Songfacts®:

• Florence Welch wrote "Ship to Wreck" after a chaotic house party she threw following the conclusion of the Ceremonials Tour. "It lasted for a day. Okay, maybe two days, if I'm being honest," she told Time Out. "It was also the worst because at some point we decided to leave the house and go to the pub. I jumped on stage with the house band and performed a really bad cover of 'Get Lucky' then crowd-surfed off the stage on to no one.
  
  The moment made got published in the media and prompted a call from her manager. Writing the song a few weeks later, Welch used it to examine why she sometimes was drawn to self-sabotage.
  
  "I was thinking about my own self destructive side, and how you can make something only to tear it down, enjoy/destroy, create/devastate etc," Welch said. "When you're in that whirlwind, you often end up breaking the thing you love the most."
• Welch penned the song with Kid Harpoon during a month-long creative furlough in Los Angeles that also yielded How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful's lead single "What Kind Of Man." Welch previously collaborated with the London-based songwriter/producer on her gospelly hit tune "Shake It Out."
• When Florence + the Machine played Coachella in April 2015, Florence Welch explained this song is about "some time off I had in London where I had some drunken parties and trashed my house and said a drunken 'I love you' too soon."
  
  "Even though all that disastrous stuff happened, I got this song out of it," she added. "It all works out, and even if it doesn't, write a song about it."
• The song's music video was directed by Vincent Haycock (Madonna, OneRepublic) and was filmed inside Florence Welch's home. The clip, which finds the songstress struggling with a tumultuous relationship with both a love interest and herself, was choreographed by Ryan Heffington, who also did Sia's "Chandelier" and Lykke Li's "Gunshot" visuals.
• Florence + the Machine performed this song on the May 9, 2015 episode of Saturday Night Live. Florence Welch had a broken foot, so she sat on a stool while she sang.
• Florence Welch said to the New York Times regarding the self-destructive side of her personality: "I'm fun up to a point, and then it gets destructive. That's how I wrote 'Ship to Wreck.' It was: 'What have I done? Oh my God! Why do I keep doing this?' It's that feeling that you love something so much, and it's always the first thing to break."