When Forence Welch found herself facing her immortality after a miscarriage, it wasn’t friends or family that she turned to. Instead, the iconic singer of Florence + the Machine found solace with plants and animals.
Florence still remembers those August days two years ago quite vividly. She’d had a miscarriage and soon discovered that it had been an ectopic pregnancy. Her fallopian tube had ruptured, and she needed to have emergency surgery. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she told The Guardian.
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“It was a real need to be around things that couldn’t speak, but had a life force or energy to them. I found that the most healing,” she recalled about that period of time. But it wasn’t her animals that helped her heal, as she didn’t own any. Instead, she found comfort in the animals that roamed her neighborhood. For instance, more cats began hanging out in her garden.
“I’m not saying anything, but more and more started coming, and foxes,” she said. “I don’t know. Or maybe I just noticed them more, because that’s what I needed to be around.”
The lyrics to the band’s 2022 hit “King” are about her internal debate about whether she should have children. Today, she finds the line, “I never knew my killer would be coming from within,” haunting.
“Having that line in King was a strange thing,” she said. “Because I had an ectopic pregnancy, on stage.”
She recalled that the miscarriage occurred just before she was headlining the Boardmasters Festival in Cornwall. Despite being in pain and bleeding, she refused to back out. But she did schedule an appointment to get checked out.
“Women! It’s funny. I took some ibuprofen and stepped out on stage,” she said. The next day, she felt a bit better and almost canceled the appointment.
“I didn’t want to go for the scan,” she admitted. “I thought, I’ve done this show, I’m fine, I can cope. But my doctor’s insistence that I come in saved my life.”
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Ten days after getting emergency surgery, she was back on a plane, headed to another festival. She also began studying the history of witchcraft.
“Modern medicine absolutely saved my life,” she acknowledged. “But you can’t go anywhere about birth without finding witchcraft and magic and medicine. Some of the first people tried as witches were midwives.”
She also made a new album, “Everybody Scream,” which, for her, is as cathartic as it gets. “I’ve shared parts of my life with [fans] that I haven’t been able to say to my closest friends,” she said. “Everybody Scream” will be her sixth studio album, and she admitted that with each new album, she hopes that she — and fans — will feel satisfied with it. But it’s more than that.
“There’s a feeling of dying a little bit, every time I make a record,” she added. “And, this time, I nearly died.”
