20 Moderation (2019)
“Do I look moderate to you?” asks the never-knowingly subtle Florence Welch rhetorically on this James Ford-produced one-off single. Opening with bar-room piano stabs, it soon blossoms into a galloping rocker, Welch battling an inner voice suggesting she perhaps rein it in. Needless to say she doesn’t listen.
19 Wish That You Were Here (2016)
Welch’s windswept wail and penchant for atmospheric harp flutters have made her catnip for fantastical film soundtracks. On this undulating, near seven-minute epic, taken from Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Welch mourns relationships fractured by constant touring. “I wanted to go home, to be where you are,” she roars as drums crash like angry waves.
18 Big God (2018)
On 2018’s fourth album High As Hope, Welch and her evolving studio cohorts (the more static ‘+ the Machine’ are for live shows) sought to dial down the bluster. On the experimental, relatively stripped back Big God – co-written by Jamie xx – Welch prowls around a loping piano figure, before a meandering sax solo from Kamasi Washington slowly takes over.
17 Never Let Me Go (2011)
After the ubiquitous success of debut album Lungs, Welch fast-tracked its follow-up Ceremonials, decamping to Abbey Road studios with producer Paul Epworth. While Lungs skipped around genres mischievously, the opulent Ceremonials focused more on widescreen chamber pop, with the Halo-esque Never Let Me Go a prime example of refined excess.
16 Sky Full of Song (2018)
High As Hope’s lead single feels like a soft caress in comparison to the usual cold, hard slap of a big chart-facing hit. Lyrically it ponders the paradox of performing live, exploring the huge highs that only temporarily pierce moments of strange isolation. “I thought I was flying but maybe I’m dying tonight,” Welch sings softly over distant harp flutters.
15 Drumming Song (2009)
While her early pop contemporaries Lily Allen and Adele turned relationships into soap operas and kitchen-sink dramas, Welch spun them into gothic fantasies. On Lungs’ propulsive fourth single, a new crush elicits the kind of high-wire emotions more akin to drowning, an exhausted Welch left “as empty as that beating drum”.
14 What the Water Gave Me (2011)
Named after Frida Kahlo’s 1938 painting, Ceremonials’ more rock-leaning promotional single (AKA the one before the proper single), finds Welch returning to a lyrical trope; trying to understand the vastness of something too enormous to understand. Here she is overwhelmed by bodies of water, a place both beautiful and deadly.
13 South London Forever (2018)
Created at the start of her 30s, High As Hope excels when Welch looks back at her youth with misty-eyed clarity. Over airy production, here she half-remembers nights spent holding hands with strangers “high on E”, and relishes in the false certainty of “it doesn’t get better than this”. Later, as the song starts to wrestle with itself, Welch snaps: “Oh God, what do I know?”
12 King (2022)
Around the two-minute 45 seconds mark of this first single from next month’s Dance Fever, Welch unleashes an almighty, wordless roar, as if making it very clear that High As Hope’s sonic retreat was an anomaly. From there the song keeps building, like a raging fire fuelled by the opening verse’s slow burn anger at societal expectations placed on women.
11 Sweet Nothing (2012)
In 2012, Welch dipped her toe in EDM’s WKD-coloured waters not once but twice, with Calvin Harris first sending a remix of Ceremonials’ Spectrum to No 1. Three months later she was back with Harris at the top on this gloriously sugary confection, Welch sounding as if she’s having the time of her life while Harris unleashes a rapid-fire electronic blitzkrieg around her.
10 Dog Days Are Over (2008)
Like most songs on Lungs, this single’s appeal has been dampened slightly by its ubiquity. There was a time in 2010 where you couldn’t shop, watch TV or wander around a festival field without hearing its opening harp trills, or that thumping chorus. Still, taken at a distance, it remains a glorious head-rush of emotions, Welch barely keeping up with its galloping ecstasy.
9 No Light, No Light (2011)
A lot of second album Ceremonials teeters on the brink of self-parody, with everything turned up to 11. On the sky-scraping No Light, No Light, Welch revels in the OTT, swishing around cascading choirs and harps before ditching her highfalutin lyrical tropes in favour of direct emotion: “Would you leave me if I told you what I’d done?” she asks during the song’s majestic bridge.
8 My Love (2022)
New album Dance Fever’s latest single finds Welch trying to find inspiration in a world locked down (“my arms emptied, the skies emptied” she panics in the song’s finale). What started as an acoustic “sad little poem” has been buffed by Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley into a pensive banger, all propulsive dance rhythms and tentative exaltation.
