Florist is a band that makes three minute existential crises instead of music.
One of their songs, “The Fear of Losing This”, well-I’m actually losing my mind over it, even though the lyrics are intensely mundane. It’s something about how they fit the words with these strange vocals and background noises, it gets to me. Here’s the lyrics:
Open your eyes
And see what you have
But really I know inside it’s all the same in death
But my mind is mine for now
I never asked
To be here at all
So why do I have to face the fear of losing it?
Of losing why I live?
And if I just knew
I’d already be gone
I told you everything
That I had the chance to
And there is no more now
No more light golden low
There is only what I have
Until that goes
Now every night
I pray to the stars
I say please give me love
Or please just give me strength
The colors of love
They all become gray
When everywhere I’ve been
Won’t be there someday
It’s a beautiful thing
That I keep close to me
And I won’t forget
But nothing is mine to keep
Okay, so I am reading back over these lyrics, and they sound not only simple, but saddening. Slack. Slack is how I feel about this song when it’s put on paper like this.
However, I urge you to listen to it. It’s so different as music. It’s almost happy, or at least a questioning happy that I can attempt to call wholesome.
The song is the equivalent of laying down on a beach and waking to be a thousand feet from shore, choking on all of the water you didn’t notice until your eyes were opened. At least, that is what it makes me think of.
I did some background research on Florist, and turns out, they call themselves a “friendship project” rather than whatever they are supposed to be titled as. A band? God and a few angels? Who knows.
Florist is unusually unheard of, which only further prompts me to crave their lyrics. Not everyone has washed them down to “another sad indie band yet”. They still have time before they become mainstream and either fade from existence and cease to produce music or all together begin making music for mainstream kids, which would ultimately be worse. (This sounds quite pretentious, but I don’t mean for it to. What I am saying is that making this a “mainstream band” would take away from the secrecy in their songs, or whatever.) I really, truly would rather Florist stop making music than produce songs like Drake’s “God’s Plan” or Panic at the Disco’s newer music (these are just the examples that are easily found in my brain right now).
These are my favorite lyrics:
I never asked
To be here at all
So why do I have to face the fear of losing it?
Of losing why I live?
Scary stuff. What a strange way of thinking about this life, right?
“The Fear of Losing This” hurts my feelings unlike any other song I have discovered. It makes me even question the comfort I find in the lyrics, as they are generally not the type of optimist/nihilist approach I would route myself into. But yeah, interesting song. You guys should definitely check it out.
