Art by Enne Goldstein, you can find more of her work here
In her latest single “Shadow Bloom,” Florist once again captures a moment of floating dust in sunlight in a small attic. It makes me melt — leading artist Emily Sprague’s consistent devotion to understanding her own internal warmth and feeling as much emotion as possible — and her ability to translate this search in her songwriting and this song is no exception. While many of her songs wholesomely center around sunlight, plants, and young memories (I’m pretty sure that Emily Sprague is fairy), Sprague also explores the experience of darkness in a heavy way.
Florist continues this quest in her latest single “Shadow Bloom,” the first release of her soon-to-be-released solo album Emily Alone. In “Shadow Bloom,” she picks an acoustic guitar, harmonizes with herself, and sings about finding solace in simplicity during moments of hardship. As per usual, Sprague reminds me of my connection to what’s bright even when it feels cold. My favorite lyric is, “light comes from a time already gone.” I need to sip on some tea and think about that for a while.
The song is, of course, meditational, especially when accompanied with a slo-mo music video of Sprague drinking tea and watering her plants in her minimalist apartment. She shares a deeper part of herself in the video; we spend a day with her in her wildly delicate world, swaying our fingers in the light reflected against the wall and feeling the warmth coming from her quartz crystal lamp. It is welcoming and sweet, to say the least, and gives me the urge to lay in the grass for a couple of hours and stare at the sky in silence.
After moving from New York to Los Angeles this year, Florist will be releasing a series of tracks she’s been writing for the last seven years in Emily Alone. According to the Instagram post releasing the “Shadow Bloom,” Sprague has created Florist as “a documentary” in which she wants to “translate experiences and emotions into music and art for people to consume in their own lives and feel maybe just a little bit more comfortable in those dark and beautiful spaces.” To say this project is special is an extreme understatement; it’s coming from an artist who literally dedicated an entire album to the color blue.
Emily Alone will be released July 26 with Double Double Whammy records in LA. Do yourself a favor and allow yourself to be peacefully taken on Sprague’s journey seeking warmth and gratitude by watching this video. I should probably start preparing now for the inevitable spiritual awakening I’ll experience with the full album, but in the meantime, I’ll drool over a 10-second-long clip of Sprague cutting a very juicy-looking orange.
