As the release date—Halloween—for Florence + the Machine’s Everybody Scream approaches, Welch has seen fit to unleash the third single and video from the album (following “Everybody Scream” and “One of the Greats”), “Sympathy Magic.” As the title might suggest, there remains a witchy aura to the overarching motif, one that Florence + the Machine is clearly continuing from their 2022 album, Dance Fever. Honing and extending the visual world established on that record, Welch keeps interweaving her Victorian aesthetic with a witch-“coded” one that’s effortlessly brought to life by her now long-time collaborator Autumn de Wilde. And for the opening of the “Sympathy Magic” video, de Wilde offers an overhead shot of “The Witch Choir” a.k.a. four women consisting of Lea Oroz, Aisling Tara, Jenna Anne Nathan and Chihiro Kawasaki (who also appear in “Everybody Scream”).
Posing in a decidedly “summoning” type of way, there is something about the image of this quartet that conjures (no pun intended) a reminder of one from Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell era. Specifically, the photo of her perched on a rock in “meditation” pose with her two backup dancers from that period, Ashley Rodriguez and Alexandria Kaye, and Father John Misty’s wife, Emma Tillman, who rounds out the “top” of their “pyramid.” Looking as though they took their aesthetic inspiration from The Craft (all “we are the weirdos, mister”), it’s telling that this would end up as the Urban Outfitters “exclusive” cover. For it’s tantamount to “Urban Outfitters witchcraft.” Sold for the “look,” but not really the meaning or legacy of what a witch is.
This is what instantly separates what Florence Welch is doing with her own presentation of “witchiness,” something one can tell she really respects and means when she’s doing it. As opposed to the Lana Del Rey form of “casually incorporating it” into her visuals, a predilection that loosely began in 2017 when she released a promo/trailer, of sorts, for Lust for Life, and stopped around the time she replaced her “witchy woman” aura in favor of a more down-home conservative side for Blue Banisters in 2021.
Welch, instead, has thrown herself deeply into the research and roots of mysticism, ergo occultism. Indeed, a lot of her research was done at London’s Warburg Institute, which Welch points out as having the “biggest occult library in Britain.” She also told Zane Lowe during their requisite Apple Music interview about the album that, while making it, “I looked into themes of witchcraft and mysticism, and everywhere that you looked in terms of birth or stories of birth, you came across stories of witchcraft and folk horror and myths and… You know, obviously some of the first women tried as witches were midwives, some of the first women tried as witches were just ‘cause they owned property… But it was also women living [in a] nontraditional [way].”
For Welch, such themes were especially weighty and apropos. Not only because, throughout her Dance Fever album and tour cycle, she had wrestled with the idea of starting a family (as is evident on a track like “King”), but because, when she finally did decide to have a child—and was actually pregnant with one—“divine intervention,” or whatever you want to call it, seemed to have other plans. Or, as Welch at last unveiled to Lowe after being cryptic for years about her major health scare while on the Dance Fever Tour, she had an ectopic miscarriage while onstage and had to be hospitalized. However, in true Welch fashion, she decided to go through with the final two shows of the tour (in Lisbon, Portugal and Mijas, Spain on September 1st and 2nd, 2023, respectively), which were a few weeks out from the date when her traumatic health scare occurred (on August 13th, 2023 in Newquay, United Kingdom).
So it was that Welch was met with a very real presentation of the life she might have had, summarily ripped away from her as she engaged with the thing she loved the most: performing. And if she did have that child, one has to wonder if the love of performing could have truly been usurped. Accordingly, at the outset of her Zane Lowe interview, Welch delivers a voiceover quote from later on in the Q&A: “I’ve been given this enormous gift, which I wanted my whole life. You know, all I wanted to do is sing. But is that somehow gonna take something else away from me that I would love to have?”
