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Florence Welch on music, maturing & not drinking

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Breaking her foot in mid-song at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio in April was a painful but unexpectedly eye-opening experience for Florence Welch.

“I was, obviously, absolutely devastated,” said the English singer-songwriter.

“But, in a weird way, the gigs we did afterwards were some of my favorites. Because… there couldn’t be any big show; I had to sit and sing. I couldn’t perform.”

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Happily, she has recovered from her on-stage Coachella mishap and is sitting no more. Now on tour in support of her fourth and most emotionally revealing album, the chart-topping “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful,” she and her band, The Machine, perform Wednesday at SDSU’s Viejas Arena. (Ticket information appears below.)

Welch, 29, spoke with the Union-Tribune by phone from England about her proudly offbeat, baroque style of pop, getting older, quitting drinking and no longer hiding behind metaphors and fantasy in her songs. Here is the complete interview.

Question: I’m wondering if you’ve done more interviews over the past few years than you might ever care to recall?

Welch: I’ve done quite a few. It’s funny, because I don’t think musicians express themselves that well in conversation. We just write songs to best describe how we’re feeling. So it’s funny to be talking about songs that you’ve almost spent your whole life creating.

Q: Well, I’d like to try and throw some questions at you that you might not normally be asked. To begin with, you go up to that great nightclub in the sky. Sitting at three tables are three people – Billie Holiday, Etta James and Nina Simone. You can only sit down and talk with one of them. Who would you pick and why?

A: I think I’d like to go sit next to Billie. I’ve always been so fascinated by her and her voice. When I first became interested in music, the emotion and sadness behind her voice was always so captivating. I listened to it so much and was so drawn to it, to her life and that whole era of music, of jazz.

Q: In the pantheon of great live albums, where would you rank “Etta James Rocks the House?”

A: Oh, wow. I’ve never heard it.

Q: It’s the album that features the classic song “Something’s Got a Hold On Me,” which you’ve performed a number of times.

Q: I’ve listened to “Something’s Got a Hold On Me” loads of times. My best friend in school introduced me to Etta’s music, and her parents were always playing Etta’s albums at home. But I’ve never heard that one. I’ll have to check it out. She was such a great singer.

Q: I interviewed Etta in 1990, and I wanted to read you a quote she gave me in that interview: “Henry Fonda said, “It isn’t just how good you are; it’s how long you hang in there.”

A: (Laughing with delight) I love that!

Q: Etta’s quote continued: “So, you hang in there long enough and stay true to yourself. The blues is the truth, and everybody ought to be able to deal with the truth. If they can’t, well, that’s their problem.” How do you respond to that quote? And has it become more important for you to use your music to tell the truth about you and your life, as you do on your new album, “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful?”

A: I think very much so, yeah. And, as I get older, something in you (evolves). That holds especially true with this record. I don’t know what (specific) drive in me came into play with it. I think I tried to write about my life on my previous albums. But, because of fear, I would hide behind metaphors and disappear behind fantasy, which was wonderful to use my imagination. But getting older meant the songs became much more direct and literal. And that was quite important to me, as an artist, to feel that was okay and to kind of own it and own who I was. It was almost like I had to own the bad and the good, equally, to kind of be more vulnerable. It’s like the grandeur of my (last album) was so big. With this album, there was a need to be freer, perhaps, and more visceral.

Q: When you are writing or recording a song, how important is the phenomenon of what some musicians call the “happy surprise,” in which you are aiming for one idea or approach and something unplanned happens, which you couldn’t have anticipated, that is even better than what you had been aiming for?

A: I don’t know (pauses). It’s a strange and convoluted way that I write songs. The song “Some Kind of Man” was definitely a surprise. It started one way, with a weird Vocoder. It was the beginning of a completely different song and I sang whatever ideas came into my head. Then it just changed, and we switched it and this massive guitar riff came in. And what I’m trying to say was that the frustration I was going through at that time in my personal life came out so fast, in one day, in that song.

Q: What about the phenomenon of the unhappy surprise, which might perhaps apply to spontaneous stage choreography at a big outdoor festival?

