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Apr 11, 2025 Web Exclusive By Marina Malin Photography by V Haddad

Florist’s music creates a safe sanctuary with its rare kind of tenderness, intimacy, and deeply human quality. Since emerging with their 2016 debut, The Birds Outside Sang, the project led by songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emily Sprague has gently guided listeners through grief, growth, and the natural world. Across records like If Blue Could Be Happiness (2017) and their expansive 2022 self-titled album, Florist has built a sonic world rooted in vulnerability, connection, and reflection. Now, with their latest release Jellywish, Sprague and her bandmates turn outward, examining the multitudes of human consciousness and imagining what it might mean to truly live in harmony—with ourselves, each other, and the planet.

Under the Radar spoke with Sprague about the magic behind Florist’s creative process, building emotional landscapes, and what it means to ask questions without expecting answers.

Marina Malin (Under the Radar): I discovered your music in 2022 at a very vulnerable time. I had just lost my partner, and I felt like your music was like the only entity that really understood what I was going through. For me, that felt very comforting. For you, as the artist, what is the relationship between your creative practice and personal experiences?

Emily Sprague: Wow. Well, I’m so sorry for your loss. That is an interesting question. I think in Florist, my music practice is so rooted in the desire for human beings to push out the bounds of our consciousness. The core intention behind Florist has always come from this belief in music as a magic that we have access to. I find that to be so beautiful about it. The project and my songwriting practice is rooted in this quest for expanding the bounds of how we think about our own selves and our relationships to ourselves, our relationships with others, our relationship with the earth and life, and our consciousness. These different layers of exploring and trying to not get stuck in the narrow boxes that society really puts us in. In terms of the connectedness, I feel like our connectedness to each other is so important. It’s so emotional and it’s so valuable to always be interfacing with that. I want to put things into the world that encourage us to grow and have healthy relationships with ourselves, each other, our life on Earth, and our existence because there is a lot here. We have this self awareness and consciousness that is packed sometimes too tightly in our worlds. I think music has this beautiful ability to present people with feelings and ideas—it’s like this transmission that you can’t exactly do with words. I have always been dedicated to and want to keep focusing on that magic quality, so that we can become more in touch with each other and ourselves.

That was such a beautiful answer, I’m still just taking it all in. You were talking about creating magic through your music, I’m curious what that looks like in your songwriting process and in general, the creative steps that are involved?

I think that the magic is in music inherently. I think it’s also inherent in life. I think that magic is our ability to connect with each other, and our ability to have these existential experiences in life. For me, when I’m writing, I try to go into the place where I’m letting myself not be held back by the ways I feel like I have to conform and hopefully I’ll write something that is an honest reflection, emotion, or something that can be related to. That’s always been my goal with songwriting. I’ve been told that I wear my heart on my sleeve because Florist songwriting is very vulnerable. To me, that’s the reason to do it. For whatever reason I feel safe sharing that stuff and having it be public. I feel that it helps other people and it helps me process my own life and experiences. Florist is very much a project about nudging the access for others to be able to enter those emotional spaces in a feeling of comfort or safety. The thing that you said at the beginning was really beautiful and that means so much to me that the music can be about complicated, sad, overwhelming, or scary things. But the environment that Florist tries to make our music can hopefully foster a place where people feel like their mind is allowed to go there to think about things that are harder to be comfortable thinking about.

I think that that’s what is so powerful about your music, not only does it create this safe sanctuary for listeners to allow their emotions to come about, but it also seems to be an equally therapeutic practice for you. With that said, how does this intimacy and vulnerability translate live? Aside from going to Florist’s shows, is there a specific setting or situation that you feel is best to listen to the music?

