Deep Album Cuts Vol. 273: Florence + The Machine
Dance Fever is one of my favorite albums of 2022 so far. And it's Florence + The Machine's 5th full-length, so she's at the point where there's a good amount music for a playlist, and she's gonna be touring around America for the next few weeks.
Florence + The Machine deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. What The Water Gave Me
2. Howl
3. The Bomb
4. Patricia
5. Long & Lost
6. I'm Not Calling You A Liar
7. Haunted House
8. If Only For A Night
9. Which Witch
10. Choreomania
11. Breaking Down (live)
12. South London Forever
13. Bird Song
14. Prayer Factory
15. Bedroom Hymns
16. When In Disgrace With Fortune And Men's Eyes (Sonnet 29) with Rufus Wainwright
17. Between Two Lungs
18. Morning Elvis (acoustic)
19. Seven Devils
20. I Will Be
21. How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful
Tracks 2, 6 and 17 from Lungs (2009)
Track 13 from the Lungs (Deluxe Edition) (2009)
Tracks 1, 8 and 19 from Ceremonials (2011)
Track 15 from Ceremonials (Deluxe Edition) (2011)
Track 11 from MTV Unplugged (2012)
Tracks 5 and 21 from How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015)
Track 9 from How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (Deluxe) (2015)
Track 16 from Rufus Wainwright's Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets (2016)
Track 20 from Songs From Final Fantasy XV EP (2016)
Tracks 4 and 12 from the High As Hope (2018)
Track 7 from the "Moderation" single (2019)
Tracks 3, 10 and 14 from Dance Fever (2022)
Track 18 from Dance Fever (Deluxe) (2022)
I can be a little snobby about modern British festival indie and adult alternative, and I kind of turned my nose up at Florence + The Machine when "Dog Days Are Over" first came out. But after "Shake It Off" and "Sweet Nothing" I had to at least admit that she was a really impressive singer, and the more my wife played her music around the house, the more I became a fan myself. In 2018 we saw her at The Anthem in D.C. in support of High As Hope and it was a fantastic show, maybe the best concert I've seen in the last 5 years. Some of her most frequent concert staples include "What The Water Gave Me," "Between Two Lungs," "Only If For A Night," How Big's title track, "Howl," and "Patricia. "
I used to just assume that Florence + The Machine was simply Florence Welch's stage name or a catchall band name for whoever she happens to be collaborating with. And that's what it's become at this point, but in the beginning it was a duo of Welch and Isabella "Machine" Summers, who contributed percussion, piano, songwriting, and production to Florence's first three albums. Songs on here that Summers co-wrote and/or co-produced are "Between Two Lungs," "I'm Not Calling You A Liar," "How Big," and "Which Witch," and of course she also helped launch the whole thing onto the charts with "Dog Days Are Over." In recent years, Summers has produced tracks for other artists (Tate McRae, Iggy Azalea, Angel Haze) and composed scores for a whole lot of recent TV shows ("Physical," "The Offer," "Little Fires Everywhere").
Welch has cast a wide net of collaborators, and one that kind of surprised me was that "Long & Lost" was co-written by Ester Dean, who's known for penning a lot of big pop hits by the likes of Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Nicki Minaj. But otherwise she largely travels in that major label alternative world: "Bird Song" was co-written by Dev Hynes, "Patricia" was co-written by Emilie Hayne, "Cassandra" was co-written by Kid Harpoon, and "Choreomania" and "Prayer Factory" were co-written by Jack Antonoff. When an artist doesn't have a whole lot of albums but most of them have deluxe editions with bonus tracks, I like to include some of those, and I was pleasantly surprised that some of Florence's deluxe editions have some absolute killers, "Bedroom Hymns" and "Which Witch" are among my favorite songs on here. "Haunted House" was a b-side from a non-album single a couple years ago that I think really deserves more attention, a great little song.
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