Welcome to Very, coming into its own on approximately this track, flattening into shape with an eerie horizon that stretches further and further away. It is like the point in a road trip where you have been driving a few days and your home has started to become more like mere memory. All vestiges of normal life have fallen away. "Dreaming of the Queen" could be the best track here. The album is starting to feel like it's capable of anything now. The song is suffused with wistful sadness—because it is another song about a relationship ending—but it is also comical in surprising ways, drolly recounting a sleeping dream full of dreamlike details: "Diana dried her eyes / And looked surprised / For I was in the nude / The old Queen disapproved." In case you were wondering, yes, "Diana" is Princess Diana, still alive in 1993 and ending her storybook marriage to Prince Charles, and the "Queen" is the Queen of England, Elizabeth II. All these years later, with Princess Diana long dead and the Queen down with COVID, the topicality hardly lands the same way, but really the point is the sad mood of the song and making the dream feel real. The dry account of the dream is largely what makes it, but the music delivers on the pomp and dignity appropriate to the British royal family. "Dreaming of the Queen" is one of the more stately floats in this parade. As the song deepens into its sadness, the utility of the absurd context emerges from the wanton banal cliches: "Love never seems to last, no matter how you try ... there are no more lovers left alive, no one has survived, and that's why love has died, yes, it's true – look, it's happened to me and you." This is not a good dream, however funny we may find this singer taking tea in the nude with the Queen and Lady Di: "I woke up in a sweat / Desolate," he notes. "Dreaming of the Queen" is funny, it's sad, it's absurd, and you never know what's coming next. It's just like a dream.
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