7 What Kind of Man (2015)
By third album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, Welch et al had reached festival headline status, a fact underlined months later at Glastonbury. On the album’s combative lead single, the pretty harp flourishes of old are swapped for rugged guitar riffs, with Welch utilising distinctly masculine rock tropes to admonish a useless man.
6 Shake It Out (2011)
In 2011, Florence + the Machine were big enough to be handed a coveted performance slot on The X Factor, a nod to Welch’s vocal influence on a plethora of “kooky” young hopefuls. They performed this maximalist baroque pop rager, which finds Welch trying to shake an almighty hangover by exorcising it from her body by sheer force alone.
5 Cosmic Love (2009)
Another song created on a hangover, Lungs’ sixth single takes a classic subject – being really really in love – and straps it to a rocket aimed at the moon. There is not an ounce of subtlety on display here (its firework-esque harp coda is joined by the sound of actual fireworks, for example), which only makes its youthful, cartwheeling exuberance all the more accurate.
4 St Jude (2015)
Across How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful’s 11 tracks, Welch invokes various characters, from Persephone to the Virgin Mary. On the delicate St Jude, which strips everything back to Welch’s pin-sharp voice and a distant electronic rumble, she references both the “patron saint of the lost causes” and the 2013 storm that shared her name. Somewhere in the middle sits perhaps her most genuinely affecting song.
3 Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) (2009)
Written at the behest of her label, who asked Welch for something more upbeat to balance out Lungs’ darker fare, Rabbit Heart bristles with the fear that comes with reaching the point of no return. Aware she was about to dive into fame’s chasm, the song’s lyrics abound with sacrificial imagery (“Who is the lamb and who is the knife?”), all wrapped up in sprightly production that gave the band their first proper hit.
2 Hunger (2018)
Written initially as a private poem, High As Hope’s second single strips away any artifice and explores Welch’s relationship with drink and drugs (she’s been sober since 2014), and her teenage eating disorder. “At 17 I started to starve myself,” she sings, a bracing opening that’s soon warmed by the chorus’ light-footed melody and Welch’s sage reflections on the complex beauty of “vibrant youth”.
1 Ship to Wreck (2015)
While making How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, Welch has said producer Markus Dravs told her to stop writing songs about water. Thankfully, she ignored him, with the album’s lead single – a galloping mix of acoustic guitar, hammond organ and glockenspiel – likening a broken relationship to a battered ship being washed up on the shore. Throughout Welch conjures up images of great white sharks and killer whales to represent her demons, continuing her philosophy of never writing small songs about big emotions. By the glorious middle eight, Welch’s propensity for self-destruction has fully taken hold: “We are lost, and into the breach, we got tossed,” she sings, “And the water is coming in fast”. Ruin never sounded so wonderful.
FAQs
What is Florence and the Machines biggest song? ›
“Dog Days Are Over” remains one of the best Florence + The Machine songs and the group's highest-charting hit, essentially launching her from the MTV Video Music Awards stage and into the stratosphere.
What is Florence the machine ranked? ›The best album credited to Florence + The Machine is Lungs which is ranked number 710 in the overall greatest album chart with a total rank score of 2,609. Florence + The Machine is ranked number 323 in the overall artist rankings with a total rank score of 6,420.
What was Florence and the Machine 1st hit? ›Rabbit Heart became Flo's chart breakthrough, debuting at Number 12 on the Official Singles Chart in July 2009.
Is Florence and the Machine married? ›Florence is not married. She was in a relationship with Stuart Hammond, a literary editor, from 2008 to 2011. The couple was rumoured to be engaged but later split after three years. She was also linked to Felix White from The Maccabees in 2016.
What song was #1 the longest? ›"Old Town Road" holds the record for the longest stretch at No. 1 with 19 weeks.
What is Number 1 song of all time? ›Machine Gun Kelly is ranked number 7,742 in the overall artist rankings with a total rank score of 83 (this takes into account any aliases or variations).
Is Bob Seger one of the greatest? ›With a career spanning six decades, Seger has sold more than 75 million records worldwide, making him one of the world's best-selling artists of all time. Seger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012.
Is Florence and the machine a band or solo? ›Florence and the Machine (stylised as Florence + the Machine) are an English indie rock band that formed in London in 2007, consisting of lead vocalist Florence Welch, keyboardist Isabella Summers, guitarist Rob Ackroyd, harpist Tom Monger, and a collaboration of other musicians.
What are Florence and the Machine fans called? ›Welch is quoted by Cover Media as saying: "They've given themselves their own name. The Flos! I get messages saying, 'I saw you on the Tube', or in this place and I'm like, 'I wasn't there'. There are quite a few doppelgangers out there, for sure."
