Florence + The Machine's two-decade journey to calm via 'Dance Fever'

"What does it all mean?"

Florence Welch ponders massive questions while sitting on a couch in her London home and on a Zoom call with The Tennessean.

She's the "Machine" that driven critically-acclaimed indie rock act Florence + the Machine for 15 years -- and successfully answered her fans' questions about how to define themselves in a world gone mad. Songs like 2008's breakthrough hit "Dog Days Are Over," 2009's cover of The Source and Candi Staton's disco classic "You Got The Love," and 2012 global smash "Spectrum (Say My Name)" emanated from a place of powerful emotional release against an overwhelming, angst-driven sociocultural current.

While existing at an exciting creative crossroads, Florence and her "Machine" visit Nashville's Ascend Amphitheater on September 20. Tickets are available via Live Nation.

After five albums, the English art-rock icon whose work highlights notes of "Running Up That Hill" vocalist Kate Bush's timeless acclaim, has led to critics proclaiming her one of the most "musically mature and emotionally mesmerizing" artists of the past quarter century.

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Aside from a likely enjoyable time at her Nashville concert, fans -- via her current album "Dance Fever," plus interpretations of her two decades of music -- could learn more about how she survived COVID lockdowns on a diet of reading books about pre-Raphaelite-era art, Carmen Maria Machado and Julia Armfield's gothic fiction, watching dark films including "Bran Stoker's Dracula," "Midsommar," "The Wicker Man" and "The Witch." She also became obsessed with the folklore surrounding choreomania, the "Footloose"-style health panic that swept through the Holy Roman Empire.

Even in the face of such overwhelming praise, Welch's 2022-released album "Dance Fever" concerns itself with how she used aggressive partying (a house-themed track is also entitled "Choreomania" and is an album highlight) in the face of the morbidity of COVID-19's quarantine to revive herself and inspire her career's next era.

COVID's quarantine allowed Welch to discover the ability to find profound meaning in life's occurrences via introspection. Before 2020, her songwriting and performance process was primarily tied to her desire to use external showcases to seek healing.

"On this album, you find me using songwriting to allow me to put clear, sharp introspection about existential thoughts into my material for some of the first times, ever, she tells the Tennessean. "My head is always so busy, and I never had a chance to think clearly, until I experienced the horror of being physically locked down," she adds, comparing the work that perpetually happens inside her mind to a "neverending podcast."

Welch describes how fairly routine practices elevated themselves to the realm of intense poetry during the era. For example, the album tracks "Cassandra" and "Daffodil" refer to how the artist saw her quarantine gardening hobby evolve into a referendum on the transformative qualities of nature's seasons in relation to humans being stuck in seemingly interminable stasis.

The album's -- and in relation, the live tour's -- dance-driven energy is very intentional. The activity Welch missed most during quarantine was the "freedom" associated with gathering at nightclubs.

From 2018:Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine on art, nerves and 'crazy' tour ideas

Welch's favorite part of dancing is "transcending the body," she states. Thus, the clubbier, techno-style track "My Love" (written with Glass Animals' lead singer Dave Bayley, also an album co-producer) was added because the artist was dancing in her kitchen and "having the best time."

"I had to share that feeling with my fans of just really needing to hear something that makes you feel like you're surrounded by people, not overthinking anything, and having fun," she adds.

Work on the album also saw her pair with producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff. His work with Lorde, Lana del Ray, and Taylor Swift has created a decade-long cottage industry for eloquent, bittersweet melodrama.

For Welch, the Grammy-winning sonic auteur helped create tracks like "King," which includes the refrain, "I am no mother. I am no bride. I am king." In an April 2022 Vogue interview, she noted, "The whole crux of the song is that you're torn between [being a mother or an artist, first]. The thing I've always been sure of is my work, but I do start to feel this shifting of priorities, this sense of, like, maybe I want something different."

Welch calls Antonoff a "great therapist to chat to" as a co-creator of lyrics, melodies, and rhythms. "Jack's commitment to minimizing my thoughts to strengthen my [creative] voice importantly pushed against my desire to use grandiose idealism to hide my deepest emotions," she adds.

Working with touring artists with fanciful imaginations similar to her own also strengthened her resolve to maintain a clarity of focus on bridging the gap between art and career moving forward. Though she calls the process "boring," it's also yielded a growing attention span that allows for tighter lyrics and melodies that allow for elevated musicality. This process combines to form tracks like "Dance Mania"'s rock-country hybrid song "Morning Elvis."

In total, Welch has a tremendous full-circle perspective on the art she's made and will continue to make in the future.

"I used to hit a piano and make abstract music describing constant noise in my head that I scribbled into a notebook. Now I'm turning Gothic folk tales and fully-formed poetry into songs."

She describes the totality of her passions as an artist, creator, and live performer best by quoting her "Dance Fever" track "King":

"And I was never as good as I always thought I was / But I knew how to dress it up / I was never satisfied, it never let me go/ Just dragged me by my hair and back on with the show."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Florence + The Machine's two-decade-journey to calm via 'Dance Fever'