After failed attempts to be together, the two characters end up committing suicide.

    "Just like Shakespeare" tells a modern version of Shakespeare's grim story. In this one, the couple ends up together, and the only bloodshed is a busted nose.
  • In the song, Losers Club frontman Nate Blasdell (best known for his work with I Set My Friends on Fire) sings about knocking his young lover's father out with a punch and declaring, "So sorry sir, she's mine." The dad is a bit of a "dick," but not quite as madly bent on familial conflict as Juliet's father is in the play.
  • In "Just like Shakespeare," the parents' crimes aren't that they violently oppose other's bloodlines so much as that they simply don't understand what's really important in life. They just don't get the power of love as their children do.

    There's so much more to life than what our parents say and think
    So have you told them you are mine?


    This is Blasdell singing with the great wisdom and insight that teenagers always imagine they possess. Neither Blasdell nor any other members of Losers Club were teenagers when they wrote this song, but they created it from that perspective.
  • I'd write like Shakespeare back in 1599

    1599 was a prolific and artistically transformative year of writing for Shakespeare, so much so that James Shapiro published an entire book about it in 2006.
  • Losers Club wrote this song while in quarantine for the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. The self-isolation gave them a creative burst, and Blasdell wrote seven songs during the first month, including "Just Like Shakespeare."
  • Blasdell explained to Play Too Much that Losers Club doesn't like to write love songs and actively avoids them. So, "Just like Shakespeare" is a deviation from their usual process.
  • The song intentionally harks back to the sounds of the early 2000s. Losers Club were looking to create a sense of nostalgia for earlier music and earlier times in life. This is reflected in both the sound and in the lyrics, which contain all the self-righteousness and pretentiousness of teenage minds.

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