What does 'Mondegreen' mean?
A question we often get asked is “where does the name Mondegreen come from?”. So we figured we would do a quick post about the origins of the name.
For years Claire and I were gigging as a duo under Laura&Claire before Leanne joined us around 2016. But Laura&Claire&Leanne wasn’t exactly the catchiest name in the world and hardly poster-friendly so we needed a name.
For years we had toyed with using the word Mondegreen for something simply because we loved the sound. It means a misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song. Apparently it comes from the Scottish ballad 'The Bonny Earl of Murray', in which the line ‘laid him on the green’ can be misheard as 'Lady Mondegreen'.
The mondegreen significance for us comes from the ampersand we used to use in Laura&Claire. An ampersand was originally part of the alphabet recital so you would say ‘X, Y, Z and per se and’ and start the alphabet again which soon came to sound like ‘ampersand’. We used to say Leanne was like the ampersand in Laura&Claire (we know, we know, we're adorable) and it's good that we get to keep some of that old identity in our name.
So there you have it! Now you have a fun fact to impress people with, you are welcome.
Laura x