It would seem that this “gift” has done just that, as Welch makes ostensible peace with not joining the “mom circuit.” In point of fact, she paid dearly with her physical health as a result of trying to become “that.” Hence, some of her witchier lines from the record revealed thus far: “The witchcraft, the medicine, the spells and the injections/The harvest, the needle protect me from evil/The magic and the misery, madness and the mystery/Oh, what has it done to me?” Referencing not only her time dealing with the hospital and the doctors after her dangerous miscarriage, it also alludes to the “witchy” remedies she turned to during this time as well, telling Lowe, “I did end up boiling kind of almost cauldrons for myself full of herbs, I needed natural ways to heal… I think it was [also] looking into forms of power, you know.” Which alludes, in another sense, to trying to take her power back. The physical kind that she lost after that felling incident.
Elsewhere in the interview, Welch emphasizes her witchy, getting-back-to-nature ways throughout making Everybody Scream by remarking, “This record I really just got so much healing, I think, from being in nature… I stayed in a little house [in Hudson Valley]. It was very, like, witch at the edge of the woods.” As for the whimsical, occult-friendly sound and lyrics, Welch added, “I wanted to put in lots of natural flora and fauna on this record from, we looked into a lot of folk songs as well because there’s that amazing period of 70s folk where they’re all, like, into the occult. You know, like, Judee Sill, and there’s an amazing book called Electric Eden which is how when, like, folk and mysticism all started crossing over.”
With “Sympathy Magic,” that kind of “crossover” is very much apparent, starting with the initially sparse production from Aaron Dessner, Danny L Harle (who also co-wrote) and Welch herself. To accompany the opening verse, images of a naked Welch overlooking the vista from the rock on which she stands, or dressed in full Victorian attire while looking practically shipwrecked on that rock, are intercut with occultish images of The Witch Choir wildly gesticulating in front of a pile of stones, as though trying to beckon something from their ancient forebears.
Pulling at her dress (while still lying on that rock) in a manner that’s both salacious and frantic, Welch sings the opening verse, “Memory fails me, names and faces blur/There is only after, or before/Am I so different?/Have I changed?/I do not recognize my face/The scar fades [a reference to her hospital visit, no doubt], but pulls inside/Tugging at me all the time/Chewing on a feeling and spitting it out/Crouched in a ball gown/Anxious and ashamed/The vague humiliations of fame.” So it is that Welch continues to establish that a major through-line on Everybody Scream is her continuing reconciliation with what it means to not only be famous, but, yes, “one of the greats.”
And after her experience during that performance on the Dance Fever Tour, plus years of trying to prove her worth through the rigors of performance in general, Welch arrived at the conclusion, “I do not find worthiness in virtue/I no longer try to be good/It didn’t keep me safe/Like you told me that it would/So come on, tear me wide open/A terrible gift [“a blessing and a curse”]/Let the chorus [Greek, song, witch or otherwise] console me/Sympathy magic.” In another scene of empowered glory, Welch appears in her Victorian “underthings” being enveloped by the Witch Chorus, as though they’re giving her an immersive embrace from the Universe itself.
It’s the kind of embrace that feels so fortifying that Welch ends up announcing, “Head high, arms wide/Aching, aching, aching/And alive/And alive/So I don’t have to be worthy/I no longer try to be good.” This pronouncement having taken her years in the music industry to arrive at. All the suffering and the toil and the internalized criticism making her fear she wasn’t “good” or “worthy” enough to have such a foothold in music.
Part of her revelations undoubtedly came from her newfound connection to nature (ergo, “witchery”), and the spirituality contained within it. Aware of the vastness of the world, it appears Mother Nature affects her so profoundly that she feels obliged to start “pussy popping” (the white girl way, if you will) in the grass, eventually pulling a Julie James (Jennifer Love-Hewitt) in I Know What You Did Last Summer kind of line with, “So come on, come on, I can take it/Give me everything you got/What else? What else? What else? What else?”
However, considering that Welch has admitted to her awe over the prescience and “invoking” qualities of her songwriting, she might not want to ask that question.
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