Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen
Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your in-box.
Across five studio albums, Florence and the Machine has explored genres including pop, punk, and soul. Florence Welch, the group’s singer and main songwriter, is by turns introspective and theatrical, poetic and confessional. She sat down with John Seabrook at The New Yorker Festival in 2019 to reflect on her band’s rapid rise to stardom. She also spoke about her turn toward sobriety after years of heavy drinking. “The first year that I stopped, I felt like I’d really lost a big part of who I was and how I understood myself,” she says. “What I understood is that that was rock and roll, and, if you couldn’t go the hardest, you were letting rock and roll down.” But eventually getting sober let her connect more deeply with fans and with the music. “To be conscious and to be present and to really feel what’s going on—even though it’s painful, it feels like much more a truly reborn spirit of rock and roll,” she says. Welch wrote the music and the lyrics for “Gatsby: An American Myth,” which opened in June at the American Repertory Theatre, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This segment originally aired on May 24, 2022.
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.