I feel really lucky that over the years we’ve had a lot of different live experiences. Our music is not always the easiest thing to experience live because of the sensitive nature and gentleness of it. We do play quietly. I sing quietly a lot of the time. Earlier on we were battling the live environments with people talking, but now after doing this for a decade we have gotten to this place that I feel so proud of. A lot of the time people will come and sit down on the floor and people are really quiet and respectful. It feels like a house show in rooms where that’s possible. It can be a really powerful thing. I think the in person experience is also about that vulnerability. I feel moved when we’re playing and we all gather for the purpose of collectively going into a place of introspection and doing it in a live setting. Performing live is an act of exposing your anxieties. For us, it’s not a performance in the sense that we are performing something that we’re not. We’re just coming as we are and offering what we can on the day. That’s what Florist music is when we’re making it as well. It’s been a process of figuring that out, but I feel like now it’s something that I do really enjoy playing live. I think it’s a bit of an unspoken thing that people know that people come in and are quiet and that just feels amazing in terms of listening to the music. In terms of the recordings, I think that they’re probably not things that just are put on in the background. For me, I love the album format—a couple of years of thinking about music, working on stuff here and there, playing around most days, and then a time period comes of writing and I have this sense of, “Oh, this is a new album.” The cycle always comes back around to that for me. I really love and encourage people to listen to the album as a format and an experience. We’re very intentional about that and how the album flows, so that would be my preferred way to listen to it. I’ve listened to our album when we were mixing it while I was running and that was actually a surprisingly cool experience. Maybe people could try that. That’s not something I would think maybe you would think to do, but it was kind of fun.

On the topic of your album, Jellywish, in the press kit it was said to be an “exercise in multi dimensional world building,” which I thought that was such a great description, but I also was a little bit confused on what that actually means. I was hoping that you could elaborate on what that quote and the record at large means to you.

To me, Jellywish is our effort to briefly talk about some really big concepts and existential musings, which are all a core part of Florist—wondering what this is, why we’re here, what our what our thoughts and feelings are, and what matters. In previous Florist records, we’ve honed in on specific experiences or feelings and done these close up explorations. Oftentimes with this back lining of it’s beautiful to have feelings or your sadness is a part of who you are, and that’s a good thing. And with Jellywish for me writing the record, I knew that I wanted to pivot a little bit from writing about my own inner world and my experiences, and look outward at humanity as this one entity and this idea that we influence each other on these small scales to create the world that we live in, the society and the relationship to the planet. Jellywish is criticizing the ways in which we limit ourselves from seeing this beautiful technicolor, multi dimensionality of what our existence is and what our life here in this consciousness is, and how beautiful it all is, but also how it is snuffed out by a lot of these rigid, narrow, unhelpful ways of living in the world and the ways in which people you know have to fit into boxes. So it’s kind of political in a sense that it is saying that we could be doing so much better. This could be so much better. The concept behind Jellywish is that this all starts with our relationship to ourselves and accepting our own multi dimensionality of our consciousness being here, and treating that with as much sort of like love and respect as possible. I wanted there to be this big, lots of colors, lots of magical, fantasy elements that I believe are all right here around us. We can kind of let that color out if we push out and extend the bounds of what we think our life on Earth can or has to be. So it’s obviously a really big idea and the way that we wanted to approach that was to crush up the kaleidoscope and find the little little pieces of these different slices of thoughts or feelings or experiences that relate back to this searching for some sense of of why we have gotten to this point and how can we influence each other to kind of make things better?

I believe the paradigm shift is possible with humanity, and I think that it needs to happen if we want to last much longer. I think that it has to start with our own mind and our own sense of who we are in the universe.

Thank you for your answer, that was incredibly thought provoking. Something I noticed about Jellywish is that it felt like there was a wider lens looking more broadly on the world and how we exist, whereas I think maybe in your previous discography it felt more like drawing from personal experiences. Specifically, listening to yourself-titled record Florist, there were more ambient interludes and reflections. In what ways do you approach the production and creative process differently for this [new] record?

We’ve been doing this for about 12 years at this point and Jellywish came at this crossroads of us wanting to continue making records while we all also love making instrumentals. We have a lot of instrumentals that we did while we were recording Jellywish that didn’t end up being on the record that we may release, and I’m sure there will be more. I’m sure there will be an all instrumental Florist record at some point. We want to keep exploring music’s power and we want to keep exploring our relationship to each other and growing within music. With Jellywish, I think the writing and the context of the album really dictated how the format came to be with all songs being kind of shorter and poppier things. Because of the inter dimensional consciousness theory being so wide reaching and dense, I felt like the best way to present this record would be a bite sized, kind of short and sweet and to the point, but very subtle as well. I think that if you push something too hard it may not have as much effect as if it just comes through and leaves a little bit of glitter.

In terms of the recording process, we did this one similarly to all of our other records, which is that we record ourselves and spend a long period of time together while we’re doing that. We are very much on Florist time when we’re recording. We’ve never really even considered going into a studio because we just don’t quite work like that. The 2022 record was so much about capturing the real moments of life and documenting a time and place. This record was different in that we did about two months of rehearsing the songs live with each other before we went in to record. So when we went to record, we had already spent a lot of time arranging the music and getting to play with each other and come up with these themes of the musical language. We had also toured a lot after the 2022 record and felt like we had grown a lot as a band performing together. There’s a lot of bits of the record of Jellywish that are live. I like to do my songs like the first track on the record and a couple of others in just one take. I would say we put more of a focus on our own interplay with each other, and less about the kind of in the moment, improvisation. The last record and this one is definitely more intentional and planned in that way.

When listening through Jellywish, you posed a lot of questions throughout the record, which created a very thought provoking [listen] for myself. Some of the questions that I really love are: “Should anything be pleasure when suffering is everywhere?” “Is this life too long?” “Can you feel the side of the eye that looks back?” In asking these questions, but not necessarily providing answers, it feels like an attempt of making sense of the world in a way that feels incomplete and all the more relatable. What was your thought process behind incorporating all these open ended questions?

I think hearing the questions read back like that, I’ve never really heard them quite like that. The first thing that comes to mind is that some of them, maybe all of them, are rhetorical and I think that’s a part of the songwriting is asking questions that you want to believe. In some way you feel these questions are true, but you’re asking for a reassurance from the world. A lot of the questions and ruminations in this record feel like it’s like a voice, a human perspective asking the forces around us, what is going on here? Why? Why are we doing this? But I think we know that the answer is wrapped up in the question. It’s kind of how we navigate the question, versus how we answer. We don’t answer it. We just sort of navigate it. I think the questions that don’t necessarily give us answers could lead us to having more sense of peace within all of these uncertainties.

That is so beautiful, just the idea of not necessarily focusing on solutions, but how to navigate and process these feelings and emotions. I think that’s so important. I’m curious if there is one track on the record that stands out as the track you took the biggest creative risk on?

I wish that there was a riskier track. I’d like to make the next Florist record really experimental and be less subtle in that way. I think the first track “Levitate” is a bit different. I’m singing very low in that track, which is something that I’ve never really done before. I’m singing differently and the track itself starts off a bit pessimistic to establish a kind of darkness and hopelessness in the record. I think that’s pretty different from Florist’s typical perspective of everything is still beautiful or everything is going to be okay. I would say that’s probably the most that we’ve deviated from playing it safe. I really wanted the record to be easy to listen to and easy to kind of get into your mind in a gentle way. The last track “Gloom Designs” is also a song that I really love because our arrangement for it is a bit unconventional. I really love music not following the standards of verse chorus verse and this part comes in and it’s just this sound collage. I’m interested in exploring different formats for songs.

For “Have Heaven” you have collaborated with visual artist Kohana Wilson for the music video. Did you have any say of how it was going to look or did the artist interpret the song themselves? What was that process like?

Yeah, shout out to Kohana Wilson, they are such an amazing artist. I was a fan of their work, both illustration and animation and then we reached out about this video. It’s the first animation that Florist has ever done. I think that that animation really works well with Florist, because it feels like it’s appropriate in its own world. It felt like something that I really wanted to do with the sort of world building of this album and to not quite always anchor it in reality…or the reality we know as it. The video is really Kohana’s own interpretation of the song. I mentioned a little bit about how it’s a song observing the mundane and having this sense of I could just jump through a portal right now and be in another dimension. I think about that stuff a lot. I kind of feel like what we see here is the tip of the iceberg—our reality, what we see in touch. Kohana just took that little bit of my own information about the song and made this absolutely gorgeous, perfect interpretation of exactly that: jumping into this other realm where we are super connected to each other and everything. I think it definitely won’t be the last animation and I hope it’s not the last time that we work with Kohana again because it was just amazing.

What goals do you have for yourself in this new year either as an artist or just as a person?

I’m working on some new music right now. It’s been a big project for me, I’ve been working on it for the last five or six years. I’m trying to combine the way that I approach songwriting with the way that I approach my other music practice, which is basically improvising electronic music. My personal goal is to connect more with people and practice what I preach. I want to take care of the people that I love in my family. We’re entering a really unknown time in the world and in the United States, you can’t ignore this stuff that’s happening anymore. I really want to use as much of my life force as I can to help the people in my life. We just have to stay close and stick together and be connected. I think that’s my goal and that’s the goal of Jellywish too.

www.florist.life

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