Everybody Scream / Hammer
(Florence + the Machine / Lorde)
I spent much of the last ten days in Los Angeles, getting sunburnt on park blankets and beach picnics with some of my dearest friends. We played card games and explored a recreated Roman villa and read (and bought) books and talked about the next chapters of our lives and went to concerts.
One of my favorite things to do by myself and with other people is experience live music. Sharing that experience with someone I love can build some of my very favorite memories, and this week I had the privilege of getting that twice with several different people, in two experiences that felt in conversation with one another.
Both shows were at The Forum, five days apart. Lorde’s Ultrasound tour was long planned, the impetus for this trip (or at least for its timing). Florence + the Machine’s Everybody Scream tour was spontaneous, a decision Anderson and I made the day before.
Both shows I experienced with friends I’ve known since college. Anderson and I have been friends since freshman year when we worked together on the first-year director short film. She was the DP and I was the sound recordist/designer. A dozen years later, she still works with cameras and I still work with sound waves. Emma and I were friends my sophomore year — her freshman year — when we met through the boys we both went on to begin and end relationships with. We grew apart, but when I moved back to Chicago in 2021, we reconnected and she introduced me to Allyna. You know how sometimes you just know that you’re destined to be friends with someone? I felt that with both of them.
It was so special to experience these artists who I’ve been listening to for decades with people I’ve known for decades. How lucky am I!!!
Both Lorde and Florence have an incredible way of channeling energy through their bodies and their voices.
They also both harness a deep vulnerability and, specifically, a deep vulnerability about their relationship to womanhood. In the albums each was touring this spring (Lorde’s Virgin and Florence’s Everybody Scream), they each unearth something difficult.
Lorde wrote about her body, her eating disorder and her gender identity. In “Hammer”, the opening of the album and of the show, she sings “some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man”. In “Broken Glass”, she says “I let myself get sucked in by arithmetic / Felt great to strip, new waist to hip / I hate to admit just how much I paid for it” and “I spent my summer getting lost in math; making weight took all I had … I’m scared to quit, loosen my grip / It’s tough to admit just how much I get from it”.
She’s quoted in Rolling Stone referencing the duct tape across her chest that accompanied the album rollout and symbolized her evolving idea of her own gender: “It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.”
Violence is the right word. There was a violence I felt in her show and in Florence’s, this sense that being a woman, being a person, allowing yourself to access what’s happening inside of you and truly feeling your feelings, is violent and raw and scary and hard.
Florence’s show featured four dancers who serve as her coven on stage. They danced chaotically, jerking their limbs, crawling and writhing through smoke. It created a sense of cathartic, feral madness, of release through raw expression.
Florence also captures and transmits the violence of womanhood. She sings about her reproductive health, the ectopic pregnancy and burst fallopian tube that nearly claimed her life. She sings about the decision to be a mother or not and about the space she feels or doesn’t feel between herself and herself on stage.
In King, she describes an argument with a partner over children: “But a woman is a changeling, always shifting shape / Just when you think you have it figured out, something new begins to take / What strangе claws are these scratching at my skin / I nеver knew my killer would be coming from within / I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king”.
“What strange claws are these scratching at my skin / I never knew my killer would be coming from within” — violent!!
Lorde and Florence each started both their album and their live show with a thesis statement of sorts. For Lorde, it’s “Hammer”. The lyric I quoted above (“some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man”) addresses her body through gender identity.
But I think even more so, the song addresses the relationship between her body and her art as a way of expressing what’s inside of her. The full lyric is this: “I run and I sing and I skip and I dance / Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man”.
The crux of Florence’s album and live show is “Everybody Scream”. It’s about movement and expression, but it’s also about Florence’s relationship with performance. I hear in it the tension of being a human trying to make honest art with so many millions of eyes on her and I also hear her complicated love of the power she has there on stage.
One chorus is: “Here, I don’t have to be quiet; here, I don’t have to be kind / Extraordinary, normal all at the same time / But look at me run myself ragged, blood on the stage / But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?”
