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Florence + The Machine  

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Florence Welch is the lead singer and frontwoman of the indie band Florence + The Machine, formed in South London, UK, in 2007.

Known for a unique and dreamy blend of folk, art-pop, indie rock, and neo soul, as well as her stirring and ethereal live performances, Welch has been likened to artists such as Adele, Amy Winehouse, and Ellie Goulding.

Florence + The Machine is a band composed of Welch, pianist Isabella Summers, Robert Ackroyd (guitar), Tom Monger (harp), Mark Saunders (bass), and a rotating cast of other artists. Welch credits her bandmates with helping unlock her creative process, as they have been so tuned-in to each others’ musical abilities for so long that they naturally know what she’s hoping for in each new song.

The band’s name came from Welch’s teenage years, when she collaborated with Isabella “Machine” Summers. For a while, the two performed as Florence Robot/Isa Machine — a private joke that eventually stuck in slightly altered form.

With huge encouragement from the BBC, Florence received early critical acclaim and attention from UK audiences as BBC Music Introducing strongly promoted the band. The band’s debut album, Lungs, was released on July 6, 2009, and reached the number two slot in the UK Album Chart, retaining the position for five consecutive weeks. It finally reached the number one position on the album chart on January 17, 2010. By October 2010, Lungs had spent a total of 65 consecutive weeks in the top 40 album charts.

Notable singles from the album included “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up),” “Kiss With A Fist,” and “Dog Days Are Over,” with the songs being featured on films and television series like Jennifer’s Body, 90210, Gossip Girl, Glee, and Skins.

Undoubtedly, the biggest hit single released from Lungs was the cover of The Source and Candi Staton’s 1986 single “You’ve Got The Love.” The track was later also released in collaboration with UK grime rapper Dizzee Rascal under the title, “You’ve Got The Dirtee Love,” following Welch and Dizzee’s 2010 Brit Award performance of the mash-up.

The band’s second studio album, Ceremonials, was preceded by a demo session in January 2010 at a small studio in London. Several producers vied for the chance to produce it, but Welch rejected their offers because she was after a new sound: something darker, heavier, more explosive, and grittier. The band had the rest of the year to work sporadically on the music, since they were out on the road touring heavily.

When the group did record, it happened between January and April 2011 at Abbey Road Studios with producer Paul Epworth, who co-wrote seven of the album’s tracks. Other co-writers included Kid Harpoon and Summers. Welch had to record many of the vocal tracks in various U.S. studios between shows on her tour.

Ceremonials featured singles “Shake It Out” and “What The Water Gave Me,” with the latter video receiving an outstanding 1.5 million views on YouTube in just two days alongside the track on iTunes in August 2011. The fourth single for the album, a remix of “Spectrum (Say My Name)” by Scotland’s Calvin Harris, became the band’s first number-one hit in the UK.

Unsurprisingly, Ceremonials reached number one on the UK Album Chart and number six on the U.S. Billboard 200. Furthermore, Florence + The Machine was honored with nominations for two Brit Awards: British Album of the Year and Best British Female Artist.

2012 was a year of rest for Florence + The Machine after having gone all out for the past half-decade. By the end of December 2012, Ceremonials had received a nomination for Best Pop Vocal Album.

In June 2014, Welch revealed that the band was working on its third studio album. Seven months later, the band performed the new album in its entirety to a crowd in a private London show. The next day, a music video for the title track, “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful,” dropped, followed by another video for the song “St. Jude.”

When How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful finally dropped on May 29, it rose to the number-one spot on the UK Albums Chart — the band’s third time enjoying the honor — and hit number one on the U.S. Billboard 200. It was nominated five times for the Grammys. That year, the band headlined Glastonbury Festival, and its set received critical acclaim from a number of outlets. In 2016, Florence and the Machine released a short film called The Odyssey, which combined all of the album’s music videos into one narrative structure.

May 2017 saw an announcement of yet another studio album, High as Hope. During this period, then-drummer Christopher Hayden left the band, but the music didn’t stop: singles like “Sky Full of Song” and “Hunger” came in April and May of 2018. Florence + The Machine stayed busy with tours and song-crafting through the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it released “Light of Love” to support the Intensive Care Society.

By early 2022, the band was back on the road, headlining festivals like Madrid’s Mad Cool. The band’s fans began receiving letters with a cryptic print entitled “King – Chapter 1,” which led to speculation of a new single. Welch confirmed the rumors on February 22 on her Instagram account. “King,” the new single, came out the next day along with a music video. “Heaven Is Here” followed on March 7. Dance Fever, the fifth studio album, was released on May 13 and immediately shot to the number-one spot in the UK.

Live reviews

Only a few hours after I wrote about Hozier performing one of the most intimate sets I had ever experienced at Red Rocks, Florence Welsh completely redefined the word ‘intimacy’. The 28-year-old vocalist of Florence + the Machine had been photographed in meltdown mode at the Montreal airport just days prior, so it came as no shock when she decided do to something a little different on the last date of her current tour. Welsh has been pretty honest about her personal challenges with the road. She’s described feelings of loneliness and exhaustion that border on depression. I’m sure she found solace in the fact that her vocal chords held strong this time around (she damaged them not long before her Red Rocks show in 2012), but she seemed slightly unraveled by the time she took the stage for a special acoustic set on Monday night.

Large scale performances and frayed nerves usually equal disaster, but as Florence’s emotions danced around her windswept red curls, she used her sweet sorrow to create an air of melancholy that infected the crowd during her stripped-down set. The audience gained another ounce of empathy with each breath…thus absorbing her sadness and eradicating any loneliness she might have been feeling. The science was exact, so by the time the 12-piece ensemble went into full effect for ‘the electric era’, we had become her friends, her confidants, and her choir. The collective energy was enough to bring the rocks crumbling down on our heads, but lucky for us (and the City of Denver) Florence held things together with the pure power of voice. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky during the entire set, but this season has seen its fair share of strong weather, and Florence + the Machine gave every drop of rain, gust of wind and bolt of lightning a run for its money. The calm before the storm just made the storm that much stronger. - See more at: http://ilistensoyoudonthaveto.com/2015/08/06/florence-the-machine-red-rocks-08-03-15/#sthash.nrdxF7Aq.dpuf

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Florence + the Machine are a power force in the UK indie scene who have conquered both sides of the Atlantic since their rise to fame following the release of 'Lungs'. Led by the charismatic and eccentric Florence Welch, the band has a reputation as one of the most exciting and energetic live acts currently working today.

As the thunder begins to roll, the machine appears onstage followed by a majestic looking Florence who confidently takes the helm and launches into the all-consuming 'Only If For A Night'. The haunting 'What The Water Gave Me' follows as Florence lifts her hands to the heavens and the audience cheer below her feet.

Before you have time to react, Florence abandons the facade of a renaissance painting brought to life and has launched herself from the stage to sing and dance 'Rabbit Heart' with the crowd. Her vocals shine through on the soulful 'Leave My Body' as she stands illuminated by a single spotlight and the restraint shown during early single 'Cosmic Love' make for an emotive moment. The finale of 'Spectrum' is a hedonistic piece of dark disco where the crowd surrender themselves to Florence's bizarre world.

Despite only having released their debut in 2009, Florence + the Machine have crafted a live show that is less a gig and more an all-consuming assault on the senses.

Florence Welch has one of the most distinctive voices of this era, and the indie rock band in which she is the lead singer is carried by this timeless vocal performance time and time again.

Opening her concert with ‘You’ve Got the Love’, Florence finds the perfect balance between a classically lyrical performance, and enthusiastic and upbeat. The blend of the band is something that comes across to the audience much more pronounced in a live performance environment. Throughout their transitions between ballads and energetic upbeat songs, they maintained their engagement with the audience, having them hooked for the entire duration. Their stamina is worth noting, as throughout the concert, their performance, both physical and vocal did not dwindle at all. The live performance topped their studio recordings.

Their 2010 nomination for Best New Artist at the Grammys was wholeheartedly deserved. Their dedication to their fans is admirable, and their endeavours to make each concert about every member of the audience is something very refreshing. Florence and the Machine set the bar extremely high for live performances, making no mistakes and topping the quality of their recorded work.

I've waited several years for Florence + The Machine to play an intimate gig near me. Suddenly, on April26th 2018 SONGKICK emailed to say just such a gig was on at Scunthorpe Baths Hall on May6th ! Wow!

Applied online via Baths Hall website, & so pleased tickets limited to 2 per person, we were all in with a chance... Feel so, so lucky to get 2x Standing, the perfect way to see her and the band. My daughter Susie & I went: she couldn't believe our good luck either.

Venue was perfect. I'd researched the playlist from Halifax, May5th, visited the old numbers + checked out the new ones, too, so I felt prepared... but I wasn't: I'd expected the atmosphere to be up close and personal, but it was so much more.

