EMILY SPRAGUE survived a hit-and-run collision on her bicycle in the winter of 2014. The wreck left Sprague traumatized with a broken neck, a severely broken arm, and a summer spent in isolation in her New York apartment.
Two years later, Sprague released The Birds Outside Sang, the debut LP of Florist—a former solo project turned four-piece made up of other musicians of the Brooklyn art collective the Epoch. The album is essentially a chronological retelling of Sprague's painful journey toward recovery, full of existential confusion in the midst of a prolonged crisis. Each song acts as an auditory journal entry, most of which were written in the depths of Sprague's isolation, recounting the experience with an uninhibited intensity through despairing pop and sythetic folk. The opening track, "Dark Light," begins with a simple distorted keyboard riff seemingly panged out in desperation.
"I was on some medication that was pretty scary for probably too long, and I basically was just knocked out for the better part of the summer of 2014," Sprague says. "I wrote ['Dark Light'] sitting in my little studio room with my one arm in a huge cast and with my neck brace. I managed to get myself off of this chair that I would sit in every day, hooked up my tape machine and played the song, and that's the recording on the album." Sprague wound up recording five of the album's 11 songs this way. "It was a weird, weird process, but I wanted sort of the essence of that to remain on the album."