A: Well, like when you break your foot? (laughs) You know what? I was obviously absolutely devastated. But, in a weird way, the gigs we did afterwards were some of my favorites because I had to just sing and there couldn’t be any big show. It was the beginning of putting the album out, and it gave me a chance to sit (on stage), sing the songs and talk a bit. There has been so much (I did) stripping away things on this album. And this (broken foot) was the ultimate stripping away. I had to sit and sing; I couldn’t perform.

Q: Have any misguided conspiracy theorists brought up the possibility to you that, after you broke your foot at Coachella in April, Dave Grohl decided to go you one better in a macho display of bluster by breaking his entire leg when he fell off the stage at a Foo Fighters’ stage in Sweden?

A: (laughs)

Q: One a more serious note, then there was the cause and effect of Dave and the Foo Fighters having to cancel their headlining performance at this summer’s Glastonbury festival (in England) and his asking you to perform in their place.

A: Well it really was a peak moment, and it was the result of a strange trail of broken bones and broken hearts that kind of led me to the Pyramid Stage at the festival this year. We’ve been playing Glastonbury since we performed in the tiny Tea Tent on a Sunday afternoon, years and years ago. And, gradually, the stages we played on at Glastonbury got a bit bigger and a bit bigger. We were always there, until finally we played the Pyramid Stage this year. It was a huge moment.

Q: Speaking of festivals, former Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick told me that her greatest accomplishment at the Woodstock festival in 1969 was to be on the side of the stage for 11 hours, without taking a pee, because there were no toilet facilities of any kind. Apart from breaking your foot at Coachella and then continuing to perform as if nothing happened, which is pretty remarkable, what has your greatest festival accomplishment been?

A: Oh, wow. The (Aug. 2) lightning storm at Lollapalooza (in Chicago) was really something, but I can’t take credit for that – it was Mother Nature! There was this big storm that was literally right above us as we played, with the bolts almost going in time to the music and the storm coming closer and closer. I feel really connected with something as I perform. And to have a storm come toward you is something I’ll never forget. The lightning was crackling behind (the downtown Chicago) buildings and people were losing it because the energy of the storm (made) everyone crazy.

Q: Sigmund Freud had some famous theories about what water represents. You use water imagery in a very moving and poetic manner on your song “What the Water Gave Me,” For the benefit of someone who hasn’t heard the song or maybe not paid close attention to the lyrics, what exactly did the water give you, and how easy or difficult was it for you to let the water run its course, so to speak?

A: I think it’s often that I feel something so big that it’s hard to describe. And water is a good way to describe something that feels so large and out of your control that you couldn’t put it in words. It’s so big a force, but it’s not malicious; it’s this kind of unknown thing. Because I think I feel things in quite a big way, a lot of times. With “Ceremonials” (her second album, released in 2011), I’d been swept up into touring and this world of parties and gigs, and I felt overwhelmed.

Q: Does getting your heart broken make you a better songwriter?

F: Hmm. I think it makes you – it’s just a rite of passage, isn’t it? You enter into world of everyone else who’s had their heart broken. It just gives you another level of understanding of the human condition. You can be more empathetic. But it’s funny. Although it’s happened so many times to countless people, when it happens to you, it’s like you have to write songs about it. It’s not like you don’t ever want to stop describing it. It’s that the only thing you can do when it happens to you is try to make something of it. It’s so visceral to have your heart broken that you have to find a way to describe it. It’s very humbling. I don’t know if it makes you a better songwriter, but it lets you convey (what you’re feeling).

Q: Does it work both ways? Does breaking someone else’s heart make you a better songwriter?

A: I don’t know (pauses). I don’t know. It’s all just experience. I think life, and really engaging in life, makes you a better songwriter. But sometimes I think being a musician is a perfect way not to engage in life and (lets) you detach and live in a fantasy world. With the songs I wrote for this record, I wasn’t on tour when I wrote them, and I was experiencing life in a much more (direct) way, because I didn’t have any gigs or traveling to do – and it was (expletive) hard! Living on my own for the first time was a real shock to the system. But it did encourage in me a more direct way of songwriting. I learned a lot about myself.