Florence hit the stage & wow! Perfect blend of old/ new, a very balanced set from a hugely professional outfit. Florence was so open & warm giving background to several numbers. She floated, danced, teased and enthralled her adoring audience. We didn't want it to stop: so much pleasure was being shared. Her voice is incredible, it blends with the music so very well. Truly, we are blessed !

An electric show of epic proportions.

While I was expecting to hear more from the upcoming album, I was still delighted to hear all of the classics as well as a few new ones. This was my first time seeing FATM live, and they most certainly didn't disappoint. Florence's vocals were so omnipotent and sharp, and the same if not better than what you hear on the record. Her free as a bird movements and seemingly infinite pool of energy were wondrous to behold. I enjoyed her interaction with the crowd as well, she seemed to bring a life to her audience that I've never seen other live artists do, personally.

The only downsides might have been to do with the venue, which took too long to get everyone seated, also there wasn't much room between people so it was all rather cramped. And the supporting act, which I didn't particularly enjoy nor could I understand very well. But those things have nothing to do with Florence + The Machine personally, so it doesn't reflect on them negatively whatsoever.

Overall, an enjoyable experience that I would repeat in a heartbeat.

I definitely recommend that you go and see Florence and The Machine if they come to your city! They are such an amazing band and they sound as good live as they do on their albums. Florence has so much stamina and tirelessly runs around onstage from side to side, looking into the eyes of as many people as she possibly can. Highlights of her show in Manchester this year were 'Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)' when she encouraged people to get on their friend's shoulders and she ran offstage and up the steps into the lower tier seating! 'Dog Days Are Over' was a perfect finale that ended with many people leaving the concert with very little clothing on! The stage was minimal but dramatic, with a huge sparkling background, rows of spotlights and a large round moon and sun that came out from behind the background during the middle of the show. Definitely go and see them if you get the chance, you won't regret it! They're worth every penny.

Florence + The Machine @ Manchester Arena

Friday 18th September 2015

10/10. Her voice sounds the same live as it does recorded. She was a crazy ball of energy dancing and running around every inch of the stage in a flowing dress and long hair. Florence even went into the crowd on several occasions to directly connect with people (much to the dismay of her security). Her commentary between songs majorly enhanced the performance as she is adorably shy and has the most calming ethereal presence- which basically means she is a massive hippie. She encouraged everyone to hold hands and embrace and put our phones away and jump wildly with her. Her band were also excellent and the staging- white sheets, almost like sails, hanging from the ceiling which were raised up and down and had lights shone on them- and the gorgeous glitter confetti which dropped at the end added to the magical experience. Next time I will be waiting for hours before to get to the front row!! Could not recommend more!!

This was the best concert I have ever been to. That is being said after seeing a lot of them. She has so much energy, and conects to the crowd so well.

A lady had jumped on to the stage while Florence was performing 'Rabbit Heart' and the security guard went after her. Florence stopped him politely, then gave the lady a big hug. Music continued on to add to the theme of her kindness. She then went on to run through the crowd, and hug a bunch of people. She ran around, then sang a note so clearly as if she hadn't moved a step. She even asked to have every one stand up and dance which was great, because where I live, people have the tendency to just sit and watch at concerts like that. I had a blast - danced my heart out to every song, and felt as if I was on some sort of high due to the energy that she sent through the crowd. I am going to see her every time she comes to town now. For sure.

What can I say? What a fantastic evening. We got to Ally Pally really early to be one of the first in....we weren't first!. Despite the heavy rain loads of people were in the line before us. The doors opened and we all entered. Luckily, we were able to get into the hall quickly, resulting in us being centre stage, 5 from the front.

We waited and waited, feet getting tired. The support band (Three girls from Watford) came on. They were awesome.

Finally,, the moment arrived, with Flo coming on stage. The concert started with 'What the Water Wants'....it just got better and better. The whole audience were enthralled. The audience sang along to every song. The atmosphere was electric. What a talented lady and group of musicians. I go to loads of gigs and concerts. I was looking forward to seeing FTM the moist and she didn't disappoint.

The concert was awesome.

Florence Welch's presence on stage is unbelievable, her voice is more powerful than in their CDs, and she dances and sings with a lot of passion.

The concert started with "What the water gave me", and it made clear that it was going to be very good. The band has a lot of great songs, and the concert was great from start to end.

One of the best moments was when, while performing "Dog days are over", Florence asked everyone to hug each other, then to take something off and wave it in the air, and to jump as high as we could on a count of three. Everyone was jumping and dancing, and the energy that the crowd, Florence and the song transmitted was huge.

Florence and the Machine´s fans shouldn´t miss the oportunity to go to one of their concerts.

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Florence and the Machine Announce 2022 North American Tour

By Allison Hussey

Florence and the Machine have announced a North American tour that picks up in September. Arlo Parks, King Princess, Sam Fender, Yves Tumor, Japanese Breakfast, and Wet Leg are all set to take opening slots in different cities. See the full schedule below.

Earlier this month, Florence Welch announced Dance Fever , her first new album since 2018’s High as Hope . She’s shared three singles from the album so far: “ My Love ,”“Heaven Is Here,” and “ King .” Welch co-produced Dance Fever with Jack Antonoff and Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley, and the album arrives on May 13.

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Florence and the Machine:

04-29 Los Angeles, CA - Los Angeles Theatre 05-06 New York, NY - Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center 09-02 Montreal, Quebec - Place Bell * 09-03 Toronto, Ontario - Budweiser Stage * 09-07 Chicago, IL - Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island † 09-08 St. Paul, MN - Xcel Energy Center † 09-10 Clarkson, MI - Pine Knob Music Theatre † 09-12 Washington, D.C. - Capital One Arena † 09-14 Boston, MA - TD Garden † 09-16 New York, NY - Madison Square Garden † 09-20 Nashville, TN - Ascend Amphitheater ‡ 09-21 Alpharetta, GA - Ameris Bank Amphitheatre ‡ 09-23 Orlando, FL - Amway Center ‡ 09-24 Miami, FL - FTX Arena ‡ 09-27 Austin, TX - Moody Center § 09-28 Irving, TX - The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory § 10-01 Denver, CO - Ball Arena  10-04 Vancouver, British Columbia - Rogers Arena # 10-06 Seattle, WA - Climate Pledge Arena % 10-07 Portland, OR - Theater of the Clouds # 10-09 Mountain View, CA - Shoreline Amphitheatre % 10-12 San Diego, CA - Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre % 10-14 Los Angeles, CA - Hollywood Bowl

* with Arlo Parks † with Sam Fender ‡ with King Princess § with Yves Tumor # with Japanese Breakfast % with Wet Leg

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By Nina Corcoran

Florence + the Machine Unveil 2022 Tour With Awesome Support Acts: Wet Leg, Arlo Parks, Japanese Breakfast, More

By Jem Aswad

Executive Editor, Music

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Florence + the Machine are set to play an extended run of headline dates later this year, kicking off September 2 in Montreal with further stops including New York’s Madison Square Garden, Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl and many more. One dollar from every ticket sold will benefit  Choose Love  to aid refugees worldwide.

The group has assembled a formidable array of up-and-coming support acts at select dates on the tour: Arlo Parks , Sam Fender, King Princess, Yves Tumor, Japanese Breakfast and Wet Leg will join as support on select dates throughout the tour. See full routing below.

American Express card members can purchase tickets in select markets before the general public beginning Tuesday, March 29 at 10am local time through Thursday, March 31 at 10pm local time.

The tour will be behind the group’s forthcoming fifth album “ Dance Fever ,” out May 13.  The album was produced by Florence Welch with Jack Antonoff and Dave Bayley of Glass Animals.

Additionally,  Welch will play two intimate shows this spring: April 29 in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Theatre and May 6 at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York.

Popular on Variety

According to the announcement, Choose Love works to provide refugees and displaced people with everything from rescue boats to food and legal advice. Their work has reached over 1.8 million people and supported over 250 fast-acting community organizations across Europe, the Middle East and along the US-Mexico border.

April 29                                                Los Angeles Theatre                                  Los Angeles, CA

May 6                                        Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center                          New York, NY

September 2                                                  Place Bell                                              Montreal, QC*

September 3                                            Budweiser Stage                                          Toronto, ON*

September 7                     Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island                    Chicago, IL†

September  8                                          Xcel Energy Center                                       St. Paul, MN †

September 10                                   Pine Knob Music Theatre                                  Clarkson, MI†

September 12                                          Capital One Area                                 Washington, D.C.†

September 14                                               TD Garden                                               Boston, MA†

September 16                                    Madison Square Garden                                New York, NY†

September 20                                      Ascend Amphitheater                                    Nashville, TN‡

September 21                                  Ameris Bank Amphitheatre                             Alpharetta, GA‡

September 23                                            Amway Center                                            Orlando, FL‡

September 24                                               FTX Arena                                                  Miami, FL‡

September 27                                            Moody Center                                               Austin, TX§

September 28                         The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory                             Irving, TX§

October 1                                                     Ball Arena                                                  Denver, CO

October 4                                                   Rogers Arena                                      Vancouver, BC**

October 6                                            Climate Pledge Arena                                       Seattle, WA†

October 7                                             Theater of the Clouds                                   Portland, OR**

October 9                                           Shoreline Amphitheatre                        Mountain View, CA†

October 12                           Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre                  San Diego, CA†

October 14                                              Hollywood Bowl                                     Los Angeles, CA

*with Arlo Parks

†with Sam Fender

‡with King Princess

• with Yves Tumor

**with Japanese Breakfast

††with Wet Leg

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Florence + The Machine Announce North American Tour: See The Dates

By Katrina Nattress

March 28, 2022

Florence + The Machine are gearing up to release their latest album Dance Fever on May 13, and a few months later they'll be touring North America in support.

