You recorded Emily Alone at home in Los Angeles. How has living in California impacted your music and your mind?

Being in California, I really did think, Man, I’m going to make such happy music now. But the opposite happened. Whenever I was about to write a bunch of songs, I coaxed them out by manipulating my house vibe to be like I was in New England or upstate New York. I would keep my shades drawn all day and drink hot beverages, make soup, and really try to feel that feeling of a deep, dark winter. Then this album just came out of me, and it was maybe the darkest music I’ve ever written in a way that feels so beautiful and necessary.

Florist is the deepest part of my musical language, but it’s also the thing that takes the most out of me. I’m always crying when I’m writing Florist songs. They’re from my perspective, and you can think of those songs as being about my life, but they just come from a place of human experience. [Emily Alone] is about the self, which can be seen as a really isolationist thing, but the idea is that it’s this journey to explore your single piece in this collective consciousness of the world. The more awareness you have, the more peacefully you can exist within the chaos. The only reason I want to share music is because I hope I can contribute to the emotional health of the world.

Emily Alone by Florist

How does Florist relate to your ambient music?

They both need each other to exist. Musically, folk songs are so simple and beautiful, but they’re words, and words are so basic, to a certain degree. I’m interested in words being more—like a sentence saying a hundred emotions, and being five words long—but language just scratches the surface of what we experience. I feel like I need to be able to explore sound and communicate things without words, too.

You’ve spoken about relating to modular synth music because it’s not organized through conventional logic. I can hear that in Emily Alone—the songs don’t adhere to typical structures.

It’s hard to not write a song that’s verse-chorus-bridge-whatever, especially when you’re writing songs rooted in folk or country music. But the freeform structure of modular synths and instrumental compositions really unlocked a part of my brain. Structure became something I wasn’t really interested in. I wrote songs with different movements. There’s a great album by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Out of the Blue—it’s this episodic, longform musical piece and it has all these spoken-word interludes. I love music like that. I’m interested in blurring the lines between indie and folk songwriting and experimental music.

Water Memory / Mount Vision by Emily A. Sprague

At the beginning of Emily Alone, you sing, “I walk and I read, I spend time in the sea/But nothing brings clarity to what makes me, me.” What were you reading?

I was reading this psychology book, Always Coming Home, about the concept of an inner child, and how everyone picks up different traumas that we carry with us throughout our lives. I read a lot of poetry. Anne Carson is one of the biggest ones. I read to find emotional answers. I want to know more, because I don’t know why we’re alive, really. Those lines in the song are about doing all the things you’re supposed to do to feel better, and ultimately, none of them make me feel like I have a reason to be alive more than making music. I don’t know why I do this. My therapist has told me that I never learned boundaries in the ways that are meant to protect us. So, I will say anything in a song. You know Buffy?

The Vampire Slayer?

Yeah. It’s the best show ever created. Buffy has this whole thing where she’s like, “Death is my gift,” because she’s the slayer, and I feel like anxiety is my gift. I don’t think twice about saying the things that make me the most sad, or the things that are the most personal about my life in songs. Because I’m not the only one who feels those things. It’s about people and human experience. I don’t know what any of it is, but that’s the point—you’re not supposed to know.

That reminds me of my favorite Emily Alone lyric, on “Shadow Bloom,” when you sing, “Do you really want to know the thing you spend your life trying to find?”

The greatest way you can live your life is to search for the answer to the unanswerable question. It would be impossible to exist if we had the answers to the deepest mysteries of life because that search keeps us alive. If you knew why you were here and what you were supposed to be doing, there would be no beauty, no way to empathize, and no way to relate to people. It’s like when you meet someone and you realize the things you share with them, and the ways you can feel so connected—you’re sharing a mystery.