The Florence + the Machine frontwoman reveals what kept her motivated while working on the band’s next album: dancers, “Dracula” and daffodils.
Florence Welch thought she would be happy when the pandemic brought live music to a temporary end. For the past 13 years, after every tour, the shamanic frontwoman of the British rock band Florence + the Machine told herself, “I’m going to settle down.” Instead, she would write more songs — which is exactly what happened in 2020, culminating in her fifth album, “Dance Fever” (out May 13).
“The whole record is a ‘be careful what you wish for’ fable,” she said via phone from her London home, where she spent quarantine. “The monster of the performance heard me: You don’t want to tour anymore? Sit still for a year. How do you feel now?”
With nothing to do during lockdown, Welch, 35, subsisted on a steady diet of scary movies. “Horror was like a poultice,” she said. “I couldn’t watch a rom-com or a film where people were eating in restaurants. I needed to see people losing it.” As a result, “Dance Fever” — named for the dancing mania that swept through Europe after the Black Death — is a collection of haunting rock songs that are frothing for release.
“Every album is a reaction to the last thing you made, and I was a little sick of my own [expletive], which is heavy piano,” Welch said. “I missed guitars.” Half of the album was produced alongside the Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, St. Vincent), who helped Welch refine what she loved about her previous records. The kinetic dance single “Free” is mellowed by “Morning Elvis,” a swelling confessional about the time she was so hung over she missed a planned visit to Graceland. (Welch has been sober since 2014, but before that, she said, “I thought the way to hang onto your rock ’n’ roll roots was to be the drunkest person in the room.”)
In her living room, surrounded by what she called a “graveyard of suitcases” in preparation for her upcoming return to the stage, Welch shared the cultural hobbies and passions that have shaped her career. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
1. Pina Bausch Pina has been one of the biggest influences on my life, especially on my performance style. “Bluebeard” was the last thing I saw at Sadler’s Wells in London before all the theaters started shutting. Her work speaks to me in a way that is really hard to put into words, and I think that is the point of dance. I can be so verbose. I can talk things around and around and get nowhere. To dance is so purely about the human experience.
2. “Cabaret” What makes “Cabaret” one of the great musicals is the undercurrent of darkness and sex and death. One of the first theater shows that I went to see when everything started opening up was “Cabaret” with Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. I was in floods of tears. I felt like I had been filled up again. I love musicals. Growing up, I didn’t think about becoming a pop star. I wanted to be on Broadway. But I was a really awkward kid. I begged my mum to send me to stage school and she was like, “No.” I definitely get my love of music from my dad.
3. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” I really wasn’t a horror aficionado. I have enough scary thoughts in my head to not want to be scared recreationally. But I got Covid just before we did the album cover shoot. I was pretty sick, so I watched Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula,” which was visually a really big reference for the record and the costumes. The script is a little clunky but somehow that and the overacting all adds to the magic. There was a period of time where I was, for lack of a better phrase, drinking all the vampire content that I could.
4. Donlon Books They have the most amazing niche, rare and strange books, like “Wisconsin Death Trip” [by Michael Lesy]. If I’m trying to impress someone who I think is really cool, that’s where I take them. It’s where I took Phoebe Bridgers and she told me I should buy Carmen Maria Machado. I remember her pulling out “In the Dream House” and she was like, “This is one of the best books I’ve ever read.” I had been interested in making a song about all the reasons why I’m not great at being a girlfriend. Phoebe opened a page and it was a very similar list of character defects. I was like, Oh, this speaks to me so deeply. That’s where the obsession with Carmen Maria Machado began.
5. Superheroes I feel like this is something people wouldn’t expect, but I love superhero stuff. My whole stage persona is a mix of my childhood obsession with Rogue from “X-Men” and a Victorian ghost. I don’t think I’ve ever liked a movie more than “Thor: Ragnarok.” I’m not like a Marvel or DC obsessive — I’ll watch everything. Sometimes they can be hit-or-miss, I admit. But there’s something about the humor of superheroes when they get into normal stuff. Nothing satisfies me more than someone in a cape arguing about something really mundane.
6. Walking to get coffee and pick up flowers I love to walk out of my house, down the street, and notice the seasons change. It was one of the things I missed the most during Covid. Now I feel such an enormous amount of gratitude to get a coffee that somebody else made and pick up some flowers. My dad told me once that his favorite flower is a daffodil and I became very interested in daffodils. They’re narcissus and they were used by ancient Romans as sleep medicine, or maybe poison, I’m not really sure. I wrote the song “Daffodil” in peak pandemic, and I really thought maybe I had lost it because the chorus is just me saying “daffodil.” Like, do I need to pull it back?
7. @poetryisnotaluxury I don’t know who set it up, I don’t know who runs it, but I found some of my favorite poems from their Instagram. “This Is the Poem I Did Not Write” by Rita Dove. “Kitchen/Holidays” by Eileen Myles. And “Meditations in an Emergency” by Cameron Awkward-Rich. The last line just destroys me: “Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.”
8. “Suspiria” The original and the remake are my two favorite horror films together. I love the dancing. I was listening to Tilda Swinton do an interview about it, and she pulled a lot of her references from a pre-Pina choreographer called Mary Wigman. That led me to be really interested in her. She did this dance called “Hexentanz” in 1914, which is “Witch Dance,” a reference for the “Heaven Is Here” video.
9. “Yellowjackets” “Yellowjackets” appeals to me because of my fascination with all things culty, but also it portrays the violence of the hormonal shift of girlhood so well. I think there’s something about being a young woman that feels very murderous. That’s what I was trying to get with a song like “Dream Girl Evil.” It can be dangerous for people to think you’re incredibly nice. When you get, “You’re an angel,” that seems like such a high place to fall from. When I see messy or violent or terribly behaved women, especially young women, there’s a liberation. To not have to try and survive by being good.
10. Scent Bar The whole band, we don’t really party anymore. We go to fragrance bars instead. Weirdly, [the musician/filmmaker] Adam Green was the original fraghead, the technical term for the fragrance community. He smells so good. He opened the door for us. When I had Covid, I was terrified I was going to lose my sense of smell. I woke up and I knew something was wrong. I have a big fragrance collection and I couldn’t smell anything. I was weeping and spraying perfume at 3 in the morning. When I told my friends, they were like, “Isn’t that a regular evening for you?”
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