After a pair of “special, intimate shows” on April 29 in Los Angeles and May 6 in New York, Florence Welch and company plan to head back to North America in September, beginning their trek on September 2 in Montreal and wrapping up October 14 in LA. Arlo Parks, Sam Fender, King Princess, Yves Tumor, Japanese Breakfast and Wet Leg will support on various dates, and one dollar from every ticket sold will benefit  Choose Love  in its mission to aid refugees worldwide.

Tickets go on sale Friday (April 1) at 10am local time. Get more info at Florence + The Machine's official website , and check out the announcement plus a full list of dates below.

Dance Fever North America 🌕✨ With support from @arloparks , @samfendermusic , @wetlegband , @KingPrincess69 , @Jbrekkie & @YvesTumor on selected dates. See poster for full details.🩸🫀 General sale Fri April 1st, 10am local. $1 from every ticket sold will be donated to @chooselove pic.twitter.com/4jKxJK9DT3 — florence welch (@florencemachine) March 28, 2022

Florence + The Machine North American Tour Dates

April 29 Los Angeles Theatre Los Angeles, CA

May 6 Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center New York, NY

September 2 Place Bell Montreal, QC*

September 3 Budweiser Stage Toronto, ON*

September 7 Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island Chicago, IL†

September 8 Xcel Energy Center St. Paul, MN†

September 10 Pine Knob Music Theatre Clarkson, MI†

September 12 Capital One Area Washington, D.C.†

September 14 TD Garden Boston, MA†

September 16 Madison Square Garden New York, NY†

September 20 Ascend Amphitheatre Nashville, TN‡

September 21 Ameris Bank Amphitheatre Alpharetta, GA‡

September 23 Amway Center Orlando, FL‡

September 24 FTX Arena Miami, FL‡

September 27 Moody Center Austin, TX§

September 28 The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory Irving, TX§

October 1 Ball Arena Denver, CO

October 4 Rogers Arena Vancouver, BC**

October 6 Climate Pledge Arena Seattle, WA††

October 7 Theater of the Clouds Portland, OR**

October 9 Shoreline Amphitheatre Mountain View, CA††

October 12 Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre San Diego, CA††

October 14 Hollywood Bowl Los Angeles, CA

*with Arlo Parks

†with Sam Fender

‡with King Princess

§with Yves Tumor

**with Japanese Breakfast

††with Wet Leg

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Florence Welch shares how anxiety came with her sobriety as she and the Machine embark on tour

Florence Welch feels things intensely.

From early hits “Dog Days Are Over,” “Shake It Out” and “Spectrum (Say My Name)” to the evocative emotional tsunamis on fifth album  “Dance Fever,” Welch’s music with her band the Machine takes root in your soul.

The London-born Welch and seven-piece Machine launch a North American tour on Friday that will roll through October before heading overseas.

The band’s brew of indie pop  and Welch’s distinctive mezzo-soprano voice – enticing on record – is even more striking on stage.

Calling from home on “Flo’s iPad,” Welch, 36, talked to USA TODAY about the intriguing songs on “Dance Fever,” filming videos in Ukraine and how Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham factors into the upcoming tour.

'I can't believe I'm not dead': Demi Lovato gets blunt on new album

Question: “Dance Fever” is such a phenomenal album . Can we talk about the song “Free"?  

Answer: “Free” was written in 2019 and ironically was the last song written before the first lockdown in the U.K. But even before the pandemic, I had been struggling with panic attacks and anxiety. There’s this thing that happens when you’ve been sober for a while and it’s been eight years for me. Your anxiety or whatever you’ve been suppressing comes to meet you, and when you get sober, you’re still managing it in other ways. When your life basically is settled and stable, it’s almost as if the body goes, “OK, time to release this,” but it was confusing to me, like why? The anxiety has been a constant force in my life for as long as I can remember, but there was a period in 2019 when it was particularly bad.

Can you share the backstory about the video, too, which you filmed in Ukraine and stars Bill Nighy?

There is a character in this video . I’m always running from something, so what is this something and how do we represent this? It’s extremely British to say something terrible and then be like, “ha ha ha.” We wanted to capture the sense of humor in the song, and (video director Autumn de Wilde) said, what about Bill? I didn’t think he’d say yes and he did. He was so good. He’s playing my anxiety. He’s a complete treasure. 

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It’s a beautiful scene at the end of the video, which you shot in Kyiv in November, along with the videos for “King” and “Heaven Is Here.” Do you feel a strong kinship with the Ukrainians?  

I can’t talk about it without crying. It was an amazing crew, amazing people. We had such an amazing time. We knew we were going to do a lot of stunts and they have amazing stunt people. It’s all been so devastating. A lot of it lately has been finding out if people were OK, making sure people were safe.

Does “King,” where you sing about mixing motherhood and a career, take on even deeper resonance now with everything women are dealing with in the U.S. with reproductive rights?

I think songs can hold things. The reason I make songs and I do performances is to give out statements. Songs can hold my feelings about things. They do tend to reflect what’s happening and it enters into the song and changes it.

You got me fascinated by choreomania (explored in a song of the same name). When did you learn about this phenomenon, where groups of people danced themselves to hysteric exhaustion?

I discovered it in 2019 when a friend told me about it and I went down a complete rabbit hole. I’d never heard of it. I couldn’t believe that this thing existed and there were outbreaks of it all over Europe from the 14th to 16th century. There are lots of theories about why it happened. It could have been a virus or a hallucinogenic brain and people were high or it was a psychological response to stress. I understood deeply that you could be so stressed that you could go onto the street and dance until you collapsed.

What can you share about the production for the Dance Fever tour?

We were looking at a lot of Miss Havisham references. There’s a funny sense of tragedy ascribed to unmarried, childless women at 35 and I do think people maybe think I sit in an old, crumbling mansion, crying in a wedding dress. So I was like, let’s just make that, then! I wanted to play with the humor and that sense of tragedy.

When you’re on the road, are there any must-haves on the tour bus?

I have to bring stuff to decorate every dressing room. Over the years, I’ve collected a lot of old piano shawls from various vintage stores and bring my own embroidered bedspreads. That really helps. No matter what hotel room I’m in, no matter what bus I’m in, I have things I can dress a room in.

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Florence Welch on Sobriety, Embracing Loneliness and Loving Patti Smith

• By Kory Grow

It’s the day before Florence Welch embarks on the North American leg of her current tour, and she’s making the most of her time in Vancouver. This morning, strangely, she went to a museum exhibit that was all about cabins. “I grew up with a Little House on the Prairie fetish,” she explains with an embarrassed laugh. “I was obsessed. I lived in South London, so there were no prairies. I had a little dress, and I remember laying a ‘river’ of towels down and my bunk bed was the log cabin. My mother was like, ‘What are you doing?'” She laughs harder.

In conversation, Welch is much more lighthearted than she is in song. The lyrics of her latest Florence and the Machine album — the ornate and intimate pop opus, High as Hope — read like diary entries. In its 10 songs, she tackles eating disorders, meeting people on ecstasy and finding the middle ground between happiness and depression. But off the mic, the auburn-haired 32-year-old, speaks in a lilting soprano, laughs plenty and has an endearing self-effacing quality that you might not expect from a multiplatinum artist. She’s four years sober, she’s managing her social anxiety as best she can and she considers herself strong even when her lyrics suggest otherwise.

She even thinks she could make a go of cabin life. “I could if I had my phone,” she says, laughing. “I think the whole point is that you don’t have a phone, but weirdly I did have an ex-boyfriend who was like, ‘I think that you would be pretty good at survival. You have a weird dogged determination.’ I’m afraid of lots of things. When it comes to actually being really scared, I have a strange bravery.”

What are your biggest fears? I’m afraid of flying. There have been so many kind stewardesses who have held my hand during turbulence, and I had to write them letters just to say, “Thank you.” And when I get back from tour, I can be a bit agoraphobic. When you allow yourself to be that vulnerable in front of so many people, it then becomes this weird thing of just walking out on the street and one person looking at you becomes this extreme thing you can’t handle. I can get a little bit edgy about going out, which makes me a super fun person to date [ laughs ].

