ELLE访问：《FLORENCE WELCH受够了折磨自己》

原文：
FLORENCE WELCH IS DONE TORTURING HERSELF
After a year of soul-searching, Florence Welch has spun a tsunami of emotional turmoil into the most spirited—and honest—album of her career.Florence Welch—she of the unmistakable flame-red hair and hurricane-force voice who is, together with a rotating cast of backing musicians, also known as Florence + the Machine—is a woman utterly consumed by the music she makes. You can see it in her performances: the way she moves convulsively to the upswell of sound, the way she belts and bellows to the heavens. She writes songs you can feel in your bones. And like Kate Bush and Björk before her, Welch is an artist in the truest sense: a renegade dreamer who can knock out two platinum albums (2009's Lungs and 2011'sCeremonials), garner a trio of Grammy nominations, tour with U2, perform at Blake Lively's wedding, be cited as an influence by Beyoncé, and still be perceived as a bit of an eccentric.But while the pleasure of freedom has always been a big theme for Welch—"It's hard to dance with a devil on your back," she sang on Ceremonials' anthemic hit "Shake It Out"—its manifestation on her new album, How Big How Blue How Beautiful, is entirely different from the bohemian rhapsodies we've heard from her before. In these songs, the 28-year-old is wrestling with the fact that sometimes freedom means casting off not just the shackles that hold you down, but also the things you love. This realization hit when Welch—the London-bred daughter of an art history professor mother and ad exec father, who was famously discovered when a manager heard her singing Etta James in a club bathroom—came off the road from Ceremonials in 2013. "The structure of touring had been holding me together," Welch says. "Without it I slightly spiraled." It was her first break from recording and touring since Lungs had made her a pop star at 21, and it also happened to coincide with the "complicated, confusing" demise of a long-term relationship ("I think everyone has had that kind of relationship at one time or another," she says, "when you keep going back and expecting things to be different but never get any answers"). She spent the next year, she says, "in a whirlwind of heartbreak and partying," trying to figure out how to make herself happy. "There was a lot of fun and debauchery and then also quite a lot of lows," she says. "I had to really face up to my own chaos and my own compulsions. On tour, you don't have to reflect on what messes you're making because you're constantly moving on to the next show. But this was a year when I had to sit with the consequences. If you trash your house on a Tuesday, you can't just go to the next house. I had to ask, Who am I? How do I feel about stuff?"
As a result, How Big How Blue How Beautiful is a more pared-down, lyrically transparent album than its predecessors. The folklore-and-fantasy-steeped imagery that's preoccupied Welch in the past—demons conjured and exorcised; redemption and rebirth—is still here, but as wallpaper, not foreground. From the solemn, haunting "St. Jude" ("And even though I'm grieving/I'm trying to find the meaning/Let loss reveal it") to the jagged, furious "What Kind of Man" ("Sometimes you're half in and then you're half out/But you never close the door"), Welch openly exposes her wounds. Helmed by producer Markus Dravs, who has worked with Arcade Fire and Björk, the songs are rife with the Machine's signature tour-de-force crescendos but also offer hushed, thoughtful moments that shimmer with something "earthier and more organic," Welch says. "Markus really encouraged me to be more vulnerable. I like hiding behind things—metaphor, reverb, extra vocals—and he just wouldn't let me do that. The lyrics were more direct, so the music simplified along with that."
Welch's onstage wardrobe has become more simplified, too. The fashion favorite—who memorably inspired Mulberry's spring 2011 runway show and performed at Chanel's spring 2012 presentation from inside a giant clamshell—was outfitted by Gucci for a previous tour in a procession of sweeping gowns. This time, she says, "it's all about stripping things back and allowing myself to be free. Sometimes in a big cape you have to perform a certain way." (If the pink pants-and-jacket combo she wore earlier this year to perch front row at Chanel, or the pristine white suit she donned to debut the new album at Coachella—a performance in which she exhorted her audience to "embrace each other, get weird with it, touch each other's faces!"—are any indication, she's all about suits these days.) Through the process of making How Big How Blue How Beautiful, Welch says, she finally answered the questions that were plaguing her. "A lot of the songs that I thought were directed at another person, I was actually writing for myself," she says. "Once you get some space in the situation, it's so much easier to see your part in things. I realized a lot of my chaos was self-inflicted." And that relationship that tore her up? Over it, at last. "I was in a situation that felt like purgatory. Unresolved, constantly going over the same things. But I think you have to find your own way out." She laughs. "I feel like you could meditate for a year or you could drink for a year, it's just a question of time. I don't think there's any way to make it faster."
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This article appears in the June 2015 issue of ELLE.

影响着Beyonce？

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