The singer Florence Welch called her “North Star”
To call someone a North Star is to call them the ultimate guide. A teacher on a spiritual level and one that guides a person to their true path and towards the light. For Florence Welch, hers is one person, an idol and icon that she sees as existing on a higher plane of creativity, passing down lessons for life, artistry and love.
Throughout her discography, Welch calls out to several muses. On ‘St Jude’, she cries out to the “patron saint of the lost causes” while ‘Cassandra’ and ‘Delilah’ nod towards mythological and biblical figures, borrowing lessons from their plights to colour the meaning behind her own works. Across her albums, she weaves these stories with fact and fiction, creating her own uniquely literary and poetic approach to introspective lyricism. But when it comes to the ultimate guiding light, the figure is real and working.
“Oh Patricia, you’ve always been my North Star,” Welch sings as the opening line to ‘Patricia’, a hymn-like track that lays her admiration and devotion at the feet of one figure: Patti Smith. On her 2018 album High As Hope, the song delves into the ways that Smith has always inspired the artist, not just musically but also in life and love, providing a vital and enduring influence that she holds closer than any other.
“When I was making High as Hope, I was thinking about how to live creatively without chaos. Her writing was like a blueprint,” Welch told Rolling Stone. That’s such a beautifully and aptly articulated way to describe Smith’s written work. In her memoir, Just Kids, while navigating the chaos of New York’s art scene in the 1970s, Smith somehow appears as a kind of grounding rod, as a calm, stoic saint amongst the carnage. Written now as an adult, reflecting on her younger years, her writing in that book, along with her many others, is full of life but treated with a distinctly delicate and thoughtful hand. Anyone who’s ever read some of Smith’s work will attest to that, finding that her prose is utterly hypnotic and unusually comforting for a famed punk figure.
For Welch, it’s Smith’s lust for life and survival that moves her most, even in small and seemingly meaningless moments. She said, “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.” But the more you know about Smith’s life story, the more even something as minor as a morning coffee feels like an act of rebellion and celebration. As she’s been surrounded by so much loss and tragedy, her ability to write about these little moments of enjoyment or the quiet times when she sits with her notepad and watches the world go by in a cafe appears in her writing as grand statements on just how worthwhile life is.
“You remind me that it’s such a wonderful thing to love,” Welch sings in the song as the ultimate lesson that Smith’s art and life has taught her. Throughout the track, the singer waxes devotional about the punk poet, penning the track as some attempt to thank her or bottle her spirit during the making of an emotionally tough album where Welch felt she needed all the guidance she could get.
As if by divine timing, just when the album was finally released, the two met by chance at a restaurant. “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’” Welch remembered of the moment when the admiration became shared.
