Dance Fever

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“When I make record, I make them with the idea that no one else will hear them,” Florence Welch tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “When you get to the realization that this private dialogue is going to be completely public, it’s like I’ve tricked myself again.” On her band’s fifth album <i>Dance Fever</i>, such private dialogues include rejecting real love (“Girls Against God”), dance as the greatest form of release (the anxious synth-folk of “Free”), embracing less healthy coping mechanisms in her past (“Morning Elvis”), and the push-pull between a creative career and the possible desire to start a family. “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king,” Welch declares in baritone on “King,” in which she ponders one of <i>Dance Fever</i>’s most prominent themes: her complicated relationship with her own artistry. “A lot of it is questioning what it gives to me as well, and being like, ‘Why do I need this so much, sometimes at the cost of more sustainable forms of intimacy or more stable relationships?’” she say. “I think this record is questioning, ‘How committed am I to my own loneliness? How committed am I to my sense of a tragic figure?’” Work on the album had begun alongside producer Jack Antonoff in New York in early 2020 before the pandemic forced Welch back to London, where her creativity was stifled for six long month. <i>Dance Fever</i>, then, also covers writer’s block (the cathartic “My Love,” a track intended to help shake off Welch’s blue, and our own) and her despair of what was lost in a locked-down world. Her lyrics occasionally poke fun at the image she has created of herself (“I think there's a humor also in self-knowledge that runs through this record that I've actually found really liberating,” says Welch), but they are often as strikingly vulnerable as on 2018’s <i>High as Hope</i>. And even if the singer admits on “King” that she is “never satisfied,” her band’s fifth album has brought her rare peace. “I feel like I managed to take everything that I learned in the last 15 years and consolidate it into this record, into this art, into the video,” she say. “I felt like, if I had to prove something to myself, somehow I did it on this record.” Read on as Welch talks us through a selection of tracks on <i>Dance Fever</i>. <b>“King”</b> “Sometimes songs just arrive fully formed, and it's always when you think you'll never write a song again. I felt like my creative abilities were finally at the peak of how I understood myself as an artist and what I wanted to do. But if I wanted to have a family, there was this sense that suddenly I was being irresponsible with my time by choosing this thing that I've known my whole life, which is performance, which is making song, which is striving to be the best performer that I can be. Somehow, it would be your fault if you miss the boat. I think that scream at the end of ‘King,’ it's just one of frustration, and confusion as well. I was thinking about Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. I was thinking about how they can commit their body entirely to the stage. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm going to have to make choice.’ It's a statement of confidence, but also of humor that the album ha, of ‘If I'm going to sacrifice these other things in my life, I have to be the best.’ I was like, ‘Why not me? Why can't I be king?’” <b>“Free”</b> “I think out of all the Florence + the Machine song, it's sort of the purest sentiment of why I do it, distilled into why music is so important to me, why I need it, why performance is so important to me. Sometimes you just know a song is working: When we started playing it before it had even come out, just this ripple started in the audience of people catching onto the chorus and starting to move. And it was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Oh, this is a special one. This is really hitting something in people.’ And that's so magical for me. That's when the celebration start.” <b>“Daffodil”</b> “I thought I'd lost my mind, because I remember coming home and being like, ‘Okay, I wrote a song today. It might be the most Florence + the Machine thing I've ever done. We're a year into the pandemic, I think maybe I'm losing it. The chorus is just “daffodil” over and over again.’ I was like, ‘Can you do that? That's a crazy thing to do.’ There were so many moments where I had nearly gave up on this record. There were so many moments where I nearly went, ‘It just feels like the way that the world i, this is just too hard to finish.’” <b>“The Bomb”</b> “There's a lot of nod, I think, to the previous record. All three of them are in this album, which is nice. Because I feel like somehow I'm bridging the gaps between all of them on this record, like all the things I've been interested in. This song is nodding to what I was thinking about, in terms of unavailability in people, in <i>High as Hope</i> in songs like ‘Big God,’ with like the obsession of someone who'll never text you back. Why is the person who creates the most space and gives you nothing the most appealing person? And really that's because if you're a songwriter, they give you the most enormous space for fantasy and you can write anything you want because they don't really exist. Every time I think in my life I've been in a stable place, something or someone will come up and be like, ‘How do you feel about blowing all this up?’ It's also a fear of growing up and a fear of getting older, because if you regenerate yourself constantly through other people by blowing up, changing everything, you never have to face aging or death.” <b>“Morning Elvis”</b> .

via Apple Music

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