During Florence’s recent tour of Canada, we had the opportunity to join her at afternoon tea for a conversation about integrity, songwriting, the music industry and her forthcoming album.

Florence Welch is genuine and awkward, but not genuinely awkward. This is one of the many endearing qualities and intriguing dichotomies about her. She wants to be as accommodating as possible and give as much as she can but like many things in life, this quality can be taken advantage of. To a degree, she wants to be hardened, callous and immune, but this is just not an enduring trait in her personality. Maybe this is unfortunate for her because it has allowed a window of openness and vulnerability for the rest of the world to peer into, muddle with and misconstrue (much like I’m doing right now) but it is also because in our media saturated world, genuine and vulnerable characteristics are rarely portrayed – at least authentically. She tries to keep herself protected yet has absolutely no sense of entitlement; another interesting dichotomy. This, aside from a set of very convincing Lungs is probably why she was Critic’s Choice at the Brit awards before her album was released and then won the British Album award the following year, after the album was released.