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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The B-52s: “52 Girls” (1978)
Florence Shaw: I have such a clear memory of when I first heard it. My dad had this record [The B-52s] in the house, and I would listen to it in my room when I was about 13. It’s that sort of age where you don’t know anything yet, and you haven’t really experienced anything, but you feel everything really strongly. This song had quite a profound effect on me. I remember I would listen to it on repeat all day, and I purposely set out to learn the lyrics, which I only ever did with a few songs when I was a teenager.
Considering the type of writing I do now, it must have awakened something in me. Just the fact that it's kind of an absurd novelty. It blew my mind that it was a list of names! I love that thing of, focusing on a detail like the sound of names, and that being legitimate for a whole song. Something about that appealed to me enormously, the simplicity of the form. I still really respond to that kind of conversational, list-like lyric.
The names alone conjure a feeling of a bygone era… they mention Jackie O at one point.
I read something online about this song, possibly because of the number 52, that they’re talking about a deck of playing cards with babes on them. And I was just like, whatever. I never care much about that kind of thing—what songs are meant to be about. My takeaway was: oh, it's a really cool list of retro American girls’ names. And that just absolutely floats my boat. Sometimes really simple songs make me think the most.
They’re one of those lifelong bands for me. You don’t have so many of those, where you really love them at every age, but The B-52s are that for me.
Björk: “Possibly Maybe” (1995)
I think Björk is my favorite lyricist, full stop. I’ve always responded really strongly to her lyrics. The way she writes—I feel like she’s holding you on a leash or something, leading you somewhere, but you don’t know where. There’s this bit in “Possibly Maybe” where she goes, “As much as I definitely enjoy solitude, I wouldn’t mind, perhaps, spending a little time with you sometimes,” and I love that. Her writing is like prose.
She knows what she wants to say and just makes it fit physically into the song. It feels kind of confrontational, even when it's romantic and sweet. Sometimes it sounds like there are almost too many words, and I find that really elegant—the way it’s forced in there. She has the presence to be able to do that. I also love how she uses double entendres. In this song she says, “He uses the crack in me,” which is a beautiful image, but it’s also kind of bawdy and sexy. There’s something about the way she holds emotion in this song that feels unresolved.
Weirdly, of all the lyricists I can think of, she’s the one where I can see her influence on my writing the most. I’ll notice things I’ve written and think, yeah, that approach is kind of borrowed from Björk. It’s the boldness, the wordiness. There’s a song by Psychic TV called “Just Drifting” that reminds me of her—the words are spilling out, but it’s fantastic because of that. It’s overflowing, not well-behaved. I love that about her writing.
Life Without Buildings: “Sorrow” (2001)
We often get compared to lots of bands I’ve never listened to in my life. But a band I have listened to a lot is Life Without Buildings. It’s kind of cheesy, but hearing them for the first time was a seismic moment for me. I was crouching next to my CD player in my bedroom, listening to a post-punk compilation with the Raincoats and stuff like that. I must’ve been a young teenager. I was skipping through the tracks—back when you’d buy a CD and have no idea what it sounded like—and their song “The Leanover” came on, and I had a really strong reaction to it.
It blew my mind that you could free yourself from the pressure of making traditional sense in lyrics. I wasn’t reading beat poetry or cut-ups or anything like that—I didn’t even know that stuff existed. But I heard this song, and it was so disobedient, so impossible to interpret in one sitting.
Around that time, I had this constant background feeling that music and art and TV and movies were so full of men’s voices. I felt really exasperated by it. I was like, “God, I know so much about how men feel. I know all about their fears and desires and priorities—why the hell do I know so much about this?” Even at 14, I felt that way. It was the indie-sleaze heyday, and I loved it, don’t get me wrong, but I remember thinking, I don’t fucking care, stop telling me about all your shit.
Hearing a feminine voice like Sue Tompkins’—that jumped between ideas, made lateral connections, and collected fragments—was such a huge breath of fresh air. I’d love to meet her one day and thank her in person. She made me feel like life had more possibilities than I’d realized before. That sounds really huge, but it kind of was that huge.
I always thought they were an older band, like a Raincoats-era band, and only later realized they were actually contemporary. But I never tire of listening to her songs and lyrics, because they always mean something new to me. I hear different lines at different ages, laugh at different parts, feel heartbroken at different parts. They’re really shape-shifty. I just think they’re great.
