The hardest Florence and the Machine song to sing, according to Florence Welch
“They’re all so hard because I’m an idiot!” Florence Welch laughed about her own music. Whether listening to her albums or seeing the singer live, the heights her voice hits are staggering. She’s the type of performer that leaves jaws dropped open in awe as her voice commands so much power in one moment and then becomes light and ethereal in the next. Her range is wildly impressive, but she’s the first to admit that that maybe wasn’t a smart decision.
But when an artist begins their career, are they ever really thinking about being older and still singing those same songs? Mick Jagger infamously said once, “I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m forty-five,” but here he is today, still singing into his ninth decade. When Kate Bush wrote songs like ‘Wuthering Heights’, hitting incredibly high notes, she certainly wasn’t thinking about being older or how her voice would change over time.
No, they’re just thinking about that one moment and that one song, following their inspiration where it leads and trying to get the vision in their mind down on tape. They’re not pausing to think, “Hmm, will I be able to hit that note on stage in 20 years’ time? 30 years time? 50 years time?” They’re probably never ever daring to dream that a song could endure for that long as a popular track.
Florence Welch definitely wasn’t thinking about that when she was making early Florence and the Machine work. “When you’re 25, and you’re hungover all the time, you never think that your career is going to go on as long or you’re going to be having to try and sing these songs at 35,” she told Vulture about those days making her first albums. But now, at age 38, she’s feeling the impact of what her younger self chose to put on record.
“One of the hardest songs to sing that we’ve actually been doing again is ‘Spectrum.’ Most of the songs on Ceremonials are really hard to sing because that album is just full out from start to finish, but ‘Spectrum’ is in a different register,” she said. As well as being an incredibly hard song for her to sing, it also has the downfall of being one of her most popular as crowds hunger to hear it. For a long time, she would bend to that and play it, but now the song hasn’t had a live outing since 2022 as the notes picked out by her younger self prove too intense today.
But even though those songs are a vocal burden now, Welch will never hate herself or bemoan herself for them. There is something beautiful and special about getting to this point in her career and being able to not only look back at old versions of herself but reunite with them in song, no matter how hard it is to sing.
All those difficult high notes are manifestations of emotional moments in her life, with the singer saying, “You’re not thinking about when you’re going to get to sing that song again; you’re tearing it out of yourself.” So when she does sing them, each soaring high note in a recollection of that past emotional release.
