EMILY A. SPRAGUE: The sci-fi element of comes from my own experience with using the genre as a lens to look at my life and at our world. I've always resonated with the way people tell stories of other worlds, and it inspires me to think about the connectedness of all of us on Earth and everything else that may be out there. I've always been kind of a space case and a little bit of a psychonaut in those regards.

In terms of the back story on – which, as I said, is only as relevant as the listener wants it to be – the album is set in the aftermath of an imagined apocalypse. If there’s a moral to the whole story, it’s only what I myself find to be beautiful about life and about beings existing alongside each other, which is that we keep coming back to wanting and searching for connection, and that having empathy for each other is such a powerful tool for building a better world.

It’s a personal mirror for me, but it’s also what I want to see in the world. A greater appreciation for the things that we have in common, and the emotions that we share with each other.

BEST FIT: What kind of sci-fi have you felt most connected with in your life, whether it be movies or books, or something else?

I really love Ursula K. Le Guin books – I've read a lot of those – and I've always loved and the moral dilemmas that they run into in that show. I find that really interesting. I also love a lot of video games that take place in other worlds and have elements of magic, or magical realism, and how they discuss greater problems through simplified storylines. 

Did having the storyline of in mind give you more freedom to write rather than drawing more directly from your own experience?

Yeah, it was nice to write lyrics where I was able to write more poetically and to work from a place of being inspired by ideas of a world – to imagine the landscape and little bits of the story without necessarily having “I” statements be about me. 

My songwriting in Florist is very one-to-one in a lot of ways, where I might be directly describing my own experiences in my life, but I feel like there’s a lot more to my mind than that. I'm not always reflecting on what I've been through, what's going on in my personal life, or even what I think about things. 

With this album, I could be more of an observational narrator of this little sandbox-y world and piece together words and lines that felt connected to each other but not necessarily telling a greater story. I like it when people put a few words together that make me feel a certain way or make me think of a certain thing. That’s my favourite kind of poetry, and I wanted to incorporate that into the lyrics. I feel like it did give me freedom.

Is there a certain lyric that you feel particularly attached to, even if you can't explain why?

One that has popped into my mind a lot recently is “I want you to be free,” which, when it was written into the song [”Spiraling to the Place"] it was very spontaneous, almost an improvisational moment, and I ended up keeping it.

I like that there are so many ways that a person can interpret that lyric. Even I don't necessarily feel the same exact way about it every time I hear it, but it always makes me feel emotional. It always hits me in some way.

You describe as a first offering. Do you feel like this world you've been creating has momentum? Do you already know where it's taking you next?

Things could change moving forward, but as of now, it feels like the meeting place of my songwriting voice and the experimental, instrumental music. How much of the lore and the world will come through in future, I'm not entirely sure. 

is representative of the world inside of me, where those different versions of me are hanging out and getting to know each other. So, I'll continue to make Florist albums, and I'll continue to make instrumental-only ambient releases. is almost like another persona, a third option.