For Florist, uncertainty is forever

This is a succinct summation of Florist’s wonderful new record, Jellywish. It’s a lyrically kaleidoscopic record with a profound sense of the uncanny. These poetic, fragmented songs track formative years and moments – there’s an endlessness in the small detail, and a playful ambiguity in the plainspoken impressionism.

“We move through our lives with a very narrow band of realities and norms – socially, politically, and otherwise,” Sprague muses when asked about the thematic thread of the record. “Ultimately, Jellywish is about the magic of how expansive our consciousness and our reality really are. I feel like so much of this is snuffed out by imposed rigidity and the expectations of what a human life should be. For the four of us, this kind of existentialism, almost metaphysical thought, has always been a big part of how we connect. Musically, we want to explore different things throughout our career and are dedicated to this and believe in music as a means to facilitate this expansion of our minds – and that’s also about our relationships with each other and our environment.”

As I speak to Sprague, the importance of her relationship with her bandmates becomes apparent, and how this informs their music. Incredibly endearingly, the band have described themselves as a “friendship project,” which Sprague laughs off as “the right way to describe what we were starting to do in 2014,” but iterates that, “even when Florist is long finished, we will still be each other’s main people; we will still be the most important people to each other.”

Sprague traces her relationship with Rick Spataro (bass/keys/engineer) and Jonnie Baker (guitar) back to her teenage years, when she briefly used them as a backing band. “I suppose the more we got to know each other and our musical language – our way of looking at the world – it felt like there was a difference between it being my songs and a collaborative process,” she says. “It’s a deeply woven collaboration between the four of us [including drummer Felix Walworth]. Every decision we make, musically or otherwise, is about us being friends first.”

Five records in, and now into their mid-thirties – what Sprague describes as “riding life together” – the band have a special musical relationship that is married to Jellywish, and the threads of existentialism that one may expect in the twilight of youth. This existentialism is particularly prominent on certain songs on the record. “Gloom Designs” juxtaposes images of technological progress with the melancholy of the passage of time, Sprague “longing for the day we can be face to face.” The computers are getting smarter, as she is quietly resigned to getting older. More positively, songs such as “Our Hearts in a Room” and “Have Heaven” illustrate the power of connection and presence – be it motherhood or platonic relationships.

Unsurprisingly, community and connection run through Sprague’s whole ethos and approach to work, and she speaks effusively about the magnetic effect of people and communities.

“We owe so much to the DIY communities in Brooklyn when we were starting out,” she shares. “Florist absolutely would not be a thing without that confluence of circumstance and people. We met the guys from our label [Double Whammy] through college; when we were starting out they were working out how to do things too. We’ve grown and cultivated our practices together. I also feel like – and I say this staring out at a bunch of trees! – that if you do want to be an artist it is important to live in a city. I’ve also spent quite a lot of time in LA and it feels similar to New York to me. It’s the energy they have in common – I think it’s really important to feed off the energy of other people.”

This correlates beautifully with Sprague’s interpretation of her own record:

“For me it’s about, what does it mean to have consciousness and be on Earth in relation to others? It’s this broken kaleidoscope of all of these little songs. I think it’s quite distorted and disturbed – it’s a look into our lives from above. It’s a lot of ideas in a bitesize form, and in the Florist way, we want to be chill and gentle and stuff. We are all, as people, very emotionally intuitive. If you want to have an art life you’ve got to kind of fly by the seat of your pants. You just don’t know how much longer anything is going to last. We have to navigate all of these twists and turns, while also maintaining this sense of being able to let things go, which I think is a big part of the record.”

Sprague leaves me on a positive note, happy with a record that, among other things, is a document of friendship preserved in amber. She explains that members of the band have new responsibilities, and as much as they are scattered across New York State, they navigate this well.

Uncertainty is forever, and this is the core sentiment running through Jellywish. Sprague’s ambitions remain beautifully grounded and rooted in the artistic. She ponders the future of the band, excited by the prospect of releasing the new record and all that goes with it, but grounded in the economic realities of art, and she maintains a refreshingly stoic and philosophical take on all of these things throughout our conversation. Succinctly, when sharing her hopes for the future, she says with a beaming smile, “I hope we continue to grow.”