Taylor Swift inspires Florence Welch to work harder.
The 39-year-old singer / songwriter joined her close pal Swift, 35, on stage at the Eras tour last year to perform Florida, a song they co-wrote for Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, and Florence admitted she found the experience “pretty f****** cool”.
She told The Guardian newspaper: “We’ve known each other for a while. So she just texted.
“It was amazing. I will say that, yes, I’m someone who wants to hide from the vague humiliations of fame. But I did step out on that stadium stage with her and I was like, this is pretty f****** cool. After this, I’m gonna have to make some changes.”
Florence also spoke about the difference in the music industry between when she released her debut at the age of 22 and now when stars like Ethel Cain and Chappell Roan are celebrated for building careers around a persona.
She explained: “When I was becoming Florence + the Machine, there was a sense that if you are flamboyant, it’s contrivance. Actually expressing your imagination upon yourself and upon your body was inauthentic and attention-seeking, or annoying. It made me shrink myself. I was still big on stage and big in my art, but offstage, I made myself smaller.
“They are allowed to keep their personal boundaries and create this incredible world and character. It’s amazing. But when I was coming up, if you created a world and a character, it was, like, ‘so contrived’. Now, there’s this celebration of people creating imaginative worlds.
“People really need worlds to disappear into. So all these communities build up around artists, and I think people really, really crave it at the moment.”