AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Florence Welch, who fronts the band Florence And The Machine, has always felt a kind of transcendent freedom when she's performing, a freedom that she didn't always feel offstage.
FLORENCE WELCH: I've always felt that, you know, I was uncomfortable in my skin as a kid. I was uncomfortable in my physical body as a teenager. And then I would step on stage, and it was always like, I am free from the body. I am free from the chattering in my head. I am free from the kind of expectations of me offstage. Here, I can kind of be anything. It's...
CHANG: Welch, who's back with a new album called "Everybody Scream," has always given so much physically to the stage. Like, she'll run and jump around barefoot. She's broken bones onstage multiple times. But still, she continues to perform even while bleeding. So when I sat down with her recently, I was like, what is it inside you when you're on stage that just takes over and makes you keep going?
WELCH: It's strange. I'm a sort of vulnerable person in lots of ways. Like, I'm really open and sensitive. And yet, there is this, like, part of me that is so tough when it comes to performance, and it is that something takes over my physical body...
CHANG: Yeah.
WELCH: ...That is almost, like, inhuman, you know, and it can do inhuman feats. And I feel like the stage - I'm allowed to let this beast of energy out. And then it just does whatever the f*** it wants.
CHANG: I love that. I mean, I can hear the beast when I'm listening to that song, "Everybody Scream."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EVERYBODY SCREAM")
WELCH: (Singing) Get on the stage, and I call her by her first name. Try to stay away, but I always meet her back at this place. She gives me everything. I feel no pain. I break down and get up and do it all again because it's never enough, and she makes me feel loved. I can come here and scream as loud as I want.
CHANG: Your previous album, "Dance Fever," was partly inspired by an actual 16th century phenomenon where people - women danced themselves to death.
WELCH: Yes.
CHANG: Well, you know, coincidentally, you almost died on this tour in 2023, right? Can you tell us what happened?
WELCH: I know. It's like this. I've always - I have spoken about for a while, like, the kind of strange, prescient nature of songwriting. And, you know, I had been writing songs about motherhood, like "King," and there was especially a line in it that was debating and defying whether motherhood was for me, and there was a line that was like, I never knew my killer would be coming from within.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KING")
WELCH: (Singing) I never knew my killer would be coming from within.
And then I actually went on to have a life-threatening ectopic miscarriage onstage in the last month of the "Dance Fever" tour.
CHANG: And just so people understand, an ectopic pregnancy is when the fertilized egg, like, implants outside the uterus, like in someone's fallopian tube.
WELCH: Yeah, it gets trapped. And I needed emergency surgery because I was bleeding internally, and 48 hours later, I don't know - really know what would have happened to me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PERFUME AND MILK")
WELCH: (Singing) Perfume and milk, the body in bloom. The falling leaves, the fallen fruit.
CHANG: Well, may I ask, have you gotten to a point where you are ready to try to get pregnant again?
WELCH: Well, like, I spoke to someone who specializes in that kind of trauma, and she said, the one bit of advice I would give to you is people try and fix it by trying again really fast, you know? Like, there's a sense that they can fix what happened. And she was like, what I would say from my experience is, you know, only try again when you feel like yourself, when you feel like yourself again. And I think part of putting this record together and doing a tour is because it is the place that I feel the most myself.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PERFUME AND MILK")
WELCH: (Singing) Burrowing down in a house in the woods on the edge.
There is a song called "Perfume And Milk," which was kind of thinking about this. There's a line that's like, healing is slow. It comes and it goes, a glimpse of the sun, then a flurry of snow.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PERFUME AND MILK")
WELCH: (Singing) The first green shoots in a sudden frost. Oh, something's gained when something's lost. The rot and the ruin...
Sometimes, you know, I feel very solid. I felt - I think I felt much more solid until I started talking about it.
(LAUGHTER)
CHANG: Sorry. And I'm making you...
WELCH: No, no, no. It's fine.
CHANG: ...Keep talking about it.
WELCH: No, it's fine. This is, you know, it's like - I think probably other people feel this way, too. I thought like, telling people would be this feeling of, like, oh, now I understand what happened to me. You know what I mean? It would...
CHANG: Right.
WELCH: ...Be like, OK, it all makes sense now. And that didn't really happen. And I was like, OK, I don't think this bit is for me yet. I think this part of it is for anyone out there who also experienced something like this. I can't see them. I'm not with them. But someone out there feels held or feels connected because I'm talking about something that they also experienced.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL")
WELCH: (Singing) Sit in the salt water, call in a vision of my daughter, light a candle.
CHANG: Well, as you were healing, I saw that you posted on Instagram, quote, "creativity is a way of coping. Mythology is a way of making sense." Can you talk more about that? Like, how did mythology help you make sense of what happened? Like, how much did mythology or mysticism play a role in making this new album as you were healing?
WELCH: It really kind of was a way, I think, to make sense of it. I think what happened to me was so kind of clinical and brutal. Like, modern medicine, like, absolutely saved my life. But it kind of - what I needed was the softness of finding other forms of power - of, like, natural herbs, like, other ways of healing. I needed so much nature around me. There was, like, a...
CHANG: Yes.
WELCH: ...Very primal feeling of just needing to, like, be in the Earth. So, I think, when I was looking into the themes of, like, witchcraft and magic and medicine, it was almost like a need to find something like some kind of, like, power within nature.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL")
WELCH: (Singing) You can have it all. You can have it all.
CHANG: When you do return to the stage for the music on this new album, what is it that you look forward to the most? What is the thing you want to tap into when you're performing this music?
WELCH: So I feel like, I can let how big the feelings are out, you know? Like, if I feel deranged, which sometimes I often do, like, and if...
CHANG: Same.
WELCH: ...I feel like I want to scream but I can't, or I want to weep but I can't, or just to move my body, like, violently almost, to...
CHANG: Yeah.
WELCH: ...Get something out of me. Like, that is my favorite thing about songs is they hold so many different things at once, and that's my favorite thing about performance. You know, it is endless.
CHANG: Florence Welch's new album is called "Everybody Scream." Thank you so much for speaking with us.
WELCH: Thanks.
CHANG: It was such a pleasure.
WELCH: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ONE OF THE GREATS")
WELCH: (Singing) I've really done it this time. This one is all mine. I'll be up there with the men and the ten other women in the hundred... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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