Emily Sprague and I are crouched over a creek in rural Germantown, New York, letting our hands float atop the shallow water. Near the rental house where Sprague and her indie-pop band Florist are recording their fourth album, she tells me to pick up a rock that speaks to me. We are going to do a spell.
Amid the overwhelming, technicolor green of our surroundings, she leads me through a brief meditation of sorts. This water, she says—with calm conviction and a slight wink—is connected to all water we’ve ever touched. “Water is emotionally charged,” Sprague notes, an idea she invoked masterfully on her first album as an ambient artist, 2017’s Water Memory. We set intentions for our smooth rocks, toss them quietly, and everything feels a little lighter—which is no small feat considering the heady discussion we’ve just concluded in the porch room about love, death, and the mysteries in between; about the orchestra of the natural environment and the ephemerality of home; and other ideas that situate thinking and feeling as the worthiest pillars of our lives.
Sprague is a poetic, sensitive person who is just as likely to reference the late composer and author Pauline Oliveros’ book Deep Listening or the Lebanese-American writer Etel Adnan as, say, Harry Potter or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” On our drive to the rental house, as we pass postcard scenery of farm stands and barns, she describes the weather upstate thusly: “Every spring it just screams.” She says the mountains are a part of her from childhood. She plays me Enya’s “Even in the Shadows” and calls it her favorite song ever. Just being around Sprague has a way of illuminating the sound of the wind rustling in the trees, or the crescendoing music of birds.
Dualities define Sprague, a 25-year-old Gemini—wordlessness and poetry, mountains and water, the physical and the spiritual—and her two musical sides work in tandem. She was inspired to make ambient music as a hobby apart from Florist, and ambient music in turn gave her the confidence to make the latest Florist album, Emily Alone, totally solo. Dark, acoustic, and bracingly metaphysical—like a new-age singer channelling the stark realism of Phil Elverum’s recent work as Mount Eerie—Emily Alone is the most striking Florist release yet.
Sprague grew up in closeby Catskill. When she picks me up from a café in Hudson, dressed in a black T-shirt tucked into black jeans with a film camera slung across her chest, she points out a bookshop called The Spotty Dog as “the beginning of the light at the end of the tunnel” beyond the isolation of upstate New York. In 2012, after graduating high school early, she followed soon-to-be Florist bandmate Rick Spataro to the small but inspired underground music scene in Albany. There, they recruited drummer Felix Walworth, and the group relocated to Brooklyn in 2013. Though Sprague had spent her whole young life just a few hours north of New York City, she had visited only twice before.
Two months after the move, Sprague was biking on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where she worked as a dog walker, when a bus struck her in a hit-and-run. “I was sure that I was going to die, and then I didn’t,” she tells me. “It changed the way I thought about being alive.”
Sprague began writing the gentle first Florist full-length, 2016’s The Birds Outside Sang, while recovering. As the band planted roots in the New York music scene around the indie label Double Double Whammy and the DIY venue the Silent Barn, where Sprague once lived, their minimal folk-pop blossomed. Augmented with synths, space, and Sprague’s unvarnished singing, Florist’s music forefronts extreme vulnerability, closeness, and a grounding humility.
The band’s second LP, 2017’s If Blue Could Be Happiness, came after the death of Sprague’s mother, and the album’s closer, “Red Bird,” is about their close bond. “We both feel so much/I know it from the years I’ve watched you live,” Sprague sings with a disarming lucidity. Thinking back to that time with her mom, Sprague tells me, “One of the last things she said to me was, ‘I love the song, you described our relationship perfectly.’ It’s the most meaningful thing that’s ever happened to me.” (Florist’s latest video, for an extended version of Emily Alone’s “M,” features a sample of an old recording of Sprague’s mother singing.)
In 2017, Sprague moved to Los Angeles, in a concerted effort towards self-awareness, solitude, and internal stability. She discovered a deep passion for surfing, which she calls “a huge part of my mental health getting better.” Though the loneliness of her new home hit hard at first, she experienced an emotional and musical breakthrough with her second ambient album, Mount Vision. “That day, I felt something change,” Sprague says of completing the mystical, spare, and deeply resonant record. “It was this beautiful bloom. All my energy shifted. I wasn’t fighting the ways in which I felt lost. I was just feeling them and accepting them.” Emily Alone followed, and both albums, while undeniably heavy, feel spacious, nonlinear, clear, and deeply self-possessed, as if Sprague is channeling a hard-earned elemental power.
“Magic is just energy,” Sprague tells me before our experiment with the rocks and water, and she makes it easy to believe, no less when considering the latest place Florist’s existential music has traveled. Earlier this year, her synth-poem “Thank You”—written in 2014 as a vehicle for light, gratitude, compassion, and aliveness while she recovered from her near-death bike accident—was used in Beyoncé’s concert film-cum-Black history lesson, Homecoming, to Sprague’s shock and awe.
In the original recording, Sprague unspools spoken-word over a simple analog loop. In the Homecoming version, her musings are replaced with a stunning monologue by none other than Maya Angelou. “What I really want to do is be a representative of my race, of the human race,” Angelou states over Sprague’s exalted, lo-fi electronics. “I have a chance to show how kind we can be. How intelligent and generous we can be.” Sprague’s reverence spirals thinking about Angelou’s words: “The truth about why I make music is in that,” she says. By Sprague’s own logic, she sent her energy out—and that energy came back.
