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BEHIND THE VELVET ROPE
David Yontef
3.9 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2024
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Introducing Florence Welch Talks About Life on the Road from The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Follow the show: The New Yorker Radio Hour
Across five studio albums, Florence and the Machine has explored genres from pop to punk and soul. 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. Welch wrote the music and the lyrics for “Gatsby: An American Myth,” which opened in June at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This segment originally aired on May 24, 2022.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. |
| 0:10.1 | This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. |
| 0:12.8 | The Great Gasby was published almost a century ago in 1925. |
| 0:17.8 | Somehow the story of a very shady, wealthy businessmen downfall |
| 0:22.2 | hasn't grown stale. |
| 0:23.4 | It's still widely read and regularly adapted in film and theatrical versions. |
| 0:28.4 | The most recent adaptation is a new stage musical called |
| 0:32.2 | Gatsby, an American myth. That voice belongs to Florence Welch who leads the band Florence and the machine and she wrote music and lyrics to this version of Gatsby. |
| 0:52.0 | Welch started her career at clubs and music and lyrics to this version of Gatsby. |
| 0:53.0 | Welch started her career at clubs in London before fronting the band's debut album in 2009. |
| 0:59.0 | Their third album went to number one in the US. |
| 1:02.6 | Ten years into the band's run, Florence Welch joined us at the New Yorker Festival, |
| 1:06.4 | along with her band, and she sat down for an interview with John Seabrook. Thank you so much for having me. |
| 1:25.0 | Let's jump back to the beginning of your |
| 1:35.0 | talking about a decade here so it's really not a great deal of time but you packed a lot into that |
| 1:36.0 | decade and you kind of hit the ground running. |
| 1:39.0 | I thought we would we would sort of go through your life by talking about a few songs, your professional life. |
| 1:45.0 | We're going to start with dog days are over. I feel like this was a song. |
| 1:55.0 | The horse is coming so you better run. |
| 2:00.0 | I feel like this was a song where you maybe first discovered your sound or at |
| 2:08.0 | least for me it was when I first heard your sound and maybe for a lot of us so I |
| 2:12.4 | wondered if you could talk a little generally |
... |
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