Florence and the Machine’s Odyssey
I really love the new conceptual work that music artists are doing. Beyonce’s Lemonade, a visual album, premiered with an hour-long short film showing us hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Florence and the Machine has also churned out an artistic film to accompany the dramatic and personal album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, which came out last June. (Except this movie is made public and not held hostage by a profit-driven music service.)
The film, which takes its title from Homer’s classical epic the Odyssey, shows the journey Florence has taken from a “car crash of a relationship” to the point of content and healing, where she felt comfortable enough to share this exceptionally vulnerable recovery with the world. Fragments of the film were periodically released as individual music videos for “Ship to Wreck,” “Queen of Peace,” and other lyrically and emotionally raw songs. Welch says,
“This is the finale of a very personal project that came from a conversation me and Vince had in the Chateau Marmont about a year and a half ago while I was writing How Big How Blue How Beautiful. I was talking to him about the record and the car crash of a relationship break up I was going through. The highs and the lows of love and performance, how out of control I felt, the purgatory of heartbreak, and how I was trying to change and trying to be free. And we decided we would re-tell this story in full.“
Now everything comes together in a cohesive film with the denouement of a stripped down acoustic version of “Third Eye,” wherein Welch proclaims at the very end “I am the same, I’m the same, I’m trying to change.” The meaning here perhaps two-fold–that Florence is the same as whom she’s addressing and also has a hole where her heart lies, or maybe she is the same person she’s always been and is still working to make improvements on who she is for the better, the changes she’s been trying to make throughout this exhaustive odyssey.
The full movie can be watched here.
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