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Did you feel that way before you were famous? That oversensitivity definitely was there. I don’t think it was helpful for a super-sensitive person to become famous. I’m always saying to my manager, “I just don’t want to get any more famous than this. OK?” She’s like, “It’s not gonna happen now if it hasn’t happened already.”

How do you handle obsessive fans? I’ve had kids come to my house, but they’re always really sweet and wearing a Florence shirt and a fringy jacket. At first, I’m like, “Ugh, dude. Maybe this isn’t OK.” They want to talk about art history or whatever. I try to explain, “I love you and I appreciate the passion, but I need to work, and I need a safe space to just sit and write and think. I don’t think you’re gonna murder me, so do you want to have this book?” And I end up giving them a book.

How would you describe your mood when you’re working? A lot of it happens on the move, ’cause I travel so much. It’s like looking out a window and thinking about when I’m really sad or feel bereft about something. I get a strange wave of existential angst. It’s so big I have to call my mom and dad and be like, “What does it all mean? I don’t understand .” And they’re actually so used to be now they’re like, “You need to lighten up.” Also, my dad is like, “That is being human. You don’t understand. This is what it is.” I was like, “Ugh, you’re not being helpful.”

You recently got a tattoo that says, “Always Lonely.” Why would you want that on your body? Oh, ’cause I was super sad. Mixing High as Hope was a really lonely time in my life. I was in New York, and I had just gone through a breakup — one of those sad ones where it’s not very dramatic: You’re trying to do what’s best for both of you. You’re just getting on with stuff, which is oddly lonely in itself. I was thinking about the end of this relationship and “Why do I feel like the album comes first before everything? Are you perpetuating your own loneliness?” The closest relationship I’ve had for my whole life is with my music. Also, I guess, I thought it was funny.

On High as Hope’s “Hunger,” you sing, “At 17, I started to starve myself.” Did your family support you writing about your eating disorder? My sister was like, “What are you doing? Are you OK? You haven’t spoken about this even with Mom, and you’ve put it in a pop song? What’s wrong with you?” I was like, “Yeah, I don’t know what I’m doing.” But it opened up a lot of stuff in my family that was good in the end. I did sit down and talk it through with my mom. But it’s funny: With English people, you have the talk and then everyone just carries on, just like, “OK, that’s dealt with. We put that in the drawer and we go on.”

At what age do you feel you were done with the eating disorder? It’s not an overnight thing. It’s funny ’cause it’s one of the most insidious things you can have. I have a healthy relationship with my body now more than I ever did before, but it took me a long time. And it stays with you in really weird ways. So it’s hard to say, “When did you overcome it?” Because you would have overcome some of the behavior a long time ago but the head stuff, it takes a while. It comes back in really strange ways, which I was looking at in this record. It’s very hard to accept love. If you’ve been denying yourself nourishment in some way, you also have a tendency to deny yourself emotional nourishment.

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You’re sober now. When is the last time you had a drink? February the 2nd, four years ago. Being an extreme drinker was a huge part of my identity. Music and alcohol are sort of my first two loves. When I stopped, there was this sense that I was letting some ghost of rock history down that I just couldn’t cope anymore. It was monumental. It wasn’t like, “I want to be healthy and I need a change of pace.” It was like, “I’m going to die. I need to stop.”

Did a doctor tell you that? Lots of people told me I needed to stop [ laughs ]. One time, I told a friend I went to this spa, this retreat, and this lady in a white coat told me I should stop drinking. And she was like, “Was that a doctor?” I was like, “I thought it was a spa.” [ Laughs ]. But with quitting, I could have maybe carried on physically, but psychologically, drinking and drugs made me really depressed. I got so tired of how repetitive the hangovers felt. Once you’ve gone into the zone where it’s just tiring and you’re not having fun anymore, it was beyond me.

So it was a realization. Kind of a realization but also sheer exhaustion. I’d been on tour since [2009’s] Lungs , straight through to [2011’s] Ceremonials . I finally took a year off to relax and it was not relaxing because I didn’t have any reason to stop drinking. It was the most un-relaxing year of all time. Also, I was in a deep, romantic obsession with somebody who was really sane who wanted nothing to do with me. I had always been with people who were just up for my madness, and then someone was like, “I’m not up for this.” I’m like, “Why?! Why?!” Like drunk and yelling, and they’re like, “This . Because of this!” That experience was everything that went into [2015’s] How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful . It was like Dante’s Inferno and Purgatory . It was really bad.

What’s your biggest indulgence now? Vintage clothes, books and I drink so much coffee.

Are you good at getting rid of old books? Yeah. Do you do the thing where you go to people’s houses and go straight to their bookshelves and secretly, silently judge them on their book choices? I have such a fear of somebody doing that to me, so I keep mine really well curated.

You have a song on your new album called “Patricia,” about Patti Smith , and you call her your “North Star.” Why is that? When I was making High as Hope , I was thinking about how to live creatively without chaos. Her writing was like a blueprint. She seems to bring such reverence to the act of living that I find so inspiring. I could just read her write about her morning coffee for pages.

I bumped into her at Omen in New York. I’m so obsessed with her; I already know that she loves that restaurant, so that’s why I go there. I saw her and was like, “Oh, my God. Now I’m literally stalking this woman. I had this sense of shame, like, “It’s too real.” But the song had just come out, and she’d sent me a really nice message. She was so kind and sweet. She has this luminous beauty. She’s like an angel, and she took my hand and I just felt so shy. She was like, “I feel like I know you already.” I felt like the kid who came to my house one time. I was like, “Oh, this is super real now. This is real.” It was magical.

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Florence Welch: ‘Who am I kidding? I’m a showboat!’

As the first Florence + the Machine album in four years is released, Florence Welch talks about the irresistible ‘monster of performance’, the conflict between career and motherhood, and sounding like ‘Nick Cave at the club’

T he other night, in an unusually high spring wind, Florence Welch’s electronic doorbell malfunctioned, repeatedly ringing through the small hours as though pressed by the finger of some ghostly hand. Sleep has always been a sensitive issue (her manager used to have to wake her very carefully on tour), so she went out and ripped the entire unit off the wall. As a child – in fact, not only as a child, but until she was 26 years old, had two No 1 albums and had performed with the Rolling Stones – Welch slept on a mattress on the floor of her mother’s living room, with books stacked around her head and three of her late grandmother’s paintings forming a makeshift headboard, which would regularly fall on her.

Her first bedroom had been decoupaged right up to the ceiling – an attempt to externalise the contents of her head: “I would have been 10. Some girls at school were being mean to me and I just remember sitting at home thinking” – she affects a melodramatic voice – “‘If they would just see this room, they would understand and they would love me!’”

Dance Fever is Welch’s first album in four years. Like Ed Sheeran or Adele, she is a survivor of that tense period at the end of the 00s when the industry decided that no one was buying recorded music any more. Her rise was steep and surprising: at 23, her debut album, Lungs , launched her on an 18-leg world tour that culminated in support slots for U2. Big gigs, and a big voice, made her a household name but her artistic paraphernalia has always been part of the package: there was a book club with fans (it’s still running) and a couple of years back, a volume of Welch’s poetry .

Today, she sits in a small room in the garden of an art gallery in Camberwell, near where she grew up and attended art college for a while. Four or five large rings chime on her expressive hands: her hair is whirled into a high ponytail which she occasionally releases, with a flick of her fingers, to punctuate a joke or a moment of drama, before piling it back up again.

Welch’s parents divorced when she was 13, and when her mother, an esteemed history professor, married their next-door neighbour, she acquired two new siblings overnight and became even more protective of her own space (her little brother slept in the linen closet). But her stepfather’s late wife had left behind an Arts and Crafts chandelier and a huge gothic fireplace, both of which fed into an aesthetic that has never left her – 13 years after her debut album she still puts one in mind of John Singer Sargent’s Ellen Terry , or the Lady of Shalott in a vintage Laura Ashley dress.

The Florence machine: career highlights

Florence Leontine Mary Welch is born in Camberwell, south London, on 28 August to advertising executive Nick Russell Welch and Evelyn Welch, professor of Renaissance studies.

When Welch is 13, her parents divorce; her mother later marries immunologist and lung specialist Peter Openshaw. Welch is educated at Thomas’s prep school, Battersea, and Alleyn’s school, south-east London; she later starts studying at Camberwell College of Arts before dropping out.

Welch begins performing with musician Isabella Summers under the name Florence Robot/Isa Machine. The following year she records with the band Ashok, releasing the album  Plans .

After being promoted as part of BBC Introducing, Florence + the Machine’s debut studio album,  Lungs , tops the UK albums chart after charting for 28 consecutive weeks; it later wins a Brit award for best British album.

The band’s second album,  Ceremonials , debuts at No 1 in the UK and No 6 on the US Billboard 200.

Welch sings on Calvin Harris's single Sweet Nothing, which is nominated for a Grammy. She performs Gimme Shelter with the Rolling Stones at the O2 in London.

