Everyone is ‘rediscovering’ Florence Price. Leave it to the L.A. Phil to reveal her essence in one of its most important concerts of the year. “Florence is at the start of her rise,” one of the festival’s hosts tells me. “You’ve seen the growth in her work since these last couple of albums. You’re starting to get a sense of what Florence is trying to do with her new material and how the themes relate to each other.”
By the spring of ’10, Florence was writing songs that were more intimate than her work on her previous albums. Her songs were now more autobiographical, and she wasn’t just writing about herself again—she was talking to herself and musing on her experience as a mother and as a woman. “There are some songs on this album which have these great melodies and lyrics and flow. It was really nice to be able to record them live.”
“I’m not the best person to talk about my feelings,” Florence says. “I’m talking about what happened. I’m just giving my side of the story so you can judge for yourself. They’re my feelings, and they’re not necessarily something you want to be hearing from a recording artist. It’s not really an album I was trying to make. I can’t be a musician and be a mother.”
Yet Florence still saw “this little girl in me that needed to be heard.”
“Florence is one of those artists that never really stops creating, not only musically, but lyrically as well,” a woman of Florence’s era says, “You’ve always got to be on your game and you’ve got to keep it fresh.”
It goes without saying that the most difficult task for any musician is to write well and play their instrument to the absolute best. Florence isn’t quite as “unconventional” a musician as her fellow L.A. Phils’ contemporaries, but she has the same love of jazz and blues, and when you listen to her, you’re not surprised that she’s always included bluesy and jazz-influenced songs in her