Emily Sprague: I made that song while out-of-my-mind from this crazy, traumatic thing that physically broke me down. I was in a neck brace and a sling. I couldn’t play guitar. I needed help going to the bathroom. I would walk up and down the stairs once a day and that was pretty much all I could do for months. And I wanted more than anything to make songs. It was out of desperation, really.
I was in Brooklyn, and I had this little studio room with no windows, but it had this chaise lounge, and I would go in there and lay down and be on muscle relaxers for my neck. That room was like a crazy void space. I remember the first day I went in there, thinking, OK, if I can just set this up and get it to a place where I can hit play and record, I’ll be able to sit in here and do what I need to do. I would lay down and be in and out of sleep, and then have these ideas for songs and wake up and start doing them.
I would fight through the haze of the pain and all these drugs, and just try to create something. I was using one hand for everything, and I recorded all this stuff on a four-track cassette recorder. With “Thank You,” I wanted to make a song about everything—empathy, and the world just running, and how you can exist in that. I made it with a $75 keyboard and a looper pedal, playing with the knobs and recording first-try.
I was 19 and it was a huge perspective shift. It made me a lot less fixated on the little things that can bother you. An old therapist called me an active nihilist, versus a passive one—like, I am obsessed with the full range of emotions. I think there’s no use in only being positive or only being negative. You have to fully see both of those things, and indulge in them even. You can cry all day and still dedicate your life to making art that shows beauty and humanity, and bring that to people who maybe aren’t seeing it, or see it within yourself. The closer you are to your core—that’s where the truest emotion goes. That’s important to try to never lose when you’re making anything.
We need to communicate with each other emotionally—that’s where our power as a generation is. We feel all this negativity and darkness in our generation, and carry a lot of weight that was just ignored in our parents’ generation, who had blinders on in so many ways. We feel so much and, in a lot of ways, are rewriting how you can live a life.
That’s been the biggest part of who I am for as long as I can remember—just so, so emotional. I remember being 13 and watching art films in my room, thinking, I want to feel in love in the painful way. I was taught somehow, someway, that feelings are worth it. I’ll try anything because I’m just interested in feeling. At this point in my life, after having experienced some of the hardest things that can happen, and knowing that everything is fine—that everything is really OK—I’m interested in exploring more.
Being in California, I really did think, Man, I’m going to make such happy music now. But the opposite happened. Whenever I was about to write a bunch of songs, I coaxed them out by manipulating my house vibe to be like I was in New England or upstate New York. I would keep my shades drawn all day and drink hot beverages, make soup, and really try to feel that feeling of a deep, dark winter. Then this album just came out of me, and it was maybe the darkest music I’ve ever written in a way that feels so beautiful and necessary.
Florist is the deepest part of my musical language, but it’s also the thing that takes the most out of me. I’m always crying when I’m writing Florist songs. They’re from my perspective, and you can think of those songs as being about my life, but they just come from a place of human experience. [Emily Alone] is about the self, which can be seen as a really isolationist thing, but the idea is that it’s this journey to explore your single piece in this collective consciousness of the world. The more awareness you have, the more peacefully you can exist within the chaos. The only reason I want to share music is because I hope I can contribute to the emotional health of the world.
They both need each other to exist. Musically, folk songs are so simple and beautiful, but they’re words, and words are so basic, to a certain degree. I’m interested in words being more—like a sentence saying a hundred emotions, and being five words long—but language just scratches the surface of what we experience. I feel like I need to be able to explore sound and communicate things without words, too.
It’s hard to not write a song that’s verse-chorus-bridge-whatever, especially when you’re writing songs rooted in folk or country music. But the freeform structure of modular synths and instrumental compositions really unlocked a part of my brain. Structure became something I wasn’t really interested in. I wrote songs with different movements. There’s a great album by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Out of the Blue—it’s this episodic, longform musical piece and it has all these spoken-word interludes. I love music like that. I’m interested in blurring the lines between indie and folk songwriting and experimental music.
I was reading this psychology book, Always Coming Home, about the concept of an inner child, and how everyone picks up different traumas that we carry with us throughout our lives. I read a lot of poetry. Anne Carson is one of the biggest ones. I read to find emotional answers. I want to know more, because I don’t know why we’re alive, really. Those lines in the song are about doing all the things you’re supposed to do to feel better, and ultimately, none of them make me feel like I have a reason to be alive more than making music. I don’t know why I do this. My therapist has told me that I never learned boundaries in the ways that are meant to protect us. So, I will say anything in a song. You know Buffy?
Yeah. It’s the best show ever created. Buffy has this whole thing where she’s like, “Death is my gift,” because she’s the slayer, and I feel like anxiety is my gift. I don’t think twice about saying the things that make me the most sad, or the things that are the most personal about my life in songs. Because I’m not the only one who feels those things. It’s about people and human experience. I don’t know what any of it is, but that’s the point—you’re not supposed to know.
The greatest way you can live your life is to search for the answer to the unanswerable question. It would be impossible to exist if we had the answers to the deepest mysteries of life because that search keeps us alive. If you knew why you were here and what you were supposed to be doing, there would be no beauty, no way to empathize, and no way to relate to people. It’s like when you meet someone and you realize the things you share with them, and the ways you can feel so connected—you’re sharing a mystery.
