How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (Deluxe) Florence + The Machine

• 1 Ship To Wreck 03:55
• 2 What Kind Of Man 03:36
• 3 How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful 05:35
• 4 Queen Of Peace 05:07
• 5 Various Storms & Saints 04:09
• 6 Delilah 04:53
• 7 Long & Lost 03:15
• 8 Caught 04:24
• 9 Third Eye 04:20
• 10 St Jude 03:45
• 11 Mother 05:50
• 12 Hiding (Bonus Track) 03:53
• 13 Make Up Your Mind (Bonus Track) 04:01
• 14 Which Witch (Demo / Bonus Track) 04:19
• 15 Third Eye (Demo / Bonus Track) 04:16
• 16 How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (Demo / Bonus Track) 04:33
• Total Runtime 01:09:51

Info for How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (Deluxe)

The result is How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, a collection of songs, written and recorded over the course of 2014. Produced by Markus Dravs (Björk, Arcade Fire, Coldplay) with contributions from Paul Epworth, Kid Harpoon and John Hill, the third album by Florence + the Machine is live-sounding, tune-rich, unhinged in all the right places and powerful in all the best ways. In voice and, ultimately, outlook Florence has never sounded better.

Markus has done a few Arcade Fire albums, Florence tells us, and he s done Björk s Homogenic, which is a huge record for me. And I felt he had that balance of organic and electronic capabilities, managing those two worlds. And, you know, he s good with big sounds. And I like big sounds. And he s good with trumpets, and I knew I wanted a brass section on this record, she adds of a group of musicians who were arranged by Will Gregory of Goldfrapp.

And with Markus, Florence continues, clarifying, I wanted to make something that was big but that had a gentleness to it. That had a warmth, that was rooted. I think that s why we went back more to the live instruments. Something that was band-led almost.

A prime example is the future Florence classic Ship To Wreck: it opens the album, and showcases Florence and Dravs enthusiasm for reframing her distinctive voice.

Ship To Wreck was written with Kid Harpoon, the London-based songwriter/producer with whom she d written Ceremonials Grammy-nominated Shake It Out , during a month-long creative furlough in Los Angeles that also yielded first single What Kind Of Man : a full-force ear-pinning anthem of uplifting defiance.

Kid Harpoon is one of a clutch of old collaborator friends who reunited to help marshal these most personal of songs. Ceremonials producer Paul Epworth helped create the album closing psychedelic blues explosion Mother, while the inner-circle of her nearest and dearest was rounded out by her bandmate and long-time studio right-hand-woman Isa Summers, with whom she wrote the epic title track.

How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful was the first song I wrote for this record, literally as I just came off tour, she explains, and then I went off and had this incredibly chaotic year, and that all went into the record. But in the end, the feeling of How Big How Blue is what I came back to.

The trumpets at the end of that song that s what love feels like to me. An endless brass section that goes off into space. And it takes you with it. You re so up there. And that s what music feels like to me. You want it just to pour out endlessly, and it s the most amazing feeling.

It s alchemy. It s magic. It s the return of Florence + the Machine.

Florence + The Machine
Hailing from South London, Florence Mary Leontine Welch writes songs that occupy the same confessional territory as gossip-loving, genre-bending contemporaries like Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash, Adele, and Lily Allen and the moody, classic art rock of Kate Bush, blending pop, soul, and Baroque arrangements into a sound that earned the young artist considerable buzz in 2007. Managed by the Camden-based DJ duo the Queens of Noize and backed by a rotating lineup of musicians, Florence + the Machine released their debut single, "Kiss with a Fist," on the Moshi Moshi label in June 2008. The critically acclaimed debut album Lungs followed in July 2009 and quickly became one of the year's most popular releases in the U.K., where Florence charted four Top 40 singles in less than 12 months. The songs gathered steam in other parts of the world, too, particularly in America, where "Dog Days Are Over" peaked at number 21, went platinum, and even earned its own performance on the TV show Glee. Lungs was reissued the following year in a two-disc package entitled Between Two Lungs, and included a bonus 12-track disc that featured live versions and remixes. That same year, Florence + the Machine returned to the studio with producer Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, Adele) to begin work on their second full-length outing. The resulting Ceremonials, which successfully expanded on the group's already huge sound, arrived on Halloween in 2011. The following year saw the release of CD and DVD versions of MTV Unplugged, an 11-track set filmed before a small studio audience that featured fan favorites along with a pair of covers, including "Try a Little Tenderness" and the Johnny Cash/June Carter classic "Jackson," the latter of which featured guest vocals by Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme. That same year, Welch announced an upcoming period of inactivity, citing a vocal injury and "a bit of a nervous breakdown" as the root causes. Her much-anticipated third studio long-player, the Markus Dravs-produced How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, was announced in late 2014 and arrived in May 2015.

This album contains no booklet.