Florence Welch Discussed Her Battle With Addiction And An Eating Disorder

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Florence And The Machine’s latest album, High As Hope, is a triumph of honesty. On the record, Florence Welch sings candidly about loneliness, nostalgia, heartbreak, and her struggles with mental health. In an interview with Rolling Stone today, Welch elaborates on some of the album’s themes.

In “Hunger,” one of the lead singles off High As Hope, Welch sings about her battle with an eating disorder, connecting her denial of proper nourishment with larger themes of self-denial. Welch says that she is healthy now, but these struggles are lifelong. Florence told Rolling Stone:

It’s not an overnight thing. It’s funny ’cause it’s one of the most insidious things you can have. I have a healthy relationship with my body now more than I ever did before, but it took me a long time. And it stays with you in really weird ways […] which I was looking at in this record. It’s very hard to accept love. If you’ve been denying yourself nourishment in some way, you also have a tendency to deny yourself emotional nourishment.

Welch also spoke about her struggle with alcohol dependency. The singer has been sober for four years now, but opened up about how her career as a rock artist challenged her road to sobriety. “Being an extreme drinker was a huge part of my identity. Music and alcohol are sort of my first two loves. When I stopped, there was this sense that I was letting some ghost of rock history down that I just couldn’t cope anymore. It was monumental,” Welch said.

Read Florence Welch’s interview with Rolling Stone here, and revisit our reviews of Florence’s album and live show.

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