Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw on the Lyrics That Changed Her Life
The post-punk singer admires Björk’s verbosity and Life Without Buildings’ lateral connections.
As soon as I hop on Zoom with Florence Shaw, I’m reminded of a line from Dry Cleaning’s new album, Secret Love. “I like to sort, move my things around, colour coding/Everything has a home in my house,” she describes on “My Soul / Half Pint,” a song about her gendered disdain of cleaning. Organizing things to the point of madness, on the other hand—that’s Shaw’s jam. Speaking to me from her compact home office (a converted mudroom), she’s got her archive of random stuff right at her fingertips. This includes Shaw’s massive collection of postcards, ranging from Renaissance paintings to swimsuit adverts to actual letters from friends, accumulated since she was a child and stored in “little folders” on the shelves lining the walls. “Because they’re collected over time, you’ll see strange things next to each other,” she says. “I quite like the juxtaposition of different images that don’t really have any business being next to each other.”
The same dichotomy is at play in Shaw’s disorientingly specific lyrics, which are compiled as much as they are written. (One of my favorite Dry Cleaning lines, for example—“Are there llama plushies here? In this shop?” from New Long Leg’s “Leafy”—is a Yelp comment that Shaw glimpsed and thought was comically blunt.) Her postcard collection served as a “random idea generator” while writing Secret Love, jump-starting her process through mismatched imagery. “I would try to respond emotionally to the pictures,” Shaw says, “and it would be like a postcard of a yak, an old drawing of a little girl wearing armor, and a business card for a sandwich shop. It was really fruitful, actually.” The spark behind “Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)” was a postcard of a young man in an army uniform, a tender portrait that moved Shaw to imagine his backstory. One verse came from a friend’s note about traveling to New York and not seeing a single famous person. And the phrase “secret love” returns to Shaw often—like in New Long Leg’s “Her Hippo”—and typically goes unnoticed until it’s too late.
Like a recurring dream whose meaning is hazy, certain images come up for Shaw again and again. I notice she’s sung about cruise ships a few times, like on the new song “Cruise Ship Designer,” and ask what that’s about; she laughs and considers it. “I do feel weirdly attracted to them, but also they’re kind of a nightmare, aren’t they? They’re massively dystopian, like a floating prison. Being trapped somewhere you can't leave, that’s not my bag. I like to be able to escape if I need to.” This happens to her all the time, she says: being blissfully unaware of her work’s recurring themes, and her own psyche, until the very end. “I'll think I’m talking about this really wide range of weird and wonderful things, and in the end it turns out every song is about cruise ships, or sausages… There’s quite a lot of shoe chats.”
Whether personal, fictional, or repurposed, the art of lyric-writing is in the editing for Shaw. She wrestles over potential lines by making photocopies of every detail about each song, color-coding them, and placing the intel in separate folders. It’s momentarily intense, as Shaw likes to consider all the options before settling on the final lyrics. “As soon as you’ve got something you like, then it gets pretty hard,” she says. “Because you’re trying to preserve the weird little knot at the center of what you’ve done. You’re trying to distill something great without killing it.”
Many of the songs admired and selected by Shaw, below, speak to a boiled-down simplicity (yes, even the Captain Beefheart spoken-word track). “Lately I’ve been less interested in big statements and more obsessed with form,” she says. “I still feel like a beginner, so what excites me is the craft itself: how words fit, where they land, how much a song needs to explain, and what it even has to be ‘about.’ I’m really focused right now on testing the boundaries of structure and clarity.”
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