The Fields Aflame

Sometime in late 2010 I came to know of Florence + the Machine via the Lungs album. I bought the cd and ripped it to upload to my mp3 player and listened to the album on our 2011 Florida Trail thru-hike in the evenings while in the tent. Since then I’ve become a huge fan of her music and have bought her subsequent albums, mostly recently High As Hope, albeit over a year after it was released. I’m a little slow on the music front these days.

It was really one of the songs from that album that I came across on Spotify that sealed the deal to get back into collecting F + M music.

Snippets from my favorite lyrics in the song South London Forever, which is probably my favorite song on the album:

With your black cool eyes and your bitten lips
The world is at your fingertips
It doesn’t get better than this
What else could be better than this?
Oh, don’t you know I have seen
I have seen the fields aflame
And everything I ever did
Was just another way to scream your name

And we’re just children wanting children of our own
I want a space to watch things grow
But did I dream too big?
Do I have to let it go?
What if one day there is no such thing as snow?

Except that green is so green
And there’s a special kind of sadness that seems to come with spring
Oh, don’t you know I have seen
I have seen the fields aflame
And everything I ever did
Was just another way to scream your name

The two particular lines that I love the most:

“What if one day there is no such thing as snow?” —just the way she sings it and the song moves in this portion.

“And there’s a special kind of sadness that seems to come with spring” —I can feel these lyrics because I can completely understand them.

I’ll close with another video of another of my favorite songs on the album: