Florist is an indie folk band based out of New York that has been making cozy and introspective music since 2013. They’ve put out four albums that have garnered critical and commercial acclaim, contributed the song “Riding Around In The Dark” to the I Saw The TV Glow soundtrack, been featured in a Tiny Desk Concert that’s gotten over a million views, and toured with artists like Pinegrove, Skullcrusher, and Lomelda.

Florist’s upcoming album Jellywish is described as “[a record that] dares to present a realm of possibility and imagination in a time that feels evermore prescriptive, limiting, and awful.” It’s one of my favorite records this year and I was so grateful to be able to talk with lead singer and songwriter, Emily Sprague, about their new album and so much more.

I'm really interested in your songwriting process. This album asks some really big questions. There's a lot about reframing thought patterns to find joy while still living through tough times. When you started out writing this album are you going in with these specific concepts in mind or do you just write the music and find the themes from there?

For me, the writing process is the most time-wise, I guess, spent just really kind of collecting experiences and thoughts, and not even necessarily writing. It's always kind of been that way for me. I will start to notice these themes coming up a lot with what I'm thinking about and feeling, and then the actual writing of the songs usually happens over the course of a couple of months when I've arrived at that place of like, this is like what's really been coming up for me lately, lately as in, you know, over the last years even. The songs from there almost will just be sort of things that manifest out of the marinating in the themes and the thoughts.

So I started writing the songs for Jellywish knowing that it would be this new album last fall. When I wrote the first song for it, at that point, it was kind of intentionally about the themes that are in the record. But at the same time, there was one song in particular that I had written actually right after we finished the self-titled record back in 2019 when we first recorded the first bit of recording for that. That kind of re-found a home in this record.

I would say I spent a lot of time thinking mainly and then the writing of the songs happens more quickly, like over a couple of months, and I'm feeling a bit more intentional about what it's all specifically about. The songs themselves end up, I think, deciding their own things in certain ways. But yeah, it's definitely intentional.

Image: Jellywish album cover

Your tour starts in about a month. Is there a song from this new record that you're most excited to perform live?

I'm really excited to play “Have Heaven”, and “Gloom Designs”. We've actually played most of the songs from the record once since recording live. We played a little hometown show a couple months ago. We were trying out a lot of new stuff there, and, yeah, it's really fun.

We went into this recording process for JellyWish actually after having spent about two months just learning the songs as a band, rehearsing them together, and working out how we wanted the arrangements to be and stuff intentionally without recording capabilities to then bring that to the actual recording time, which is something we've never quite done in the past. It's been a bit more sort of improvisational or intuitive. We've recorded past things, figuring it out as we learn the songs, but this was different. I think it's a way that we wanted to go, in terms of our band dynamic and the live sets. To be something that is a bit more rooted in that live performance cause we've all gotten to know what it's like to play with each other after many years so that feels good and fun. I'm excited to play all of them.

Your Bandcamp and your Spotify bios describe Florist as a “friendship project”, and I thought that was just really sweet. Can you tell me more about your friendship with the band?

When the band started back in 2013 it was still sort of my songs. I met Rick [Spataro] and Johnny [Baker], and within that next year, Felix [Walworth], and it started as everyone kind of playing with me as this band in the background style thing.

I think when we first started getting together it was clear that we were drawn to each other for reasons other than just to play music together, really It is kind of more than that for us, and behind the scenes, and after we [Florist] maybe never tour again or whatever, they're the people who we spend holidays together and stuff. We know each other's families. We are each other's best friends, and that foundation is really important in terms of how we make decisions and move forward in this project. It kinda comes before anything else really. We've really gone through a lot together and still want to. It's a huge part of what Florist is and why it even sounds the way that it does.

Image: V Haddad

One of my favorite things about your music is the use of subtle little noises in the background. There’s a lot of little synths and drones, or field recordings of a river or birds chirping. You just really build this incredible atmosphere. Can you walk me through how you do these soundscapes? Is this something you think about when you're writing the lyrics, or is it more so the song's been recorded and you do it afterward?

Going back to the beginning of Florist again, one of the first things that we ever did as friends exploring music together was all sort of play the first ever synthesizer that any one of us got, which was a Moog Rogue. It's a tiny little monophonic synth and it has some controls on the panel that you can sound design with essentially, and you can push it to some bird sounds or water sounds kind of things. The band started with this real love of synthesizers, you know. Johnny [Baker] is really into sampling and does a lot of that on all of our recordings. We've always used these synthesizers to kind of make the sound. A lot of it, I think, is us just having fun and wanting to be sort of deviant in terms of where an arrangement can go and how we can be strange, but still present this somewhat easy to listen to regular kind of little pop track. I'm really obsessed with synthesis and stuff. To me, it takes a really specific florist track to not have anything like that on it. It either has that stuff on it, or there's a reason why it doesn't. We're always just making weird sounds and using lots of different effects and gear and stuff to try and find new sounds.

I Saw The TV Glow was my favorite film last year. I found it so moving and the soundtrack is just incredible. Your song “Riding Around in the Dark” is great on its own, but it's use in the movie is especially devastating. I'm interested in how you got involved in that project.