What is it about “Sorrow” specifically that you love?
“Sorrow” really encapsulates their lyrical approach for me—it feels like it’s about a relationship, but then it keeps taking these left turns. There are fragments that sound overheard, like notes written down, and then she’s just naming letters. It’s really mysterious. There’s repetition, but also constant interruptions.
Gang of Four: “It’s Her Factory” (1979)
I chose “It’s Her Factory” for a pretty simple reason. It uses, or at least it seems to use, lines pinched from newspapers and magazines. If I’m thinking about lyrics that really changed my life, this is right up there. It planted that idea of writing where the form itself is something borrowed, but then changed by rearranging it, and also by performing it. It was something I listened to when I was younger, and it really struck a chord with me. I just thought, that’s fucking cool—to take something that already exists, add a little something to it, and make something new.
With [Dry Cleaning’s] “Magic of Meghan,” I literally used lines from a pretty bland magazine article [about Meghan Markle], rearranged them, changed the context, and then added my own little interruptions. That approach is absolutely inspired by this song. I remember hearing it and thinking, that’s cool. Decades later, you find yourself in a rehearsal room thinking, I’m going to do that.
It’s a political song, but not in an obvious way. There isn’t a clear message, exactly, but it’s sensitive to the world. I really like songs like that. I always get a bit freaked out when songs are totally insular, when they don’t seem aware of the world around them.
I really love how functional the language is, also. It’s so rhythmic and so physical. The words are doing something before they’re meaning something, and that was really important for me—realizing that lyrics can be political and bodily at the same time.
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: “The Dust Blows Forward ’N’ the Dust Blows Back” (1969)
With this song, it sounds like he’s doing a line, pressing “stop” then “record” again—like you can hear the little bumps of the tape machine. It feels like a dictaphone. You can hear him pausing, waiting for a word to come, figuring out what rhymes. Whether that’s real or performed, I don’t mind. I love it.
I also really love the way he writes about food. I end up writing about food a lot too, not intentionally—it just happens. When I’m backed into a corner, food words come out. We did an improvised set the other night and I just kept singing about crisps. It’s like it comes from somewhere deep.
There’s a line like, “One red bean stuck at the bottom of a thin bowl,” and I love it because you think he’s going to say “can,” and he doesn’t—he says “bowl.” That’s like a punchline to me. I love unexpected words, even when they’re not funny. And then there’s “hot coffee from a crimped-up can”—I can see it.
There’s also, “His beak opened an inch above a creek.” I love the sound of that—the way inch and creek sit next to each other. It feels like he cares as much about how words sound as what they mean. I really relate to that. Sometimes I choose words just because they feel good in the mouth—round words, sharp words. I find that really exciting.
You can tell he’s prioritized good sounds next to each other. It’s playful, and then he’ll suddenly rhyme as a surprise. I love that too—it’s like another little ingredient you can drop in to wake people up. There’s something really meticulous about it, even though his vocals sound wild.
Kelis: “Caught Out There” (1999)
I kind of wish The Neptunes hadn’t written it, because I just want to give the credit to Kelis. We all know it’s in the performance. I first heard the song when I was about 11, and I found it so exciting. All the girls at school were singing it in the playground, shouting it, and it unleashed this feral energy in all of us. It was so cool and so fun. I remember thinking, I can’t believe this is on the radio. How is this allowed?
Her performance—shaking her hair, yelling it in the video—was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen. It unleashed this feminine rage, but there was also vulnerability in it. There’s that line, “How I dress is a reflection of me,” and it comes right after she’s been rejected. It gives away this moment of self-consciousness, like, is it because I’m weird? Is that why this happens? That kills me, because everyone knows that feeling. Even as a little kid, I understood it. I’d never been in a relationship, but I felt it through friendships—falling out with people, feeling betrayed. I was an extremely emotional child, and everything felt high stakes. That song totally spoke to that. It gave me a lot.
And yeah, I hate that it’s Pharrell or whatever on the writing credits—not against him, but the point is, the words aren’t the thing. It’s her. The same words sung by someone else wouldn’t inspire anyone. The way she says them is perfect. Absolute catnip to emotional little girls. Even now, what I love is her control—she goes from pure rage straight back into singing. That harnessing of emotion is so satisfying to hear.