How did Machine Girl get their name? ›
The actual name of the band is borrowed from a hyper-violent Japanese action flick called The Machine Girl, which is about a vengeful orphan girl with a machine-gun arm. But the name also represents the "female energy" that Stephenson wants the character to embody.
What was Anthony Hamilton's first hit? ›Hamilton was first introduced to mainstream audiences with his singing of the chorus of Nappy Roots 2002 single "Po' Folks" which earned a Grammy Award nomination for "Best Rap/Sung Collaboration" in 2003. "Po' Folks" is the second single from the multi-platinum Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz album.
Is Florence and the Machine autistic? ›The Florence and the Machine star was diagnosed with both dyslexia and dyscalculia in her youth — two sets of “learning difficulties,” as she often heard them described, inaccurately, during her school years.
Was Florence and the Machine in Gossip Girl? ›Florence & The Machine appears in 'Gossip Girl'. Florence & The Machine have appeared in an upcoming episode of 'Gossip Girl'.
Did Billie Eilish open for Florence and the Machine? ›Just one small suggestion. I remember seeing Billie Eilish perform live for the first time, at Charlotte's Spectrum Center in October 2018, when she opened for Florence + The Machine — when Eilish was just 16 years old, when barely any adult had ever heard her name. She was a weird and wonderful revelation.
What is the shortest song to hit #1? ›The Shortest Hot 100 Hits
While it just misses the second list above, Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs' “Stay” is the shortest No. 1: just 1:38 in length. The classic led the Nov. 21, 1960, Hot 100.
- The Stone Roses - Fool's Gold (9.53) ...
- Primal Scream - Come Together (10.21) ...
- David Bowie - Station To Station (10.14) ...
- The Doors - The End (11.43) ...
- Orbital - Chime (12.46) ...
- Flowered Up - Weekender (12.53*) ...
- Mogwai - Mogwai Fear Satan (16.19) ...
- Spiritualized - Cop Shoot Cop (17.14)
According to Guinness World Records, Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" (1942) as performed by Bing Crosby is the best-selling single worldwide, with estimated sales of over 50 million copies.
What are 3 of the most popular songs? ›- Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana.
- Imagine - John Lennon.
- One - U2.
- Billie Jean - Michael Jackson.
- Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen.
- Hey Jude - The Beatles.
- Like A Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan.
- I Can't Get No Satisfaction - Rolling Stones.
Who has the most 1 hits in music history? ›
The Beatles have tallied the most No. 1 hits in the 61-year history of the Hot 100, with 20. Their closest competitor is Mariah Carey, with 18.
Who did MGK name himself after? ›Behind The Name
“I got the name Machine Gun Kelly because of my rapid-fire delivery when I was 15 and started doing shows,” he once said. MGK shared his first mixtape, Stamp of Approval, in 2006. From there, he built a local fan base in Cleveland where his eventual stage name started to take shape.
It is Machine Gun Kelly's second No. 1 album, following “Tickets to My Downfall” nearly two years ago, and is the first rock album to top the Billboard 200 chart since AC/DC's “Power Up” in November 2020.
Why did MGK change his name? ›Why Colson Baker Ditched 'Machine Gun Kelly' Name for Acting: “I Don't Feel Like Being 'Inception' in a Person” The chart-topper — and now movie star with the violent Western 'The Last Son' — says it's all about "respect for the art" when it comes to embracing his given name.
Who is the greatest frontman of all time? ›1. Bruce Springsteen. Bruce is the link between folk, '60s R&B, punk, and of course, rock and roll. He's the common man's arena superhero and in his mid sixties, his concerts still last over three hours.
Who is the best live band ever? ›- Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Last weekend we asked our readers to vote for their favorite live acts of all time. ...
- The Rolling Stones. ...
- The Who. ...
- Pink Floyd. ...
- Led Zeppelin. ...
- U2. ...
- Queen. ...
- Pearl Jam.
- The Beatles. The Beatles are unquestionably the best and most important band in rock history, as well as the most compelling story. ...
- The Rolling Stones. ...
- U2. ...
- The Grateful Dead. ...
- Velvet Underground. ...
- Led Zeppelin. ...
- Ramones. ...
- Pink Floyd.
DJ Machine Girl is the moniker for producer and DJ, Matthew Stephenson, and for their band Machine Girl, with drummer Sean Kelly. They make high energy yet surreal breakcore, digital hardcore, and footwork from the future apocalypse.
Is Bon Jovi a man or a band? ›Bon Jovi is an American rock band formed in 1983 in Sayreville, New Jersey. It consists of singer Jon Bon Jovi, keyboardist David Bryan, drummer Tico Torres, guitarist Phil X, and bassist Hugh McDonald.