[Director] Jane Schoenburn reached out to me pretty much directly. It was a cold call, like, as they're just sort of a music fan. We had a call together and discussed what the movie was about. We shared a lot about each other's childhoods, and feelings about existing in the world being queer, being trans, you know, having all these early experiences and the horror of it.

I wanted to write from that place of how I felt when I was growing up and had that feeling of “this is not my world. I don't know where I am or what this is”, growing up in a really, really small town where I felt totally alienated by my interests and my presentation and all this stuff. A lot of the Florist songs and a lot of the songs I write are really personal and about all the different times of my life in some ways, but this was like, I really went back there and wanted to kind of capture this feeling that I remember of both being so broodingly devastated about what is happening, but at the same time having this lust for life and wanting to find something else.

The version of the song that appears in the scene at the end of the film was the demo that I made and sent to Jane, and basically during editing it was being used while we recorded the full band version which is on the soundtrack. The demo version just kind of became what they all preferred. Like, this is what kind it has to be, this hits in this different way. Then when we made the full band version, the music team was like “We really love this, so we should put this on the soundtrack”. That's why there's two different versions. That was an amazing project to take part in, and I'm totally honored that Jane asked me. Writing that song was really special.

Image: I Saw The TV Glow (2024)

Another one of my favorite songs of yours is 43 off the self-titled record. I think one of the things I like so much about your music is it’s not really telling you how to feel or telling you a direct story. It's more like setting a scene and giving you the pieces. I've listened to that song a lot, and I kind of have slightly different reads of it every time. When you write is ambiguity something that you're thinking about? Are you trying keep things vague sometimes?

Hmmm, I guess I would say I do like to keep things a bit vague, but I like to try and get to this point where the song has a specific feeling, but a vague interpretation, which I find to be really fun and interesting. If you feel something so strongly, and you know why, but it's not exactly spelled out for you, those are kind of my favorite things to find from other creators and out in the world and nature. I think I write from that place of having those experiences in life, and then wanting the song to be this sort of catalyst for feelings. When I'm writing, a lot of the times I’m sort of processing, and maybe releasing is one way you could think of it, but just sort of meeting these feelings and trying to commit them to something that is actually in the reality, and not just in the air, or in memory. That's kind of my fixation of writing music, it's like magic. It's just really amazing that we can pull out these things and solidify feeling. I think the vagueness is always something that's felt important to me in terms of it also being from my life experience, I'm not writing from anyone else's. I also really feel strongly that my songs that I write are always accessible to anyone so it doesn't feel like it's just my story, because I believe that we share a lot as humans.

What are some inspirations for you in a general sense as an artist, and then specifically for this new record?

I'm really inspired by visual artists. I have a big collection of photo books, like photo monograph books, and I also love paintings. I love contemporary landscape painting. I'm really inspired by that approach to, I guess world building, or a bit of a setting like a silent emotional tone. I think that's a really cool idea. Even though music is something we hear, I like to try and maybe kind of combine the two, or I'm inspired by that, so then maybe that can be a part of the music where you have this sort visual sense that goes along with it. I love poetry as well. I'm really bad at naming artists off the top of my head. I'm the type of person who just draws a blank if you're like “what's your favorite movie?”, I can't think of a single movie.

I would say Etel Adnan is one of my all-time favorites artists. She was a poet and painter, and just really inspired by all these different ways that we as humans are encountering life, and encountering each other, and encountering our feelings and processing them or not. That concept is the biggest thing that was inspiring me to think about when writing this record. How are we connected, and how do we speak to each other? How do we relate to each other? There are all these different ways to do that, and that to me is sort of really magical. That's what I was inspired to focus on.

Image: Etel Adnan

When I think of your music I think of nature. I listened to the new album on my headphones while walking through a nature trail yesterday and it really amplified it. The band is called Florist, what's your connection with nature and do you have a favorite flower?

I really love the lily of the valley flower. I wouldn't say it's necessarily my favorite. I'm also the kind of person who, like, my favorites are always changing, whatever it may be. I like the idea of the florist, the character, being an arranger of something that already exists, but is presented in a way that can be used for an occasion to give someone a feeling, or give someone a gift, or have this role that gets a bit of a spotlight on it, a bit of a highlight. The songs that we make, we think of them as being already basically existing in the world, if that makes sense. When we make our songs, it's just sort of trying to highlight these things that we all care about and arrange to present as our version of like a little flower bouquet, basically.

I'm from a tiny, tiny, tiny, rural town where I'm an only child, I just spent my entire childhood alone in the woods. Whether or not it's directly referenced or it’s a theme of a florist song or not, it's just fundamentally a part of who I am, and it'll always be a part of that music. I obviously care a lot about the natural world and respect it tremendously, and I'm humbled by it. I feel like we ought to all just respect that a bit more, and that's obviously a part of Jellywish as well.

Image: V Haddad

Thanks to Emily Sprague for talking with me about their new record. The new Florist album, Jellywish, comes out April 4th on Double Double Whammy Records, and you can catch them in Austin on May 13th at Antones.