Florence + the Machine's third album,  How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful , is released. They headline Glastonbury festival after the Foo Fighters pull out.

Welch appears in the Terrence Malick film  Song to Song .

The band’s fourth album,  High As Hope , is released. Welch releases the book  Useless Magic , a collection of lyrics, poems and illustrations.

The fifth Florence + the Machine album,  Dance Fever , is released. Kathryn Bromwich

In person, Welch does not have the imperious air she has on stage: she seems to arrive filterless, fizzing with a nervy but rather humorous energy. In the video for her latest song, Free , she plays herself, while Bill Nighy has a cameo as her “anxiety”. Interviews are hard work, she says – she likes to schedule a day off afterwards to lie down. Harder than being on stage for two hours? “I think so, yes, because that’s scripted and you’re in control.”

Being on stage was, of course, a moot point until recently – this summer, she will tour for the first time in three years. Everyone knows that musicians had a terrible time in the pandemic but Welch, with her unusual directness, is a useful person to ask about it. What did she really think her prospects were?

“My mum said: ‘You’ll find something else to do,’” she says. “It felt incredibly final. I don’t know if that’s because musicians and performers lean towards dramatic thinking, but the reality was no one could say, before there was a vaccine, if gigs would ever come back. Maybe in five years, seven years. I often think about everyone meandering back into the world now with so much unprocessed PTSD.”

Welch told her mother: “I don’t really want to exist in a world where I can’t do the thing I feel like I was put on this Earth to do. The thing that gives me meaning, that makes the jumble in my head – which is a sort of screaming nightmare a lot of the time – make sense.” In print, this sounds a bit overblown but in person, she sounds almost apologetic.

Lately, she has been musing on what she calls the “monster of performance” – how it comes round every two years and swallows you up for a world tour. When it slunk off during the pandemic she felt “bereft”. In March 2020, she was in New York, writing songs for Dance Fever , with Jack Antonoff, known for his work with Lorde and Lana Del Rey. Back in south London, in lockdown, she moved her boyfriend in to her flat and wrote “sad little poems” instead, which turned into songs such as My Love (“my arms emptied, the skies emptied, the buildings emptied”). Unable to dance on stage, she danced in her kitchen (“I’m actually really good at wombling around in socks”). Yet Dance Fever , which was eventually produced in the UK with Dave Bayley from indie band Glass Animals, is no disco record. It may be high in BPM, but much of what she’s put on top is dark, strident, mournful: she has called it “Nick Cave at the club”.

She became fascinated with a historical phenomenon called choreomania, first recorded in the Holy Roman Empire in 1374, in which large groups of men, women and children would dance themselves into a manic state, to the point of exhaustion and occasionally death. There is a similar scene in Ari Aster’s Midsomm ar , one of the horror movies she watched during lockdown. In the video for Heaven Is Here , the first track released from Dance Fever , directed by the film-maker Autumn de Wilde, Welch and seven dancers in Victorian dresses throw their bodies around like bags of bones. The video was filmed in Kyiv a few weeks before the outbreak of war. Two of the dancers, Nastia and Maryne, are now refugees – when we spoke last month, Welch had tracked Nastia to Amsterdam but was still trying to locate Maryne.

“We had made it through the pandemic, everyone was so happy to be working again, and the general sense from the team was of freedom, of celebration,” she recalls. “And for them to not know what was around the corner – that it wouldn’t in any way bring people together, that we would emerge to be engulfed in another horror. I can’t even… I said to my Ukrainian friend: ‘I feel so helpless.’ She said: ‘It’s not helpless, we’re still holding on. I’ve never been sadder and I’ve never been prouder.’”

F lorence Welch has clocked up an impressive career, one that spans the key moments in pop’s digital age. In 2009, she was described as the boho art-school alternative to pop urchins Kate Nash and Lily Allen, which really takes you back. Her apparent class privilege initially provoked some sneering reviews, and her jump to fame was questioned when she won the Brits critics’ choice award after just two singles. When she heard she’d won, she had a panic attack in a branch of Caffè Nero, as she later told the journalist Pete Paphides: “Why? Because I had done nothing and I was getting an award for it.” Welch emerged in an era, at the start of the digital landgrab, when new artists would arrive to great fanfare before they knew how to sing live, or even had an album to promote (often, by the time the album emerged, no one was interested any more).

Of her sudden rise to fame she says: “Although I’m grateful for it, it would have been good to have been allowed a bit more time to find my feet. The whole of Ceremonials [her second record] is just an album about someone being under so much pressure that they want to be at the bottom of the ocean.”

But as the music industry debates moved on, so apparently did the meaning of Welch. In 2011, during anxieties over controversial Rihanna videos, she was celebrated for her cleavage-covering frocks. “Parents who worry that their teenage daughters have few pop role models other than the intemperately sexual Rihannas of the world should be pleased that Florence Welch is back,” said one reviewer .

And here she is, still on the scene. From the start, she savvily put her focus on huge gigs. She supported U2 on her first tour. But when I ask her what she learned from joining the Rolling Stones on stage at the O2 in November 2012, she goes unexpectedly pink.

“I thought I knew the words to Gimme Shelter,” she says, “but I realised when I got to rehearsal that I didn’t know the specific words… I thought: ‘It’s the Rolling Stones, it’s a rock band, they’ll probably just wing it.’ Then I realised Mick Jagger doesn’t wing anything.”

Jagger clocked the fact that Welch didn’t know the lyrics to the song he’d invited her to perform for an audience of 20,000. “It’s ‘rape, murder’,” he corrected, when she gave a formless, emotive wail. “I remember running off to sit in the loos with the words after that. That’s what Mick Jagger taught me: fucking learn your lines.”

She still feels traces of the old anxieties she felt at the start of her career. “Is it the loss of anonymity?” she wonders. “The loss of who you might have been had you not become famous? The loss of a private person, someone who will walk through the street and be unknown?”

Would she welcome that anonymity back?

“Who am I kidding? I’m a fucking showboat.”

“F or someone who drank so much,” she observes, “it was so clear from the start I wasn’t suited to it. Even without the drinking and hangovers, I’m an incredibly anxious person with a lot of ups and downs. How did I manage?” She has been sober since 2014; at her lowest points, she’d fail to show up to studio sessions, or when she did, get through the days with monumental hangovers, “pulling songs out of me. I’d be so hungover that making work was kind of agony.”

She drank to perform – and when tours ended, she whirled from one experience to another, waking up in strange places, losing days in one endless, slightly terrifying afterparty.

In 2018, in the lyrics to her song Hunger , Welch wrote about an eating disorder in her teenage years (“At 17 I started to starve myself”). She filled her life with anxiety about food, relationship chaos and alcohol – “and now I’m 35,” she says, “things are relatively stable, and all the things that I would be spinning to distract me from myself have stopped, because I’ve identified what they are. They don’t work any more; I’m too tired to have relationship chaos, I can’t do it! I don’t have time for people who don’t text me back. It doesn’t give me the same drug that it did.”

Instead, she says, “being in the flow of making a song is one of my absolute favourite places to be. And that really has got so much better since I got sober: it’s such a lie that chaos is creativity.”

Without the old crutches of bad men and booze, Welch has had to face older psychological complexes. “All the things that I ran from, I now bring as close to me as I can,” she sings on her new song Prayer Factory. So, what are those things she ran from? “It’s so boring,” she says, with a collapse of the ponytail: “I want to be the one person who says: ‘It’s not my childhood! It’s not my mum!’”

In the previous chapters of Welch’s story, Evelyn Welch, soon to become the first female vice-chancellor of Bristol University, has featured as a gently disapproving voice, once saying “what a waste of a brain” when her daughter told her she could remember every outfit she’d ever worn, and approaching Florence’s career with an “I don’t want to talk about your music, I care about you” attitude.

I ask Welch whether she feels any creative affinity with the Renaissance scholar, who has specialisms in the early modern fashion economy, and gives a dazzling lecture. “No, she lives in her head,” she replies. “She lives almost entirely in her head, in academia. She was always writing books when we were younger, and she’s very happy on her own with her books and her work. My sister wanted warmth, a consistent or traditional mothering, but I admired someone who could live in her head, because I did the same. Which is good and bad, because I’m very good at being loved from a distance – I think that says so much about going on and being famous…”

Although these days she describes her mother as “quite sweetly proud of her”, it is refreshing to hear a pop star analyse their need for the adulation of crowds, and admit they have no problem whatsoever with being loved at a remove. Being loved close up, by contrast, “kind of feels like being crushed”, Welch says in Girls Against God. She is now in a stable relationship with an unnamed and very “maternal” man, and that presents a whole new challenge. “I keep thinking that what I really want is to be in a room, on my own, with my dreams and fantasies and my weird house-slash-art-installation. But then the clock ticks forward a couple of hours, and you realise that you’re alone, and this thing that you think has worked for you for so long is not sustaining you any more.”

