by Andrea Crowley-Hughes

Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine was dreamily enthusiastic when she explained how performing “Various Storms and Saints” live led her to regard the song in a different way.

To a packed Barclays Center on June 14, Florence said she initially wanted the song cut from the album she was touring to promote, “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful.”

“At the time when I wrote it, I was still very much in the feeling of this song and I actually didn’t want to release it because it felt too close to the bone,” she said. Only recently, when she started singing it in concert, did the transformation take place.

“Now when I sing it and I see people singing it back to me, it’s like it releases it. It frees it.”

This was just one of the personal disclosures that Florence gave that night in between sprinting, pirouetting and occasionally lying on the floor of an arena-length stage festooned with organs, red curtains and a shimmering silver backdrop.

Dashing off these confessions with crisp enunciation, she was part best friend, part English choir director. At one point, before “Shake It Out,” she asked the audience to act like choir members who were hung over and a little lost, to mirror the state she was in when she wrote the song.

Background on how Florence felt when she was writing songs was a recurring theme: “I was hung over” (various), “I was in love, the kind of love that makes you feel like you’re in love with the world” (the title track on “How Beautiful”).

At the concert, my thoughts drifted to how this spirited frontwoman was herself transforming songs that I had become attached to years before. I sunk into Florence + the Machine’s album, “Ceremonials,” when I was dealing with gut-wrenching decisions, navigating the end of my 20s and bracing for an impending loss. I listened to “Shake It Out,” “Breaking Down” and “Only If For a Night” on the way back from therapy sessions. My affinity for the previous album, “Lungs,” followed soon after, and I listened to “Blinding” with a bleak outlook.

I had assumed that seeing Florence live would bring up torrents of emotion too strong to bear, but I was surprised at how light I felt, watching her make them conversation pieces and belt them out between twirls. Songs that had only indicated a dark night of the soul were now cries of celebration.

Florence performed this same alchemy on “Spectrum,” but with greater social significance.

Not a full week had passed since 49 people were gunned down at Pulse Nightclub, a gay bar in Orlando, on Latin Night. Undoubtedly, many heads in the audience were foggy with grief, and Florence steadily held up a rainbow flag through the downtempo opening notes. Before we could catch our breath, the significance of the action crystallized as she held the flag higher with the lyrics, “Say my name / As every color illuminates / We are shining / And we will never be afraid again.” Background vocals soon helped spin a downcast moment into a defiant anthem. Florence’s voice was unwavering and she led a “love is love is love is love” chant that is now melded with our memory of the song.

A large arena at capacity is the kind of public space where mass shootings and hate crimes have claimed lives too frequently to be acceptable. It wasn’t without fear that I watched our leading lady brandish the flag, but she took that fear, pushed it aside and turned it into a testimonial. The lives lost in Orlando were overwhelmingly young, queer and Latinx. As soon as the news broke, members of these communities had the compound trauma of seeing that specificity erased. It was healing to hear “say my name!” It was a courageous decision not to let the wounds sit silently in their seats, unacknowledged. No, let them cry out instead. Let them dance. We are not afraid.

That moment of validation happened so quickly, on a night where the sets were all cut slightly short, but it set a tone for the rest of the night. Morgan Cohn wrote about Pulse as “a place full of people who were just trying to figure it all out.” Alongside stories of drunken revelations, the club’s spirit of sanctuary was invoked in a time it was most needed, and it could not have been done with solemnity or solitude.

As Florence herself said, “It’s so easy to say it to a crowd but it’s so hard, my love, to say it to you out loud.”

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Andrea Crowley-Hughes is a writer and multimedia creator studying at The New School for Public Engagement. She is interested in the ways the digital and analog intersect and diverge. Follow her at @and_reach on Twitter and Instagram.