Dear all,

After a week of sitting in my parents’ house and eating maggi, I emerge from my cocoon. I have transformed from the ugly caterpillar who struggled to survive the fever into a different ugly caterpillar who will struggle to differently survive.

Florence and the Machine’s first album came out in 2009, which was the year I started university. It was a bad year for me in many ways. In a way, I can only speak of it obliquely - by alluding to things that suggest the shape of that year. Perhaps the thing that I find it easiest to allude to is Lungs.

I can’t actually separate Lungs into its constituent parts, nor can I pretend some objectivity about it. Each song seems to flow into the next, a consequence of my constant repetition of the album. What Florence Welch and her band did in that album was to distill a kind of emotion that I did not yet know I was feeling - a quiet, silent desperation that had to be chained inside me lest I let go of it and as a result also myself.

(This is funny, because Florence and the Machine’s most recent album is titled Everybody Scream.)

There are songs on Lungs which reach so far into the realm of pure imagery that it is difficult to explain what they are saying. It makes work that feels otherwise cliche bombastic and unapologetic. The world is full of songs about heartbreak, but only Florence Welch can make Hurricane Drunk work:

I hope that you see me 'cause I'm staring at you
But when you look over, you look right through
And then you lean and kiss her on the head
And I never felt so alive and so dead

Perhaps what I love most about Florence’s oeuvre is this sense that her emotional exposition is no different from her artistic intention. I never feel, with her, that I am attempting to understand an experience that is alien to me - which I do feel with many other popular artists. I can’t tell you a damn thing about what Bruno Mars or Justin Bieber or Ed Sheeran feel about themselves when I listen to their music. I don’t know how to imagine the internal lives of Ariana Grande or Taylor Swift, even though they’re just as human and real.

It’s not that they lead utterly different lives to me - so does Florence Welch. It’s not even that I heard her first album at an important time in my life, because I also heard Phoenix’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix on repeat that year and I barely think about it now. It’s that every single time Florence Welch makes something she’s doing what I want to be seeing in art and doing in art - self-reflecting, learning, making new things and surprising herself in the process.

When I first heard Ceremonials, their second album, I bounced off it. I was so married to the sound of the first album, to the feeling of needing release, that I almost felt betrayed by the fact that Florence decided to go somewhere she found interesting, instead of staying where I needed her.

It meant that when they released How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, I stayed away. How could I possibly deal with another album that didn’t speak to me, when speaking to me was the reason Florence was so good? I stayed away when they released High as Hope, too, even though Hunger is a song with just deep, aching insistence on paying attention to yourself. It took three albums for me to reconsider my position. It took the video of Dance Fever’s Free, in which Florence is sitting next to her anxiety, played by Bill Nighy, for me to reconsider my own position about her.

Of course, the intervening period also meant I’d grown as a person, reconsidered my position about a great many things, and accepted that sometimes, I am just wrong. I was wrong about my own feelings regarding Ceremonials, because I’d convinced myself it was an objectively bad album. I was wrong also about Lungs, which I’d convinced myself was a perfect work of art. Neither of these things is true.

But Everybody Scream, their latest album, hit me like Lungs did the first time I heard it. Like it was made by a band that has looked both out into the world and within its own selves to make music that is about something inescapably true. Like every song is somehow the natural continuation of the one before it. Like the imagery in it has gone beyond metaphor.

Next week, my thoughts about perfection in craft, and what it means to make perfect things.

Cheers,

mvs