Florence + the Machine: more than a big voice

July 26, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

MINNEAPOLIS

Florence Welch, the big-voiced frontwoman of Florence + the Machine, has been hailed as pop’s most striking nightingale.

She can sing soft and tender or she can wail like a wolf. There’s good reason her 2009 debut disc was titled “Lungs” — her lusciously bravura voice strikes with the force of a hurricane.

Her rich, dreamy voice was perfect for singing about coffins, werewolves and kisses.

Welch showed the depth and range of her voice on her recent CD/DVD of “MTV Unplugged” with stripped down versions of selections from her two studio albums as well as covers of 1960s soul icon Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and the Johnny Cash/ June Carter hit “Jackson,” with rocker Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age.

The Redding classic is her all-time favorite song. “I’m obsessed with it,” she said. “I used to watch him perform that live on YouTube on the Stax Soul Tour. On this one tour I did, I’d watch it every time before I’d go onstage. This mix of a tender song but he puts in something so primal and aggressive — it’s just so perfect.”

But she didn’t try to get whipped up into a frenzy like Otis did. “It just didn’t fit me,” she said. “I just had to take it back and slow it down.”

The famously red-headed Welch actually grew up a brunette in London, the daughter of an advertising executive and an art historian. She was raised on musicals, punk rock and Stevie Nicks.

“I was always singing but my family was always telling me to shut up,” she said. “I used to do a lot of singing in my bedroom to musicals, pretending to be Sandy from ‘Grease’ and that kind of thing.”

Welch dropped out of art college and formed a band with keyboardist Isabella “Machine” Summers that evolved into Florence + the Machine.

After the band released its debut “Lungs,” the song “Dog Days Are Over” (co-written by Welch and Summers) was used in such TV series as “Gossip Girl,” “Covert Affairs” and “Glee” and in the theatrical trailer for the Julia Roberts film “Eat Pray Love.” F+M worked the various media, performing “Dog Days” on the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards and recording “Heavy in Your Arms” for the soundtrack to the blockbuster film “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.”

The momentum continued last year when Florence (sans the Machine) sang on the Grammys and the Oscars.

“Those things have had a huge impact on my career, especially in America. It’s such a vast place,” Welch explained. “I think I got lucky. I have a choice in what I attach my music to, and I’ve never done anything that I didn’t feel comfortable with.”

Last fall, Florence + the Machine released “Ceremonials,” another collection of bombastic pop that sounds bigger and deeper than “Lungs.” It has delivered two radio favorites, “What the Water Gave Me” and “Shake It Out.”

“‘Ceremonials’ is more thought-out” than the first album, Welch said. “I definitely had a lot more clear idea of what I wanted to do musically. Some people say this record is more introspective. There was desperation to the first record, and this one has more elements of light and shades in it.”

Despite her powerful, dramatic performances, Welch, 25, seems a bit uncomfortable onstage between songs.

“For me, music takes you somewhere, and it’s almost like a shield, like an armor,” she said. “You can be protected by it, and the song surrounds you. You are a different animal, as it were, and when the music stops and the song finishes, I can just go back to being myself. And myself is someone who is not used to talking to large crowds.”