Glowing Brightly - By Florist
TITLE: Glowing Brightly
ARTIST: Florist
GENRE: Synth / Indie Folk / Lo-Fi
MOOD: Grief / Nostalgia
SIMILAR TO: Frankie Cosmos, Adult Mom, Emily Yacina
RELEASE DATE: August 11, 2017
Highly anticipated since their debut album, The Birds Outside Sang (2016), Florist declared they would release their new album If Blue Could Be Happiness (2017), on September 29th. Since then, they have been releasing new singles starting with “What I Wanted To Hold”, and now “Glowing Brightly”.
Like the rest of their music, the new song is a beautiful myriad of feelings, emotions, and synthesized sound. It employs plodding drum beats, ringing and metallic guitar chords, and minimalistic synthesizers that somehow transitions the weird beeps and hums into gentle and calming background noise that adds to the melody.
Emily Sprague, the lead singer and lyrical genius of Florist, has a lovely and vaguely melancholic voice. Somehow, almost everything she writes is powerful, existential, and universal to the experiences that everyone faces. In this song in particular, it’s about finding consolation and comfort through nature during times of distress. The lyrics are both personal and moving; through precise and poignant poetry, Sprague mourns the death of her mother who died earlier this year by longingly singing, “Mom, I love you, I still hear your voice inside my sleep.”
It’s honest and haunting and more than a little bit heartbreaking. There seems to be something special about this song, as if it has some sort of atmosphere or energy. When Sprague sings to her mother, “Next time you see me I’ll be glowing brightly, outside with the birds in the middle of the yard,” you viscerally feel her pain. Although the song is tinged with impermanence and endings, the way that Sprague candidly speaks about her grief allows the message to transcend its simplicity and spins it into something more beautiful, more alive, and almost seems to give it a life of it’s own.