Songfacts®:

• "God Turn Me Into a Flower" blooms as the third single from Weyes Blood's fifth studio album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. The song draws from the ancient Myth of Narcissus, where a beautiful youth fixated on his own reflection and met a tragic end. As the nymphs gathered to honor Narcissus's remains, they discovered only a solitary flower.
• While the myth traditionally serves as a warning against conceit, Weyes Blood's lyrics offer a compassionate twist. Delving into introspection, the song embraces empathy and invites self-reflection on the same timeless theme. "I'd been trying to figure out what exactly was the crux of why everything felt so selfish and strange," Mering told NME. "Colloquially, it's become this idea that he was obsessed with himself, that he saw himself and was just obsessed with it. But the real crux of it is that he didn't recognise himself. He was obsessed with the reflection, but he didn't realize it was just him."
  
  "All of our mistakes in the human race come down to this: we are continuously using these technological frontiers to strive closer to something, not realizing that it's our own death. By destroying the planet, we destroy ourselves," she continued.
  
  "At the end of the myth, Narcissus gets turned into a flower, which is symbolic for something that's just kind of pliable and goes with the flow of the universe," Mering concluded. "And ultimately, it's soft. That's the approach you have to take with all the uncertainty and irrevocable change that's happening right now. If everything's gonna fall apart, don't be weak. Become soft."
• The six-minute keyboard-and-vocal slow burn is as much a plea as a lament. In the opening verse, Mering captures the essence of being in the spotlight, whether on stage or in the constant glare of digital life. Her words encompass the performer's journey or the universal act of image curation in today's digital age.
  
  As long as I stand, to face the crowd
  To know my name, to know its sound
  It's good to be soft when they push you down
  
  Mering perceives narcissism's roots in America, stretching beyond smartphones' rise, back to the explosive era of capitalism in the '50s and '60s post-war years. "It's almost like the greatest hubris of all is just thinking that there's just gonna be something better, and never working on yourself," she told Pitchfork. "Oh, you just need this career, this milestone."
• In the second verse, Mering ventures into the realm of Narcissus, sensing the creeping pull:
  
  It always takes me, it's such a curse to be so hard
  You shatter easily and can't pick up all those shards
  It's the curse of losing yourself when the mirror takes you too far
  Oh, God, turn me into a flower
  
  The flower represents a kind of escape.
• Then, in the third verse, Mering unveils a realization Narcissus never attained.
  
  You see the reflection and you want it more than the truth
  You yearn to be that dream you could never get to
  'Cause the person on the other side has always just been you
  
  As Mering fixates her gaze upon the idealized image, it gradually dawns upon her that the very embodiment she yearns for is none other than her own reflection. In this profound realization, she acknowledges the inherent flaws and vulnerabilities that reside within her, recognizing that she, like everyone else, is simply a flawed human being.
• "God Turn Me Into a Flower" came to Mering when she was in quarantine during a bout of Covid. "It was tough, I thought, I need to write some kind of hymn. I was playing my organ and it came out," she told Uncut magazine. "That night, in my dream, I wrote all the lyrics out on a piece of paper. I woke up the next day and thought, 'That's it.' I'd finished it."
  
  Mering reconvened in April 2021 with producer Jonathan Rado, who worked on her previous album, Titanic Rising. They completed the song alongside Ben Babbitt, who did the cello arrangement.
• And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow was critically acclaimed, with many publications including it in their Best Albums of 2022 lists. Spin magazine named it as their album of the year. They called it, "an album of our time, embracing the connections, the isolations, the breakups, the coming-togethers, the hopes and the dreads with focus intimately personal and vision expansively communal. She wraps this in lush, often majestic music, as poetic as her words and as vibrant as her spirit - and as inviting as her voice."
• Mering kicked off a brief run of US headline gigs on December 6, 2022 at the Music Box in San Diego. During her performance, she treated the crowd to the first live airing of this song.