Florence Welch on art and ‘crazy’ ideas
We dare you to find someone more effortlessly at ease on stage than Florence Welch.
The 32-year-old leader of the bombastic British rock band Florence + the Machine leaps barefoot across the stage during their concerts, never missing a high note as she sprints out to meet the crowd, spins in the air and then doubles back to her microphone stand.
But on the eve of their “High as Hope” tour, Welch laughs, and says she always has the same thought before she hits the road.
“I literally just think, ‘There’s no way I can do this.’ ”
“As soon as the tour starts, I’m fine. But just before I have to go, I get this sense of, like, cosmic exhaustion. I don’t even know if I’m able to stand up, let alone do the tour. Which I think is maybe nerves and pressure.”
On the other hand, when Welch began work on the band’s 2018 album, “High as Hope,” she was newly free of the pressure she’d felt for years in the studio.
It’s the first album she’s made since she decided to quit drinking a few years ago, and it provides her with her first producer credit.
“Hope,” in turn, has been praised for its stark, minimal production and intimate songs, featuring some of Welch’s most personal lyrics to date. Lead-off single and standout “Hunger” starts with this arresting line: “At 17, I started to starve myself.”
In a pre-tour conversation with USA TODAY Network, Welch was an open book.
‘The best way’ to make music
On “High as Hope,” Welch says she was able to get back to the mindset she had when making the band’s 2009 debut album, “Lungs.”
“With your first record, you have no expectations of yourself, because you’re just like, ‘I don’t know how to make music or make songs, and no one’s probably going to listen! I can just do whatever I want!’ ” she says with a laugh.
“And then with your second and third (album), there’s quite a lot of pressure . ... And people are like, ‘Are you gonna last? What’s coming next? Are you gonna be able to progress as an artist?’
“It was almost like I’d learned so much from the making of those three, and by the time it came to make this one, I had such a sure sense of who I was as a musician and as an artist. And weirdly, that allowed me to go back to making music, how I started in the beginning ... probably the first way that I tried to (make music), which was without any sense of expectation and a real sense of joy, is the best way.”
‘One big collage’
The tour’s striking set design includes a multilevel stage, with steps jutting out all around like thin layers of rock. Welch explores that space thoroughly during the show, as massive flowing drapes rise and fall overhead.
The visual side of Welch’s work is never an afterthought.
She went to art college before opting to pursue music full-time, and her handwritten lyric sheets and poems often double as visual art pieces. Earlier this year, “Late Night” host Seth Meyers noted that Welch was the first guest who redecorated their own dressing room.
“I’ve always had a very particular sense of aesthetic,” she says.
“Even when I was a kid, I was always drawing and writing poems. The first diary I had was actually a visual diary of drawings of things that would happen to me. There’s one drawing of me with my insides outside of my body, and then a big heart on top of it, which I think was a really astute prophecy of how I was gonna deal with life and my relationships,” she says with a laugh. “
musician and as an artist.” Florence Welch