What is Florence Welch vocal range? ›Florence Welch has a vocal range of three octaves, spanning Eb3 – F#5 – E6. What is Florence Welch's voice type, classification or fach? Florence Welch is a mezzo-soprano. Her voice is relatively bright, but not as youthful and bright as a true soprano and certainly not as androgynous or dark as a true contralto.
Why is it called a fan? ›
Fan is generally–and very likely correctly–believed to be a shortened form of fanatic. The origin of fanatic (which can be traced back to the Latin word fanum, meaning “sanctuary, temple”) is less often commented on.
What is a fan called in America? ›fan in American English
SYNONYMS supporter, enthusiast, partisan, booster, addict.
“Fan” is also the word for something for blowing air with. It came from the Latin word “vannus” and originally meant “shovel or basket for tossing and winnowing grain”. There is even a suggestion that sports fans originally were the people, who fanned themselves and that way they got their names.
What style is machine girl? ›Style and themes
Pitchfork defined their style as "relentlessly smashing together bits of punk, grindcore, rave, industrial, and more" and "unpredictable and dangerous, full of animalistic rage and uncontrollable energy".
Machine Girl: I use Premiere and After Effects.
Who was the first manufactured girl band? ›One of the first major all-female groups was the Hamilton Sisters and Fordyce, an American trio who successfully toured England and parts of Europe in 1927, recorded and appeared on BBC radio – they toured the US variety and big-time theaters extensively, and later changed their stage name to the Three X Sisters.
What is the most played Hamilton song? ›Guns & Ships - 123 Million Listens
Although Hamilton is the star of the musical, many of the side characters are given chances to shine.
What I'm Feelin'
Was Hamilton the first rap musical? ›“The fact that Hamilton is the first successful hip-hop musical and hip-hop is 40 years old tells you everything you need to know about how late change comes to the very siloed, very white world of theater,” he said.
What celebrity has an autistic child? ›Jenny McCarthy has been a vocal advocate for research when it comes to autism spectrum disorders because her son, Evan, was diagnosed at the age of two.
Is there any actor with autism? ›
Dan Aykroyd
Because of this, he's become one of the most famous contemporary faces of autism in the entertainment industry. The Oscar-nominated writer and actor have professed that his Asperger's factored into his character development in several movies, such as the classic 1984 film Ghostbusters.
While the first season generated the best ratings for a TV show for the streaming service up to that point and quickly garnered a second-season renewal, Gossip Girl ultimately didn't live up to the lofty expectations of both critics and fans of the original series, which ran for six seasons from 2007 to 2012.
Who was the very first Gossip Girl? ›After six seasons of hearing Kristen Bell's mischievous voice-over—and witnessing endless morally inept blasts—the real person behind the secret source was revealed to be none other than Dan Humphrey.
Who is Billie Eilish owned by? ›| Billie Eilish | |
|---|---|
| Works | Discography songs recorded |
| Parent | Maggie Baird (mother) |
| Relatives | Finneas O'Connell (brother) Brian Baird (uncle) |
| Awards | Full list |
The rising star announced on Tuesday (Feb. 8) that she's pulling out of opening for Billie Eilish's Happier Than Ever, the World Tour. “Due to production limitations, I am unable to put on the show that I believe you all deserve,” she tweeted.
What is the highest Disney song? ›The chart-topping 'Encanto' smash now ranks as the biggest hit from multiple generations of Disney animated films.
What was the big song from Top Gun? ›The Love Song: 'Take My Breath Away' by Berlin
Arguably one of the greatest love songs in the history of cinema, Top Gun's wildly successful love theme was written by legendary composer Giorgio Moroder, with lyrics by Tom Whitlock, and performed by L.A.-based new wave outfit Berlin.
- Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. Stairway, denied. ...
- Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin. ...
- Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. ...
- Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix. ...
- Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones. ...
- Hotel California by Eagles. ...
- Light My Fire by The Doors. ...
- Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
#1 "Thriller" - Michael Jackson.
What is the darkest Disney song? ›
...
Hellfire (song)
| "Hellfire" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Tony Jay | |
| Length | 5:22 (including "Heaven's Light") |
| Label | Walt Disney |
| Composer(s) | Alan Menken |
Lin-Manuel Miranda's catchy Encanto soundtrack tune "We Don't Talk About Bruno" has surpassed Frozen's Oscar-winning hit "Let It Go" as the biggest Billboard Hot 100 hit from Disney's animated filmography, according to new tracking data from the publication.
What Disney songs have hit #1? ›The only other Disney songs to chart higher than or match 'Bruno' and reach a Top 5 position on Billboard's Hot 100 are: Aladdin's 'A Whole New World' by Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle (No. 1 in 1993) The Lion King's 'Can You Feel the Love Tonight' by Elton John (No.