When she took off for New York before the pandemic, she was 33: the intention, she says, was to have “one last year to be completely insane, one last year under the wire, before getting serious”.

There seems to be, at the heart of Dance Fever , a desire to talk about motherhood in a new way: “To be a performer,” she writes in an accompanying press statement, “but also to want a family, might not be as simple for me as it is for my male counterparts.” Welch wants to look more deeply at the split inside female performers when faced with the assumption that should they want to have children, they’ll disappear for five years, or remake their career in a new image entirely. What if you want children but don’t want to stop? Are you allowed to say that?

“I think we’re still at the very beginning of women not dropping out,” she says. “We’re at the start of a conversation. There’s a lot more female artists out there. There’s more space for us. It felt like you were on your own at the beginning.”

She is pretty upfront about it all and she’s doing the maths. She’s 35. The album and world-tour cycle takes two years, and she’s just got one coming up. The gap between 35 and 40 suddenly seems rather small. Touring is a bodily commitment, and so is pregnancy. The desire for a child creeps on, she jokes, “like body horror”, spreading her long fingers up from her waist.

She raises an eyebrow at her parents’ generation who say they just got on with it, and let their babies sleep in baskets under the table in the pub. “People go into it saying: ‘I want to have a baby but I don’t want my life to change.’ It is completely upended. I don’t think I’m under any illusions about what it entails.”

She told her boyfriend she wished he was the one with the womb. She would make “a great, unreconstructed 1950s father”, she says: “I love providing, I love being out there and being off and coming back and being fun and being cuddled.” While making music is a “fever”, the desire for motherhood is a “haunting” – an encroaching feeling of wanting something different, of the old ways not working any more.

“The irony is, it’s all converged at this time where I felt like I really knew what I was doing, finally,” she says. “I’ve figured out how to be responsible for myself and my work and show up for it. I’m finally able to be in control of it in ways that I never have before, but then there’s this creeping sense of being irresponsible about something else, for fuck’s sake…”

The desire to settle down to some domestic life – this new, “creeping body horror” – still feels illogical. If she doesn’t do it, if she “makes that sacrifice”, then she needs to be the best, she tells me. But she wants it, and that’s the problem.

O ne of the things you often hear about Welch, and it’s generally from middle-aged men, is “my 12-year-old daughter likes her”. That first wave of 12-year-olds are getting on for 25 now, and Welch has not mastered TikTok – unlike Madonna – so whether she amasses a new generation of child fans remains to be seen. Meanwhile, there are other changes in her crowd. Around 2015, she started to experiment with suits on stage – “through osmosis, watching male performers, it was the physicality that I took on board” – and noticed that once she did so, she started getting headline slots, including 2015’s Glastonbury festival. “I thought: ‘Did I get through the door by evoking something familiar?’ It wasn’t intentional, but it was interesting that it changed when I became this masculine figure.”

Welch has never shied away from the God delusions of rock and pop stars, and Dance Fever is full of them. She positions herself as next in line to the Micks and Iggys of the world: “You said that rock’n’roll is dead but is that just because it has not been resurrected in your image? Like if Jesus came back but in a beautiful dress.” Does she consider herself a rock star?

“Pop star and rock star, I don’t really know what they mean now,” she says. “Honestly, some of the people who would be considered ‘pop’ stars are the most rock’n’roll people I know.”

“Like Rosalía and Charli XCX, and Lizzo – they’re embodying this spirit of rock’n’roll. They’re doing exactly what they want, and the joyful confidence of it, and the attitude…”

She was always ashamed, she says, of her own “genrelessness”. “I felt like if I had a genre and I could stick to it, that’s when they’d take me seriously.” But men are “getting better at it” she says – meaning, they’re getting better at liking Florence + the Machine. “More men seem to take it seriously than they did before. I don’t know if it’s just longevity. Because I’ve stuck around, things seem to be changing for me. There’s been different phases but I think generally, who I am and what I like hasn’t really changed. Occasionally I’ve flirted with minimalism but it never really worked! People are finally thinking: ‘Oh, this is real! This is just the way she is.’” Not long after Florence + the Machine first emerged, there was another debate in the music industry, fuelled by the internet, about how real or fake you were as an artist – as people’s previous musical incarnations, before they hit on the aesthetic that sold them, were found to be on display on YouTube, in open-mic clips, for ever more. But there is no alternative Welch hidden away, and what you see before you, in the vintage Laura Ashley dress, has its roots far back, in a gothic fireplace, decoupaged walls and a grandmother’s paintings falling on her head. She still decorates her hotel rooms with shawls and candles when she goes on tour.

A while back, she expanded on the events that fed into her formative years, after her parents’ divorce, revealing that her grandmother killed herself when she was 14. Today she tells me: “She jumped from her apartment in New York. She sat on the window ledge for a while, I think. She was manic depressive, she’d read all night and sleep during the day, and then the whole cycle would begin again.”

Welch has considered the shadows passed from grandmother to mother and daughter: “I think her pain echoed down to my mother and then to me. My mother has put an absolute lid on it, in the most impressive way. I didn’t inherit the lid, you know; I’m leaky and everything pours out.”

She has started to become more distrustful of the introversion she has always fetishised. “The comfort of being alone with just my books and my things and just me in my head – it’s not working any more. People are good. Letting people in is good.”

Dance Fever by Florence + the Machine is out now on Polydor. A UK and Ireland tour starts in Cardiff on 16 November.

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Florence Welch hints at surprise Eras Tour appearance

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Florence Welch could appear to perform 'Florida!!!' with Taylor Swift when she plays Wembley Stadium.

She told British Vogue: “I almost didn’t think of the scale of it. There’s the sort of bigness of [Taylor Swift the phenomenon], and then there’s the Taylor I spend time with in the studio, who is just the sweetest and most down to earth.”

Florence continued: “We had such a fun time. And then when it came out I was like, ‘Oh, s***!'”

Quizzed on whether she could appear at one of the eight concerts Taylor is playing at Wembley Stadium this June and August, she played coy: “If I was gonna do it, it would be a surprise.”

Meanwhile, Florence and the Machine are set to play a one-off orchestral gig at London's Royal Albert Hall, performing their acclaimed debut album, 'Lungs', in full.

Florence teased the special concert and is "currently on the hunt for old medieval English instruments."

‘Florence + The Machine – Symphony Of Lungs’ - which will be part of the BBC Proms - will take place at the historic venue on September 11.

She told the publication: “When [the invitation] came in, they were like, ‘We know you’re off, but would you…?’ and I was like, ‘Yes!’"

The 37-year-old singer added: “I’m so honoured.

“The background to life in my house is classical music, and especially the more obscure things. So it’s a really exciting thing to be asked to do – the Proms is just so special.”

The 'Dog Days Are Over' hitmakers released 'Lungs' on July 3, 2009, and it went on to nab the BRIT Award for British Album of the Year.

A 10th anniversary edition was released in 2019, with two unheard tracks, 'Donkey Kosh' and 'My Best Dress', which were recorded during the original recording sessions for the LP.

A special box set also included B sides, rarities, and more.

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Florence Welch Channeled ‘Folk Horror Fairy-Tale’ Style on Tour

By Christian Allaire

Singer Florence Welch has been traveling the globe since April this year for her English indie-rock band Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever tour. The album (the band’s fifth release, released in May) explores Welch’s relationship with movement—an interesting concept given it was recorded during the height of the pandemic, when live performances came to a halt. Her favorite part of touring, then, has been being able to reconnect with audiences and dance again. “I’ve just loved it,” Welch tells Vogue . “For an album so much about performance—the pull of it, the loss of it—to get to finally perform it live is truly a profound experience.”

The singer wanted the feel of this tour to be entirely different from her past ones, so she began with an eerily beautiful set. “The album itself is a kind of folk horror fairytale, so we wanted to create something that almost felt like a haunted house or a sunken ship,” says Welch. “Faded and rotting grandeur was very important. We pulled a lot of references from Great Expectations ’s Satis House, the mansion where Miss Havisham lived.” The end result was a striking stage display with haunting chandeliers. “[Stage designer] Es Devlin and I looked at a lot of holy reliquaries, and imagined what they would look like if they had been at the bottom of the sea for a hundred years collecting barnacles. Which is where this ‘sunken cathedral’ reference came from.”

To riff off the vibe of the set, Welch’s tour wardrobe had a similar dark, romantic feel. She wanted her fashion on stage to reflect her songs and lyrics, albeit in a more theatrical way. “The iconic costumes for Lucy Westenra from Bram Stoker’s Dracula were a big influence,” says Welch of her looks. “Again, fairy tales and horror have been a big part of the references. Something beautiful but bedraggled. Trailing lace, embellishment, crowns, vampiric capes. This is a very theatrical album, so it gave us a lot of room to play.”

