Album: High as Hope (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • This eerie love song was co-written by Florence Welch with The xx multi-instrumentalist Jamie xx. It features American jazz musician Kamasi Washington on tenor saxophone.

    You need a big god
    Big enough to hold your love
    You need a big god
    Big enough to fill you up


    The track was written about the modern phenomenon of "ghosting" - when somebody doesn't reply to your texts. Welch said though "ghosting" is one of her "favorite words," it's not her "favorite feeling." She added: "I was describing it to someone and they said to me 'You need a big god', as if the need in me were so cavernous, it would take something enormous to fill it. Probably something bigger than a text message."
  • Directed by Autumn de Wilde and choreographed by Adam Khan and Florence Welch, the haunting video features Welch wading and dancing in a reflective pool of water with an army of dancers. The visuals draw inspiration from Francisco Goya's 1798 oil canvas painting Witches' Flight. Welch said:

    "It's always been a very physical song. I saw a dance piece in my head as I was writing it, so to co-choreograph something with Akram Khan was a huge honor. Autumn de Wilde fully understood what I was trying to do. The power of the desire within the void, left with yourself to rage and wonder and really it is yourself you are raging against. Not the ghost."

    Akram Khan added: "For me, this encounter with Florence and her powerful song somehow navigated itself towards the element - water. But the direction of the dance also became a resistance to all things that wish to oppress, a sort of protest dance and yet a celebratory one towards a new found freedom."
  • The High as Hope album was produced by Emile Haynie, who has also worked with Eminem, Kanye West and Lana Del Rey. He told Billboard that Florence Welch's penchant to physically express herself in the studio fed through into the recordings. Even on this heartfelt ballad, one is able to sense the singer's movements.

    "That was literally her in a room with a mic and a piano she's playing with one finger, stomping, hitting drums, and clapping all with her bracelets jangling," the producer told Billboard.
  • The song samples Simon Benson and Peter Cox's "Azure Blue" which can be found on the 1976 album Orchestral Contrasts.

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