Florence and the Machine, Live at The New Yorker Festival

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2022

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Across five studio albums, Florence and the Machine has explored genres from pop to punk and soul; the band’s most recent record, “Dance Fever,” just came out. Florence Welch, the group’s singer and main songwriter, is by turns introspective and theatrical, poetic and confessional. She sat down with John Seabrook at The New Yorker Festival in 2019 to reflect on her band’s rapid rise to stardom. She also spoke about her turn toward sobriety after years of heavy drinking. “The first year that I stopped, I felt like I’d really lost a big part of who I was and how I understood myself,” she says. “What I understood is that that was rock and roll, and, if you couldn’t go the hardest, you were letting rock and roll down.” But eventually getting sober let her connect more deeply with fans and with the music. “To be conscious and to be present and to really feel what’s going on—even though it’s painful, it feels like much more a truly reborn spirit of rock and roll,” she says.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.7	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Over five studio albums, the band Florence and the Machine, have explored genres from pop to punk to soul, and their most recent record, Dance Fever, just came out.
0:24.0	I need my golden crown of sorrow, my bloody sword to swing, my empty halls to echo with grand
0:31.8	self mythology, I am no mother, I am no bride, I am no mother I am no bright I am key
0:39.5	I am no mother
0:43.9	I am no bright
0:46.0	Their music can be both
0:47.5	introspective and theatrical
0:49.4	poetic and confessional
0:51.3	At the center of it all
0:53.2	is Florence Welch the singer and main songwriter.
0:57.3	My colleague John Seabrook says this. Heartbreak and loneliness rarely feel as delightful and as
1:02.7	inviting as in a Florence Welch song. Seabrook spoke with Florence Welch at the New Yorker Festival in
1:09.0	2019. She decided to go on a hiatus from performing after years of touring, but she sat down with John
1:15.6	and played an acoustic set with Florence and the Machine.
1:33.1	Thank you so much for having me.
1:44.6	Let's jump back to the beginning, to the beginning of your career, which we're talking about a decade here, so it's really not a great deal of time, but you packed a lot into that decade, and you kind of hit the ground running. I thought we would sort of go through your life by
1:50.5	talking about a few songs, your professional life. We're going to start with dog days are over.
1:55.5	The dog days are over. The dog days are I feel like this was a song where you maybe first discovered your sound,
2:20.3	or at least for me, it was when I first heard your sound, and maybe for a lot of us.
2:25.3	So I wondered if you could talk a little generally about where this song came from
2:29.3	and how it fit into what work you were doing at the time.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.