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The New York-based indie quartet is gearing up to release its picturesque debut LP.

The songs of Emily Sprague—vocalist and bandleader for Brooklyn indie quartet Florist—are rife with intimate, pastoral visions housing bite-sized snippets of full-sized emotions. Sure, there’s the by-now-standard yearning for the innocence of childhood, but more so, Sprague’s compositions search for a way to map those emergent experiences of quiet safety onto the dizzying present. With the band’s debut LP, The Birds Outside Sang, due out on January 29, we thought it was the perfect time to chat with Sprague about the art of sensitivity and the transformative power of creative friends. 

Homebase: Brooklyn, NY 

You grew up in a small town in the Catskills. Was it idyllic? Isolated? Nurturing? It almost feels like that place can be heard in your music. 

Yeah, Palenville, NY is where I grew up. It's a hamlet tucked in right at the bottom of the mountains. The kind of town where people sell firewood out in their front yard by the street, and there are extensive dirt bike trails in the woods if you know where to look. I love where I grew up so much. It was very isolating for me, but I became myself through that experience, and I don't wish I had any different experience. 

When I was sad or bored, I went down to the creek. Now the creek is very special to me. My fondest memories of my childhood involve trees and lakes and leaves. The slow and quiet pace of that life has seriously affected the person that I am now as an adult, and in my opinion it's positive. I had two friends in the neighborhood and we would ride our bikes around and make fires in the woods. It wasn't like I was totally alone, but it was on my own that I discovered art and music and the things that I love. I will probably live in the city for a while, but my heart is always in the Catskills and I know that I will end up there again.

You’re a part of the genre-bending musical collective that goes by The Epoch—aside from helming Florist, you play in Told Slant, the project fronted by Florist drummer Felix Walworth. How did you fall in with them? Was it immediately clear that they were on to something you wanted to be a part of? 

I met Felix and Oliver [Kalb, also of Bellows] in 2012 in Albany, NY. I was living there and my girlfriend at the time was playing a show with Told Slant. I remember being really excited to meet some "NYC" kids. I had no idea what New York City or Brooklyn was like for people my age, but when I saw Told Slant play I realized that I was missing out on something. We stayed in contact a little bit, mostly for shows, then Florist shared a bill with Bellows the following year and we decided to do a Told Slant + Florist tour together that fall. I met everyone else either during or soon after, then moved to Brooklyn into a house with Felix, Oliver, Susannah [Cutler of yours are the only ears], Gabby [Smith of Eskimeaux] and Henry [Crawford of Small Wonder] at the beginning of 2014. It was really the first time in my life I felt like I found a community of people that I fit into. 

You were making your own music before connecting with The Epoch. How has your friendship with the other creative minds of that group changed your own writing/performance? 

My songwriting process hasn't changed really at all. My recording process is also the same, although I've gotten a lot more gear since I first started doing that, and the sound is getting less 'lo-fi". I guess the friendly competition has really made me want to be constantly making something, not because I want to be better or have more released or whatever, but because I am constantly inspired by what my friends are doing and I don't want to miss a beat. All of a sudden people hear the songs I write and are there to tell me how good they think it is, and then someone else writes a song and I'm like "damn that's so good," then eventually I want to write another song. It's all good fun. 

You’re the driving force behind Florist, but you’ve often expressed the importance of the band’s other members. What is it that each of them bring to the project? 

Florist is a project where I write the songs (chords, melody, lyrics) by myself at first, but it wouldn't be Florist if Rick [Spataro], Jonnie [Baker] and now Felix weren't a part of it. I think that wasn't totally clear for a while last year, when I released the "6 days of songs" EP thing on Bandcamp and it kind of got some attention. I released that because, at the beginning of the year, I was badly injured in a bike accident and I couldn't play the guitar for a few months. Rick and Jonnie were living upstate and I was in the city. Some friends in NYC talked about doing a song-a-day project, and I was just starting to be able to hold a guitar neck again, so I wanted to be a part of it. I hadn't gotten a chance to release any music in a while, so I just wanted to put that out because I was proud of it. But from now on, Florist is going to be how it always started -- as a friendship music project between myself, Rick Spataro and Jonnie Baker. If we ever stop playing music together, then I will come up with a different moniker and release my songs that way, and if I want to make music without them, I'll start a side project. 

As far as the process of Florist the band goes, we record together, and that's the biggest thing. When we are recording a song, after the bones are laid out the ball is in anyone's court. The Birds Outside Sang was recorded mostly live and we did minimal overdubs afterwards. So the full band songs on that sound pretty much exactly how we play them live. 

The visual aesthetic is a big part of what you do, and even your music itself is very visual—it tends to paint very vivid pictures of specific scenes. Are the music and the art two sides of the same coin to you? Or are they better at expressing different, if related, things?

I think I'm visual person above all else. I am very bad at thinking about things any other way. And when I like something it is almost always because of how it looks. So I read more graphic novels than I do regular books; I've always loved photography and film and graphic design and, when I see something that I like, I know immediately. So I like incorporating that kind of stuff into music. 

I think of music as visual in some ways though, or at least for me it's not all logical or theoretical. A song makes me feel something in the same way that an awesome frame from a movie makes me feel something. I've always been most interested in pairing music and images, so I guess right now I'm making music that already sort of feel that way. But my dream would definitely be to make music for images or make both for each other.

There’s such a sensitivity to your music. Are you a sensitive person? Is sensitivity important to you? 

Yeah I am sensitive. It feels really stupid to say that. It's an aspect of me that has a lot of control over my life, so I guess it makes sense that my music sounds the way that it does. But I also, for the most part, only listen to music that is calm. I've always been that way... my pace is slow. 

Florist’s music is small and intimate, which lends the whole project that feel—has it been hard or frustrating to adapt to “scaling up?”

I am nervous sometimes that, because the music I write is so small, fewer people will care about it. Like it's not easy, or cool enough or something. Ultimately, though, I don't really care how many people listen to my music. I am happy to have the audience that we have now. It's bigger than I ever imagined possible when I first started playing music, and I'm grateful for that. I'm just excited to have a vinyl record of Florist songs with a jacket I designed that I can give to my parents.

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