How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful is Florence + The Machine's third
studio album.
HOW BIG
For Florence Welch, the success of her first two Florence + the Machine
albums Lungs (2009 – Album of the year, Brit Awards 2010) and Ceremonials
(2011) meant five years of back-to-back recording, promoting and touring. Lungs
ran straight into the making, promoting and touring of the Grammy- nominated
Ceremonials, an album written while on the road and recorded straight after
coming off tour. The shows were getting bigger, the hair redder, the success
wider and wilder.
HOW BLUE
A pop star at 21, with two international hit albums behind her, Florence
discovered that in giving seven years to her music, some elements of real life
had been left by the wayside. Coming back from tour and moving out of her
mother’s Camberwell home, Florence re-engaged with normal life: going out,
falling in and out of love, and simply trying to learn how to look after herself
outside of the hermetic bubble of life of the road.
“It was sort of a crash landing” Florence freely admits, “I guess
although I’ve always dealt in fantasy and metaphor when I came to writing,
that meant the songs this time were dealing much more in reality. Ceremonials
was so fixated on death and water, and the idea of escape or transcendence
through death, but the new album became about trying to learn how live, and how
to love in the world rather than trying to escape from it. Which is frightening
because I’m not hiding behind anything but it felt like something I had
to do.”
And so the new Florence, and her songs, started to swim into focus.
HOW BEAUTIFUL
The result is How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, a collection of songs,
written and recorded over the course of 2014. Produced by Markus Dravs
(Bjo¨rk, Arcade Fire, Coldplay) with contributions from Paul Epworth, Kid
Harpoon and John Hill, the third album by Florence + The Machine is live-
sounding, tune-rich, unhinged in all the right places and powerful in all the
best ways. In voice and, ultimately, outlook Florence has never sounded
better.
“Markus has done a few Arcade Fire albums,” Florence tells us, “and
he’s done Bjo¨rk’s Homogenic, which is a huge record for me. And I felt
he had that balance of organic and electronic capabilities, managing those two
worlds. And, you know, he’s good with big sounds. And l like big sounds. And
he’s good with trumpets, and I knew I wanted a brass section on this
record,” she adds of a group of musicians who were arranged by Will Gregory of
Goldfrapp.
“And with Markus,” Florence continues, clarifying, “I wanted to make
something that was big but that had a gentleness to it. That had a warmth, that
was rooted. I think that’s why we went back more to the live instruments.
Something that was band-led almost.”
A prime example is the future Florence classic ‘Ship To Wreck’: it opens
the album, and showcases Florence and Dravs’ enthusiasm for reframing her
distinctive voice.
‘Ship To Wreck’ was written with Kid Harpoon, the London-based
songwriter/producer with whom she’d written Ceremonials’ Grammy-nominated
‘Shake It Out’, during a month-long creative furlough in Los Angeles that
also yielded first single ‘What Kind Of Man’: a full-force ear-pinning
anthem of uplifting defiance.
Kid Harpoon is one of a clutch of old collaborator friends who reunited to
help marshal these most personal of songs. Ceremonials producer Paul Epworth
helped create the album closing psychedelic blues explosion Mother, while the
inner-circle of her nearest and dearest was rounded out by her bandmate and
long-time studio right-hand-woman Isa Summers, with whom she wrote the epic
title track.
“How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful was the first song I wrote for this
record, literally as I just came off tour, “ she explains, “and then
I went off and had this incredibly chaotic year, and that all went into the
record. But in the end, the feeling of How Big How Blue is what I came
back to.”
“The trumpets at the end of that song – that’s what love feels like
to me. An endless brass section that goes off into space. And it takes you with
it. You’re so up there. And that’s what music feels like to me. You want it
just to pour out endlessly, and it’s the most amazing feeling.”
It’s alchemy. It’s magic. It’s the return of Florence + the
Machine.