To bring that vision to life, Welch enlisted Gucci’s Alessandro Michele to conjure up the designs. It was a natural fit, given Welch has served as a muse to the designer before, and Welch says they share a similar approach to stage wear. “Alle just knows how to dress my body at this point,” says Welch. “The dresses add so much to the performance, while always giving me freedom to move. And Gucci really dove into the fairytale with us.” He created pieces such as lace-trimmed maxi dresses, or ruffled gowns in sheer lilac. “I loved the chokers and the sequined embroidery,” she says. “This is the most detail we have ever had on stage outfits, and I’m so grateful to Gucci for all the time and love they have put into them.”

Outside of this particular album, movement has always been important to Welch, who is known for her twirling on-stage. As such, her performance costumes have to be practical. “I used to perform in suits, as I like invoking masculinity in my performances, but honestly I just can’t move as well in trousers,” says Welch. “As the show started to involve more and more contemporary dance, dresses became the only option for freedom of movement. So, I had to create masculinity through energy rather than clothes.” She adds Michele’s ethereal dresses were perfect for the tour. “You need something that is going to create romance and power,” she says. “And to be flattering no matter how you are throwing yourself around up there.”

As she continues touring through the end of the year, Welch will likely debut a few more new Gucci looks on stage. She says it’s already been her favorite tour to date. “From the stage to the clothes, to the looks that the crowd are showing up in,” says Welch. “Maybe it’s something about the theatricality of this album. But it really feels like the audience feel free to express themselves in their outfits, too. We’ve had people dressed as vampires, demon brides, Midsomer flower cults, and holy relics. No matter how tired I am, I now always look forward to seeing what everyone is wearing.”

Below, more photos from Welch’s Dance Fever tour.

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Florence + The Machine Postpones Tour After Singer Breaks Foot: ‘My Heart Is Aching’

'Dancing on an injury is not a good idea,' Florence Welch said.

By Mitchell Peters

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Florence + the Machine has postponed the remainder of its U.K. tour after lead singer Florence Welch broke her foot.

The charismatic frontwoman for the orchestral rock band took to social media on Saturday (Nov. 19) to share the upsetting news with fans, noting that she had been dancing on her injured foot while performing at London’s O2 Arena on Friday evening.

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Florence + the Machine’s U.K. tour was scheduled to run through Nov. 30 in Dublin, Ireland. The trek will be rescheduled for 2023. At press time, the band had live shows scheduled for next year in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the U.K., according to its website .

“Please hang on to your tickets. We are working our hardest to reschedule these dates for next year and we will let you know as soon as possible,” Welch added in her post. “I’m heartbroken as the Dance Fever tour has been my favourite show we have ever put on. The communion with you. Your beautiful faces shining. I love you so much, and I’m so sorry to anyone who is disappointed.”

Florence + the Machine is touring in support of its latest album, Dance Fever , which topped the U.K. chart , and reached No. 1 on Billboard ‘s Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums charts.

See Welch’s post on Instagram below.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Florence Welch (@florence)

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Florence And The Machine

Florence Welch reveals emergency surgery saved her life as she pledges to play two remaining dates on Dance Fever tour

29 August 2023, 14:27 | Updated: 29 August 2023, 14:39

The Florence + The Machine singer has said the band will close out their tour in Lisbon and Malaga after having to cancel shows this month.

Listen to this article

Florence Welch has addressed the cancellation of the recent Florence + Machine shows and revealed she "had to have emergency surgery".

The King outfit were due to play Zurich's Open Air Festival and Rock En Seine in Paris on 25th and 26th of August respectively, when they band had to cancel at the last minute "on medical advice".

Now, Welch has addressed her fans on her personal Instagram account, revealing their absence was caused by life-saving surgery, but she would be back to finish the tour at In Lisbon, Portugal and Malaga, Spain next month.

"I'm so sorry that I had to cancel the last couple of shows," she began her heartfelt post.

"My feet are fine, I had to have emergency surgery for reasons I don't really feel strong enough to go into yet, but it saved my life."

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Florence Welch (@florence)

She continued: "And I will be back to close out the Dance Fever tour in Lisbon and Malaga. (Maybe not jumping so much but you can do that for me).

"Suffice to say I wish the songs were less accurate in their predictions. But creativity is a way of coping, mythology is a way of making sense. And the dark fairytale of Dance Fever, with all its strange prophecies, will provide me with much needed strength and catharsis right now."

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• Florence Welch discusses Florence + The Machine's Dance Fever album

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Florence + The Machine - Dance Fever Track By Track

This month Welch celebrate her career so far with a Florence + The Machine anthology entitled Under Heaven Over Hell , which includes a collection of 39 songs from their five albums so far, including Dog Days Are Over, Hunger , Spectrum , Ship To Wreck and King.

Stream Under Heaven, Over Hell below:

See Florence + The Machine's remaining dates below:

• 1st September 2023: Meo Kalorama 2023 - Lisboa, Portugal
• 2nd September 2023: Cala Mijas 2023 - Malaga, Espana

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Florence Welch Likely To Join Taylor Swift Tour

by Music-News.com on April 26, 2024

Florence Welch hinted she could pop up at one of Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ shows in London.

Florence is featured on the track ‘Florida!!!’ from Taylor’s latest LP ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ and has admitted she was slightly naive about “the scale” of being part of Taylor’s crazy world.

She told British Vogue: “I almost didn’t think of the scale of it. There’s the sort of bigness of [Taylor Swift the phenomenon], and then there’s the Taylor I spend time with in the studio, who is just the sweetest and most down to earth.”

Florence continued: “We had such a fun time. And then when it came out I was like, ‘Oh, shit!’”

Quizzed on whether she could appear at one of the eight concerts Taylor is playing at Wembley Stadium this June and August, she played coy: “If I was gonna do it, it would be a surprise.”

Meanwhile, Florence and the Machine are set to play a one-off orchestral gig at London’s Royal Albert Hall, performing their acclaimed debut album, ‘Lungs’, in full.

Florence teased the special concert and is “currently on the hunt for old medieval English instruments.”

‘Florence + The Machine – Symphony Of Lungs’ – which will be part of the BBC Proms – will take place at the historic venue on September 11.

She told the publication: “When [the invitation] came in, they were like, ‘We know you’re off, but would you…?’ and I was like, ‘Yes!’”

The 37-year-old singer added: “I’m so honoured.

“The background to life in my house is classical music, and especially the more obscure things. So it’s a really exciting thing to be asked to do – the Proms is just so special.”

Florence released ‘Lungs’ on July 3, 2009, and it went on to nab the BRIT Award for British Album of the Year.

A 10th anniversary edition was released in 2019, with two unheard tracks, ‘Donkey Kosh’ and ‘My Best Dress’, which were recorded during the original recording sessions for the LP.

A special box set also included B sides, rarities, and more.

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Aka one-woman pop-indie-blues-rock singer Florence Welch, a modern-day Kate Bush with the grit of PJ Harvey. Her debut release, the Brit award-winning more...

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Florence Welch Forgot About "the Scale" of Taylor Swift's Reach Until "Florida!!!" Dropped on ‘Tortured Poets Department'

Florence Welch is giving fans a brief glimpse into what recording "Florida!!!" with Taylor Swift for The Tortured Poets Department was like.

The Florence & the Machine frontwoman sat down with British Vogue to discuss what she does in her downtime between tours and recording, as well as her BBC Proms debut this summer. While chatting with the publication, the musician also opened up about working with Swift on her 11th album, which was released April 19.

When asked if she was prepared for the internet discourse that followed Tortured Poets when it was released, Welch admitted she wasn't quite ready.

"I almost didn't think of the scale of it," she told Vogue . "There's the sort of bigness of [Taylor Swift the phenomenon], and then there's the Taylor I spend time with in the studio, who is just the sweetest and most down to earth."

She revealed that Swift approached her with a "concept and a story" for the song, which is Welch's "favorite way to start songwriting," she shared. "We had such a fun time. And then when it came out I was like, ‘Oh, shit!'"

"Florida!!!" is featured on the installment of Tortured Poets (the Grammy-winning artist released an additional 15 songs at 2 a.m. ET following the release of the initial album). In a track-by-track experience of some of the songs featured on the album, Swift broke down her song with Welch.

"I think I was coming up with this idea of what happens when your life doesn't fit or the choices you've made catch up to you and you're surrounded by these harsh consequences and judgment and circumstances did not lead you to where you thought you would be? And you just want to escape from everything you've ever known. Is there a place you could go?" she explained.

She continued, noting that she watches  Dateline  and "people have these crimes that they commit; where do they immediately skip town and go to? They go to Florida. They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in. I think when you go through a heartbreak, there's a part of you that thinks, ‘I want a new name. I want a new life. I don't want anyone to know where I've been or know me at all.' And so that was the jumping off point behind where would you go to reinvent yourself and blend in? Florida!"

Since the singer-songwriter released her newest album, she has broken several records, including the most-streamed artist in one day on Spotify, the most-streamed album in one day on the music platform and the most-streamed album in one week with 1 billion streams (in five days).

