The song Florence Welch finds hardest to sing
Florence Welch’s ethereal voice is a huge part of the signature, witchy-pop sound of Florence and the Machine. Amidst a sonic mix of dainty strings, pop beats and climactic builds, Welch’s vocals cut through the layers of sound to tackle themes of love and pain.
Her powerful vocals seem to stretch and sprawl effortlessly across orchestral art pop instrumentals, but Welch’s singing doesn’t always come easy to her. In an interview with Vulture, Welch notes how she doesn’t do herself any favours when she’s recording her songs: “They’re all so hard because I’m an idiot! I don’t think about it in the studio, layering a thousand vocals and making a choir.”
But the song she finds hardest to sing is ‘Spectrum’, the fourth single from her 2011 album Ceremonials. She shared: “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.”
The vivid song details a euphoric love that takes Welch from “cold and clear” to illuminating colour. She declares: “We are shining and we will never be afraid again”. The bold, emotionally-charged lyrics are accompanied by equally kaleidoscopic instrumentals, with glorious synths and a gently plucked harp. The track was striking enough to gain Florence and the Machine’s their first number one, topping the UK charts for three weeks.
Over ten years on from its release, Welch explains her newfound struggle with the song’s unrestrained vocals: “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. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me tomorrow.”
She continues, “I was very tortured at that time, so the singing is also very tortured. You’re not thinking about when you’re going to get to sing that song again; you’re tearing it out of yourself.”
Despite her trepidations at 25, Welch’s career is yet to slow down – she released her fifth album, Dance Fever, just last year, which topped the UK chart. A culmination of the band’s work, the record became Florence and the Machine’s most critically celebrated for its genre-blending songwriting.
On the latest record, she shared: “I think I’ve been able, with this record, to bridge a lot of the past records. ‘Spectrum’ and things like that, we can reintroduce them into the set because, on this record, I’ve stopped rejecting any part of myself. I think every album is an opposite reaction to the last record, but with this one, it’s almost an embracing of all the last three.”
Welch included the song in her live set at a run of festivals last summer surrounding the release of Dance Fever, including Mad Cool Festival in Spain and NOS Alive in Portugal. The setlists, like the album, embraced all of Welch’s output so far, even including ‘Never Let Me Go’, a song she once vowed to never play again.
Despite her concerns, Welch’s performance of ‘Spectrum’ at 35 remains just as euphoric and captivating as it was at 25.
Watch Florence Welch perform ‘Spectrum’ live below.
