Last month, some St. Louis Cardinals fans created a version of Lorde’s hit song “Royals” that changed the words around to create a baseball parody. Lorde, who was born in New Zealand, is obviously singing about “Royals” in the political sense, right? Yes, but that doesn’t mean baseball had nothing to do with it.
As Lisa Gutierrez of the Kansas City Star pointed out, Lorde recently revealed in an interview with VH1 that an image of a Kansas City Royals player inspired her to write a song called “Royals.”
There’s no denying the fact that ‘Royals’ has seized the zeitgeist. And speaking of that track, Lorde herself recently spoke to us about how the song was inspired in part with her obsession with historic monarchs and, strangely enough, by an image of a baseball player wearing a Kansas City Royals jersey in National Geographic.
In that interview, Lorde explained how she “had this image from the National Geographic of this dude just signing baseballs. He was a baseball player and his shirt said, ‘Royals.’
‘It was just that word. It’s really cool.'”
Hardball Talk reader @LBTross did some digging and discovered that the photo Lorde was referring to is likely this shot of George Brett, which shows the Kansas City legend surrounded by kids who are waiting for autographs.
Ironically enough, this is the same George Brett who was recently caught on video going off on an autograph seeker. These artists really do get their inspiration from all kinds of places.
