San Francisco Giants fans flooded two Bay Area radio stations with calls to pull Lorde's "Royals" from the rotation while the Giants take on the Kansas City Royals in the World Series. Stations 104.5 KFOG and 96.5 KOIT heeded the calls and pledged to be "Royals"-free zones until after the series.
"Our listeners told us to do it, so we did it!" KOIT Program Director Brian Figula wrote on the station's website on Oct. 18. "As of 4 p.m. today we've removed Lorde's 'Royals' from our playlist until the end of the World Series. Go Giants, beat the Royals!"
The Kansas City radio station 99.7 The Point will make up for Lorde's lost spins. The station will play the hit single "on the hour, every hour, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday," when the Royals will host the Giants for Game 1 of the World Series.
An old picture of Royals' great George Brett inspired Lorde to write the song. She used to collect old issues of National Geographic magazine and spotted a 1976 picture of Brett with "Royals" scripted across the front of his jersey.
And now you're Royal. @lordemusic meets @Royals icon George Brett. pic.twitter.com/7BPRW6VYJD
— MLB (@MLB) April 16, 2014
"I'd been kind of thinking about writing the song for a while and been pulling together a couple little lines here and there, and I had this image from the National Geographic of this dude signing baseballs. He was a baseball player and his shirt said Royals," Lorde told VH1 last year. "I was like, I really like that word, because I'm a big word fetishist. I'll pick a word and I'll pin an idea to that."
The Royals sent over a No. 5 Brett jersey to Lorde when she played in Kansas City in March. He also wrote, "Lorde, you are Royal to me," according to The Kansas City Star. The rock star and the ballplayer eventually met at an event in Las Vegas in April.
