We Are Kings
On Florence, the witch choir, and twenty thousand people remembering something all at once
I have written previously about the spiritual experience that is seeing Florence + The Machine live, and whelp! It never gets old, because she continues to deliver. BUT. A couple of weeks ago, at MSG, somewhere between the first song and the last collective exhale, it stopped feeling like a show and started feeling like…something else.
I don’t fully know how to explain what it turned into instead.
The easiest word is ritual, but that sounds pretentious, so let me try to just describe what I saw.
Florence was barefoot, as always, all wild hair and outstretched arms, moving across the stage like she was summoning something. And behind her, the witch choir —a group of women clad in dresses and bloomers, hurling themselves around the stage in the most wonderful and wild way. We went with them. Twenty thousand people singing, yes, but also shouting, chanting, jumping, and crying, and reaching for each other in that specific way you only do when you gather in a magickal, safe place.
But it wasn’t just that.
It was what people were wearing.
Have you ever been somewhere and noticed that everyone arrived having made a similar silent decision? Long dresses that moved when people swayed. Flowers in hair. Lace, linen, soft things. Feminine things. Nothing super polished or fancy for Instagram (though people were certainly posting). It felt authentic and less like people had gotten dressed for a concert and more like they’d prepared for something.
Witchy is the word that kept coming to mind, but not in the witch-tock way. Less like a costume, less performative, and more like connecting to something that I can’t quite pin down. Like a remembering of something greater than us all. Connection (maybe?) to matriarchal wisdom, and power.
I’ve been chewing on why it felt so charged in there, beyond the obvious (great songs, incredible performer, New York crowd energy).
I think it has something to do with the current political climate and a history of systemic repression. I know. Duh, but stick with me.
We’ve spent a long time (a very, very long time) being told to make ourselves smaller. Quieter. More manageable. To process privately, hurt politely, keep it contained. And then someone like Florence gets on a stage and just...refuses to. She’s enormous up there. She and the witch choir take up every inch of space available to them and then reach for more, AND then? They ask YOU to reach for more.
And something in the room responds because it’s permission.
Permission to be loud. To be emotional without apologizing for it. To let your body do what it wants to do, which apparently is reach toward strangers and scream lyrics and cry without quite knowing why.
There’s something I keep coming back to: we had this before.
Long before anyone invented the language for nervous system regulation or collective healing, people gathered. They sang. They moved together. They had specific clothes and sacred objects that said to the body: this is different, pay attention, you’re safe. They created containers for the kind of emotion that ordinary life doesn’t have room for.
We were kings.
At some point, we were told to stop doing that, or rather, times changed, the culture changed. We lost our connection to nature, and to each other, because…the patriarchy. UGH.
But the body doesn’t forget. It just waits.
And that night — a woman on a stage refusing to shrink herself and twenty thousand bodies remembered all at once.
I don’t want to oversell this. It was also just a really good concert, and people were having fun.
But I also don’t want to undersell it because there was something happening in that room that felt bigger than entertainment, even if it was also entertainment. We were grieving something. Celebrating something. Recognizing something we couldn’t articulate but absolutely understood.
We are still kings.
I’m still not sure I have the words for it. But I know that when I walked out, I felt less alone than I had walking in, and…a little sad. Not because of anything from the show, but because I want this gathering, this connection, all the time. Not just once every few years. Because we are powerful when we come together. We have the numbers to make a change.
Maybe that’s enough to say for now.
I made a playlist of her set list here, because your body might need to remember too: