How Florence Welch’s journey of healing worked its way into mine.
By: Simona Zaunius
Florence Welch photographed in her London home / photo: Tom Beard
“The show was ending and I had started to crack,” Florence Welch, the lead vocalist of Florence + the Machine, sweetly sings, opening the band’s fourth album, “High as Hope”. The indie rock band from England, often referred to simply as “FATM”, is known for its eccentric production, dramatics in both instrumentals and lyricism, and Florence Welch’s gloriously belted vibrato.
“High as Hope”, released in 2018, was the first album to be executively produced by Florence. Departing stylistically from the band’s previous efforts, it features softer and more minimalist production. The instrumentals in the beginning of the opening track, “June”, are uncharacteristically sparse. A faint tinkling of bells. Piano comes in, at first barely audible, and then assured, moving the song along. Slowly tension builds until we reach the chorus. A single phrase: Hold on to each other. Hold on to each other. Hold on to each other. Hold on to each other.
The background vocals kick in. The drums come in. The piano remains steady, assured, humming and beating in the background. “I was beginning to lose my grip/and I have always held it loosely but this time I admit/I felt it really start to slip” she sings. And then – a break. She cracks completely open. Guitars. Bashing, resounding drums. A hundred layers of her voice sing,
HOLD ON TO EACH OTHER.
The song ends in a lucid flurry. Fervent clapping, drums pounding faster and faster. You can practically see the leading woman and her long red hair spinning faster and faster and faster until the final 8 beats, 8 claps, isolated and done. The “show” – the Florence + the Machine you know of “Dog Days” and “Shake it Out” – has ended. The woman, Florence Welch, has begun.
Florence Welch on the cover of "High As Hope" / photo: Island Records
I remember clearly where I was when listening to “High as Hope” for the first time. The flat forests and half baked towns of Lithuania were passing me by in the train window. I was 15, unsure, afraid, away from home. That summer day “High as Hope” became my favorite album and it has remained so. How does one begin to write about an album that has been a soundtrack to their life for nearly five years? As I enter my twenties, it is impossible for me to view this album objectively, or to even articulate everything it has meant to me. But I can look back at the past five years and try to figure out why I never tired of the album.
High as Hope, to me, is about healing. About coming to terms with oneself. Unlike another favorite album of mine, “Lemonade”, which explores healing and redemption in a gorgeous and poignant linear narrative, what grounds “High as Hope” is its messiness. Though it contrasts heavily to the carefully crafted anthemic dance tracks on the band’s previous projects such as “How Big How Blue How Beautiful” and “Ceremonials”, “High as Hope” does not lack in grandeur. Yet here the grandeur stems from Florence’s deepest inner self. The big things are given their time, but the little things are also given the room to be big.
There is a person’s past and history woven into every word she sings. Memories fly by the eyelids, woven into the songs the way spotting a certain ice cream in the store transports you back to a summer’s day. The songs convey a universal experience, how everything around us holds some sort of memory or association, how we are all simply everything that’s happened to us.
Florence isn’t afraid to spend time singing about watching television in a hotel room, or interrupting her ode to Patti Smith with a piece of poetry on toxic masculinity. She refuses to be confined to her sharp metaphorical tracks of the albums before. It’s the rawest Florence has ever been, referencing her drug addiction, her eating disorders, her grandmother’s suicide. “Grace” speaks directly to her sister. But by nature of her sister’s name, Grace, the song reaches out to us, a song of worship filled with unbearable lament and pain. A song of faith; “Grace, I know you carry us.”
Florence interpolates between the past present and future, screaming, whispering, growling, moaning. Most of the songs end in a big, grand chorus. Whether the song is about hunger, loneliness, burnout, getting ghosted, love for an icon, it builds into a swell of emotion and sound that threatens to knock you over. And what can be more relatable for a high school Simona, (or I argue anyone), than the most intense and turbulent emotions caused by the littlest things?
In my teen years waves would build and break and knock me over and over and over again, leaving me with sand in my nose and the sting of salt at the back of my throat. Healing is not just one journey, one big wave. It’s many smaller ones, over and over again. The ocean is relentless. Through her deeply personal lyricism and deep emotion, Florence was with me in the waves.
The conclusion she comes to at the end of the album is one I am now, at 20, just beginning to realize. “High as Hope”’s closing track, “No Choir”, is perhaps the best written song of her career. After an album filled with rage, sorrow, triumph, weariness, we get a song that encapsulates the closest to a solution we will ever get to the emotional turmoil that accompanies each of us through life. “...There will be no grand choirs to sing/no chorus could come in/about two people sitting doing nothing”. A still, peaceful silence. The loneliness doesn’t leave her, but she has figured out how to put it down.
While I still do get dragged to the bottom of the ocean, it’s happening less and less. And when I’m walking in the frigid Toronto air on the way back from a friend’s after a simple chat that was the result of an “I need to get out of the house” text, I begin to see what Florence meant. Though the ocean will never be completely still, it feels as if the waves have passed, for now, and me and Florence are floating on our backs in the ocean, looking at the sun, hair wet and bedraggled, holding onto each other.
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