Every City Was A Gift

Florence + The Machine “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (Demo Version)”

This recording may be labeled as a “demo” version, but don’t mistake for anything remotely minimal or skeletal. This is a fully produced song complete with a string section, and the main difference between this and the final, official recording is that the album version has even more strings, and goes even bigger than what is already quite huge the first time around. This is about what you’d expect from Florence Welch – she’s a woman with an enormous and powerful voice, and her band and producers are constantly challenged to find ways to appropriately showcase it. I prefer the somewhat less ornate version of “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” for two main reasons – the mix on the album version sounds oddly sterile and featureless to me, and I’m not crazy about its extended string coda. It’s also nice to hear a recording of this band that allows the song to feel big without every element of the arrangement competing with Welch’s voice for power and intensity.

The song is terrific either way, though, and stands out as one of the best things Welch has written. The majority of the tracks on her new record are, as Douglas Wolk puts it, breakup songs “from the point of view of someone who is absolutely convinced that her breakup is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to anyone.” But this one is coming from a different place – it deals with the struggle of a long distance relationship, but more than anything it’s a love song about cities in general, and Los Angeles in particular. It’s interesting to hear a voice that mainly deals in songs about broken love and quasi-religious themes be used to express awe for a skyline. It should probably happen more often! I know this feeling well, and it’s a powerful thing.

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