The second chorus is: “Here, I can take up the whole of the sky / Unfurling, becoming my full size / And look at me burst through the ceiling; aren’t you so glad you came / Breathless and begging and screaming my name”
Here, I don’t have to be quiet! Here, I can take up the whole of the sky! Becoming my full size! She also says “I can come here and scream as loud as I want”! Performing gives her a release that strikes me as both painful and incredibly cathartic.
And both women don’t seem to shy away from those emotions in a meta sense as well. Both Lorde and Florence addressed the audience with their vulnerabilities. I happened to see both shows on their penultimate tour dates and in the final stop on the tour, which clearly brought up emotions for both artists. Lorde spoke about how this tour has changed her, perhaps more than other tour or album process has. Florence was overcome with emotion towards the end of one song (I believe “Spectrum”? But possibly “King”.) and asked the band, crew, and audience to give her a minute to collect herself. She spoke frankly about how difficult “You Can Have It All” is to sing, both vocally and emotionally.
It was a raw reminder that these larger-than-life artists are just people, vulnerable and fragile. Florence fills arenas with her voice and her presence, but she also, by her own admission, can’t stop writing about men not texting her back.
The same feeling followed me from LA to Santa Fe, where I went with friends on Saturday to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Through the introductory video and many of the exhibit captions, it was impossible to escape her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. I won’t pretend to know much about the lore there — I’m sure there are many books to be read about their relationship — but the glimpses I got were unsettling to me.
Here’s this incredible artist, uniquely successful during her lifetime and after, who has given generations of people new perspectives on nature, sexuality, artistic expression, and themselves. Yet, it seems that she spent much of her adult life following around some guy. And sure, love is powerful and worth investing in, whatever, whatever. But I get the sense that she was often unhappy. She followed her husband and his family to Lake George, which she allegedly hated. She then started spending parts of her years in the Southwest and it doesn’t seem like he joined her.
Even larger-than-life women, even those able to harness what’s within them — the rage and terror and violence, the curiosity and awe and beauty — even they can be made to feel small.
It’s harrowing, but it’s also reassuring. I can be confident and also insecure. I can own my talent and competence and also feel imposter syndrome. I can, as I expressed to friends over margaritas in New Mexico, feel genuinely fulfilled and happy with my life as it is and also long for something different. I can feel at peace and also find release in a communal scream expanding through an arena.
I can have a special trip seeing old friends and making new friends and lying in the sun like a lizard, and I can also be very tired and excited to go home to my sweet apartment and community!
My Berklee class aligned beautifully with this week of concerts as the syllabus focused on live events and touring. I had to plan a detailed tour schedule for a fake band, which was surprisingly difficult and fun, and I also had to answer a discussion question about live performance. Here’s my answer, if you’re interested (but please, for my ego, know that I wrote this in approx. four minutes on the train and we don’t get graded on discussion posts <3). :)
What does it mean to put on a performance?
How can an artist create a unique and memorable event?
Share an example of a live music event that blew you away, and explain why.
Putting on a quality performance is about engaging the fans from the minute they enter until they leave and with more energy than just playing through a straight set list. It should be about providing an experience that's different than what they can get from listening at home, not live.
Artists can use lighting, pre-show set-lists, choreography/blocking, and other live twists on songs and instrumentation to create a memorable event.
I've been to a lot of incredible live shows, but the two most recent were just this past week - I saw Lorde and Florence + the Machine both at The Forum in LA just a few days apart from one another and they both blew me away. Both Florence and Lorde are phenomenal live performers, bringing so much energy to their shows. They also both used lighting to fill the arena space, used extended intros and outros from songs to give the audience something unexpected and unique, used dancers and choreography to elevate the experience, and made good use of the Jumbrotron screens around the arena to not just show the artists but to enhance the visuals. They both also I think nailed the balance of speaking to the audience in a way that adds to the experience rather than detracting, saving most of the time and energy for the music, but occasionally addressing the audience in a way that felt real and vulnerable, like they were truly connecting with the many thousands of us.
I have two more days out here, these ones spent with my parents and their dog in a camper van, and then to my sweet apartment I will return. <3