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The five-date jaunt begins in Perth on Saturday, March 4 next year.

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Florence + The Machine have shared details for a five-date Australia and New Zealand tour, taking their upcoming Dance Fever album Down Under in the first quarter of 2023.

The run will start in Perth on Saturday March 4, when Florence Welch and co. take to the stage at the RAC Arena. They’ll head to Melbourne next, playing Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday March 8, before jetting up to Sydney for a gig at Qudos Bank Arena the following Monday, March 13.

The last Australian show will go down at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre that Friday, March 17, with a sole NZ gig penciled in for Tuesday March 21 at Auckland’s Spark Arena.

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Joining the group for all five dates will be indie-pop star King Princess, who is currently hard at work on the follow-up to her 2019 debut, Cheap Queen . That record, tentatively titled ‘Hold On Baby’, is due for release later this year, with the recent singles “Little Brother” and “For My Friends” expected to appear on it.

Tickets for all five dates of the tour go on sale at 11am local time this Friday. There will be a presale for members of Frontier Touring’s mailing list, running from 11am on Wednesday, May 4.

Florence + The Machine’s new album, Dance Fever is due out on May 13 via Polydor. Announced back in March – and described by Welch as sounding like their 2009 debut ‘Lungs’ with “more self-knowledge” – the band have shared four singles from it thus far: “King”, “Heaven Is Here”, “My Love” and “Free”.

Last month, Welch opened up about the creation of Dance Fever , saying: “I had this drive underneath me and I was like if these songs want to get out, I have to get them out fast, because I do have other desires. The thing I’ve always been sure of is my work, but I do start to feel this shifting of priorities, this sense of like…maybe I want something different.”

The band debuted tracks from the album live in Newcastle last month, performing a series of new cuts including the unreleased “Girls Against God”. They’ll embark on an arena tour of the UK and Europe later this year, taking in 11 shows between Paris and Dublin this November.

Florence + The Machine’s 2023 Australian and New Zealand tour dates are:

Saturday, March 4 – Perth, RAC Arena Wednesday, March 8 – Melbourne, Rod Laver Arena Monday, March 13 – Sydney, Qudos Bank Arena Friday, March 17 – Brisbane, Entertainment Centre Tuesday, March 21 – Auckland, Spark Arena.

Pre-order Dance Fever .

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Florence Welch Forgot About the 'Bigness' of Taylor Swift's Fame Until 'Florida!!!' Dropped: 'I Was Like, Oh S---!'

The Florence and the Machine frontwoman collaborated with Swift on "Florida!!!" from the superstar's new album, 'The Tortured Poets Department'

Lia Toby/Getty; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty

Who can forget just how famous Taylor Swift is? Her friend and collaborator Florence Welch , apparently.

The Florence and the Machine frontwoman opened up to British Vogue in a new interview about how it felt to release their collaboration, "Florida!!!," on the pop superstar's new album, The Tortured Poets Department — and how working together in the studio made Welch forget about Swift's stature.

"I almost didn’t think of the scale of it," said the "Dog Days Are Over" singer, 37, of the immense level of fanfare that followed the release of TTPD — which has already become Spotify's most-streamed album in a single week with over a billion streams.

"There’s the sort of bigness of [Taylor Swift the phenomenon], and then there’s the Taylor I spend time with in the studio, who is just the sweetest and most down to earth," added Welch.

The British performer also spoke to the outlet about making "Florida!!!," which Swift has described as a song about seeking escapism after heartbreak, partially inspired by Dateline episodes where criminals escape to Florida.

Welch told British Vogue Swift came to her with "a concept and a story" for the track — "my favorite way to start songwriting," she said. It wasn't until "Florida!!!" dropped as part of the 31-song album, however, that she realized the scale of fanfare they'd receive in response.

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty; Gilbert Flores/Billboard via Getty

"We had such a fun time," recalled the Grammy-nominated artist. "And then when it came out I was like, ‘Oh, s---!'"

Since the TTPD release, Swift has shared various clips of rehearsal footage for her next Eras Tour leg, leading many fans to theorize that she may add songs from the new album into the setlist. Does that mean Welch could potentially join her on stage for a live rendition of their collaboration? "If I was gonna do it, it would be a surprise," she teased.

Swift recently explained the meaning behind "Florida!!!," telling iHeartRadio she "was coming up with this idea of like, what happens when your life doesn’t fit, or your choices you’ve made catch up to you."

John Shearer/Getty

The "Fortnight" singer highlighted how at times in life "you’re surrounded by these harsh consequences and judgment, and circumstances did not lead you to where you thought you’d be and you just want to escape from everything you’ve ever known," leading one to question, "is there a place you could go?"

According to Swift, she is "always watching"  Dateline  and thought about how "people have these crimes that they commit, where do they immediately skip town and go to? They go to Florida."

"I think when you go through a heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks: I want a new name, I want a new life, I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all," she continued to the outlet. "So that was the jumping-off point behind where would you go to reinvent yourself and blend in? 'Florida!!!'"

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On ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Taylor Swift Could Use an Editor

Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances. But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.

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By Lindsay Zoladz

If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.

Nearly 20 years into her career, Swift, 34, is more popular and prolific than ever, sating her ravenous fan base and expanding her cultural domination with a near-constant stream of music — five new albums plus four rerecorded ones since 2019 alone. Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers. Her record-breaking Eras Tour is a three-and-a-half-hour marathon featuring 40-plus songs, including the revised 10-minute version of her lost-innocence ballad “All Too Well.” In this imperial era of her long reign, Swift has operated under the guiding principle that more is more.

What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally. “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’” And yet, that’s exactly what she continues to provide, announcing two hours after the release of “Poets” that — surprise! — there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.

Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.

Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in — ahem — football metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”

At times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track , on which Swift’s voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth ?! — is strangely humanizing.

Taylor Swift’s New Album Reviewed

For all its sprawl, though, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s production. ( Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a more muted and organic sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the first album, and the majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have been working together since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has become her most consistent collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to much of “The Tortured Poets Department,” however — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato — that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.

As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer,” one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is one hell of a drug.” If you say so!

That song , though, is one of the album’s best — a thunderous collaboration with the pop sorceress Florence Welch, who blows in like a gust of fresh air and allows Swift to harness a more theatrical and dynamic aesthetic. “Guilty as Sin?,” another lovely entry, is the rare Antonoff production that frames Swift’s voice not in rigid electronics but in a ’90s soft-rock atmosphere. On these tracks in particular, crisp Swiftian images emerge: an imagined lover’s “messy top-lip kiss,” 30-something friends who “all smell like weed or little babies.”

It would not be a Swift album without an overheated and disproportionately scaled revenge song, and there is a doozy here called “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” which bristles with indignation over a grand, booming palette. Given the enormous cultural power that Swift wields, and the fact that she has played dexterously with humor and irony elsewhere in her catalog, it’s surprising she doesn’t deliver this one with a (needed) wink.

Plenty of great artists are driven by feelings of being underestimated, and have had to find new targets for their ire once they become too successful to convincingly claim underdog status. Beyoncé, who has reached a similar moment in her career, has opted to look outward. On her recently released “Cowboy Carter,” she takes aim at the racist traditionalists lingering in the music industry and the idea of genre as a means of confinement or limitation.

Swift’s new project remains fixed on her internal world. The villains of “The Tortured Poets Department” are a few less famous exes and, on the unexpectedly venomous “But Daddy I Love Him,” the “wine moms” and “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best” who cluck their tongues at our narrator’s dating decisions. (Some might speculate that these are actually shots at her own fans.) “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is probably the most satisfyingly vicious breakup song Swift has written since “All Too Well,” but it is predicated on a power imbalance that goes unquestioned. Is a clash between the smallest man and the biggest woman in the world a fair fight?

That’s a knotty question Swift might have been more keen to untangle on “Midnights,” an uneven LP that nonetheless found Swift asking deeper and more challenging questions about gender, power and adult womanhood than she does here. It is to the detriment of “The Tortured Poets Department” that a certain starry-eyed fascination with fairy tales has crept back into Swift’s lyricism. It is almost singularly focused on the salvation of romantic love; I tried to keep a tally of how many songs yearningly reference wedding rings and ran out of fingers. By the end, this perspective makes the album feel a bit hermetic, lacking the depth and taut structure of her best work.

Swift has been promoting this poetry-themed album with hand-typed lyrics, sponsored library installations and even an epilogue written in verse. A palpable love of language and a fascination with the ways words lock together in rhyme certainly courses through Swift’s writing. But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities. It is also an art form in which, quite often and counter to the governing principle of Swift’s current empire, less is more.

Sylvia Plath once called poetry “a tyrannical discipline,” because the poet must “go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of “The Tortured Poets Department” would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.

Taylor Swift “The Tortured Poets Department” (Republic)

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history  by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?  

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex  at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence  to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .