Turns out it was Miley Cyrus, not Katniss Everdeen, who inspired Charli XCX’s track off The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 soundtrack.
The song “Kingdom” was originally something Charli was working on with Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend. The two actually started writing it after seeing Cyrus play the Staples Center and, no surprise, there was some alcohol involved.
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“We were really, really drunk, and we went back to his house,” she tells Radio.com. “I laid on top of his piano and he played this amazing piece of music and we started writing ‘Kingdom.’ It just kind of like sat as this weird, drunken voice note on our phones for a while.”
It wasn’t until Lorde—who Charli calls by her given name Ella—called her up and asked her to lend a song to the soundtrack, which she not only appears on but also curated, that Charli figured out what to do with it.
