“We Were Reaching In The Dark”
What Florence Made with Us at Governor’s Ball 2019
*****
Maybe growing up is unlearning all the judgments that limit possibilities for transcendent moments of communion.
*****
I have always loved Florence + The Machine: I have felt drawn to her, to her music, like a magnet. I have been impressed with her messages and her vocal abilities, but more than that I have felt she possesses something special, or at least something especially compatible with what‘s inside me, or with how I receive information.
Since I bore witness — and that definitely feels like the right term here — to her performance on June 1, 2019, I think I might have more words on what I’ve felt for years. Something happened, and I strongly feel the need to attempt to express what it was.
*****
And the grass was so green against my new clothes
And I did cartwheels in your honour
Dancing on tiptoes
My own secret ceremonials
- Florence Welch, “Only If For A Night”
*****
Florence performed to tens of thousands of people that night, and I was among the thousand closest to the stage. The 80 minutes I stood waiting, investing, tired feet on muddy shoes on concrete, were massaged by the generously quick, cathartic cooling of the New York summer air, or maybe by the palpable energy of hope and immortality I witnessed in the age-diverse audience that surrounded me. (You know how sometimes it’s hard to separate feelings from the air itself?)
One of the most amazing things people can do is, without saying a word, convince each other that a shared moment matters very, very much. In this case, I felt this kind of unspoken importance before the moment, Florence’s arrival on stage, had even arrived. Far before human beings figure out a rainstorm is coming, there are usually no birds to be found. I don’t know why. Perhaps they are removed enough from their own egos to understand what the earth is telling them. We were the birds here, anticipating something significant, and Florence was about to be, more than I could yet know, a thunderstorm.
*****
*****
Mother, make me
Make me a big grey cloud
So I can rain on you things I can’t say out loud
- Florence Welch, “Mother”
*****
If a performing artist cares to, they can curate the audience’s experience way before the show’s technical start. Florence Welch’s greatest superpower is that she cares very, very much, and before she expressed this to us through pure, dynamic, dancing energy, and before she expressed it to us directly, verbally, she had already expressed it through the set design. The sturdy but intricate wood-slatted platforms communicated professionalism and experience; the raised platforms and the vastness of instrumentation expressed a limitlessness; the harp on stage and the white nebulous drapes hanging above it all validated everyone’s hunch that Florence is actually an immortal wood nymph.
It’s relatively common to start a set with the first track from your most recent album, but in this case it seemed eerily appropriate for Florence to play “June,” the first track from 2018’s High As Hope — not only because the performance took place on June 1st, but also because its chorus sets the most important ground rule for a Florence + The Machine show: Hold onto each other. The serendipitous relevance, or perhaps brilliant methology, behind the decision to open with “June” was the first of several moments that together created a sense that Florence has an other-worldly relationship to time and space.
About a half-hour into the show she asked everyone in the audience to embrace someone near them, and people — everyone! — in New York City! a place where people avoid eye-contact like it’s a disease! — really did it: they literally held onto each other. Just through her presence, through what she means to people, through the ways her songs have positively affected her fans’ lives, their mental health, their actual relationships, Florence manifests in real life the trust she believes is possible.
What’s even more magical, though, is that she manages to create this trust without for a moment encouraging people to forget all the fucked up things that are happening in the world. She sprinkled the show liberally with a number of mini-speeches that relayed her sincere empathy regarding recent events in the United States. Just as one example, in reference to the then-recent Alabama ruling in which all abortions have become criminal, she shouted, like a life-long best friend on a visit home, American women, you deserve so much better!!!
And you know what? She is absolutely fucking right.
*****
We were reaching in the dark
That summer in New York
And it was so far to fall
But it didn’t hurt at all
And let it wash away, wash away
- Florence Welch, “End of Love”
*****
Because Florence had created this uniquely safe, sacred-from-scratch kind of space, by the time she came down to the audience’s literal level, we felt — knew, were reminded — that we were part of something bigger. So when she ran at full speed between every barricade, faster than possible, with a look of intense focus, during “Delilah,” and when she stopped to head-bang, seated on concert railings and supportive hands during “What Kind Of Man,” you could feel the way the whole crowd reached for her — with their arms, with their hearts — to say “thank you.” Thank you for urging us to be better, for believing in us, for hosting us with home-cooked hope, and for being a Big Enough God for us. And thank you, also, for being completely human with us: tender, imperfect, confused, bursting, in the here and now, in the dark.
*****