Q: I’m reminded of the story by Kinky Friedman about an 8-year-old kid chatting with Willie Nelson. Willie asks him: “What do you want to do when you grow up?” The kid replies: “I want to be a musician.” And Willie says: “Well, make up your mind. You can’t do both.”

A: That’s it! Sometimes, as a musician, the rate at which you grow is very much in your own hands. Because you have the facilities to stay like a child, forever. As long as you can go (perform a) show, the rest of your life can be total chaos. For me, having time alone and being responsible for myself when I was making this album showed me (what had been) my own self-destructive nature. But, yeah, my life can be singing, dancing and dressing up.

Q: When you made your new album, “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful,” how scary was it for you to remove some of the protective musical and emotional layers, if you will, and strip things down a bit? And – in hindsight – how cathartic was it for you to do so?

A: It was frightening to release it because I felt very close to it. It’s almost like it helped me to make it – and “Do I have to tell people I feel better now?” But something happens in the alchemy of a live performance. When you sing it to an audience and they sing it back, it’s not yours anymore; it’s a shared experience.

Q: Prior to making “How Big,” you said that you had a kind of “nervous breakdown” connected to your “on-off relationship” with drinking. Was there a tipping point for you, and how has your creative process changed as a result?

A: I think the way that I grew up, going to parties and seeing punk bands play… I grew up in very much of an art college, drinking culture, where to perform you’d grab a bottle of vodka and a can of paint, and get on stage and see what happens. I thought the amount you drank would determine how good the gig was, and that’s what I did, for years. It was this free-for-all, chaotic thing. And I don’t regret it, because that’s what it was.

Q: You didn’t use heroin, but a number of musicians who did so in the past took heroin because (jazz sax legend) Charlie Parker took heroin. And the musicians who copied his drug habit didn’t realize Charlie Parker was great despite his heroin use, not because of it. What was it like to go on stage straight?

A: I was angry when I first realized I could sing better when I was not drunk. I was like: “(Expletive), this means I have to be sober on stage.” But what I get now on stage, without drinking, is this clarity and feeling the performance in every way. I haven’t drunk on stage for years now. But, a couple of years ago, I had a few in Amsterdam, got on stage and hated it. It felt so exhausting, because I couldn’t get in that space of connecting with the music or the audience. I was like: “(Expletive), I’m expletive drunk on stage.” And I felt so detached from the audience. So I think I’ve moved a bit beyond that. It was part of my journey; I had to go there. And I don’t do things by halves. It’s a case of: “I’m in it (completely).”

Q: Is there any indirect connection between the title of your album “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful,” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” which was one of the first great self-confessional albums and is still one of the greatest?

A: No, there isn’t, actually. But I was listening to a lot of Neil Young and getting over into that Joni Mitchell, Laurel Canyon feeling around music. But I wasn’t listening to that album (“Blue”) a lot.

Q: How do you think your view of the world has been impacted by having an English father and an American mother?

A: Being an artist, it’s very useful having an American passport. We spent a lot more time as children in Italy (on vacation), rather than America. But when you’re a kid, you always want to be somewhere else. I was angry at my mother because, if she hadn’t married an Englishman, we could have spent all out time in America, where the cereals, toys and movies were all amazing…

Q: Fans hugging and kissing each other, at your prompting, before you sing “Dog Days Are Over” at your concerts has become a recurring phenomenon. Since we live in an era of branding, might the “Florence Welch International Dating App for Sensitive Music-Lovers” be in the offing?

A: (Laughs). That would be amazing! No we haven’t thought about that. I’m not very good at branding. I’m not very good at technology.

Q: What do you call a drummer with a coat and tie?

A: What?

Q: The defendant.

A: (laughs). Ah, the drummer jokes!

Q: Do you have a joke you’d like to share? It doesn’t have to be about a drummer.

A: I do know some. Oh! What piece of cheese do you use to get a bear out of a cave?

Q: I don’t know. What kind do you use?

A: Camembert. “Camembert. Camembert, Camembert out of the cave!”

Florence & The Machine

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Viejas Arena at Aztec Bowl, 5500 Canyon Crest Drive, SDSU

Tickets: $30.50-$66 (plus service charges)

Phone: (800) 745-3000

Online: ticketmaster.com

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