Florence Welch Discusses How It Feels to Be a Woman Headliner

Florence Welch poses for the cover of Elle UK‘s Wonder Woman issue, which is on newsstands now.

Here is what the Florence + the Machine singer had to share with the mag:

On being afraid of the vulnerability and truth in her music: “I was horrified at what I was doing…There were things in Hunger that I still haven’t really spoken about to some of my oldest friends; I don’t really talk to my mum about it. My little sister was like, ‘What are you doing? You can’t speak about this stuff and you put it in a f**pop song!’”

On working with women: “If I go into a studio situation I know what I’m doing and what I want to do. But when I was younger, especially if it was with an older man, I would end up doing what I thought they wanted to do. But it meant that nothing sounded right. And so when I finally went in to work with Isa [bandmate Isabella Summers] she just let me sit down and do whatever the fuck I wanted at the piano and hit the walls with sticks and it was from that, from the safe space of a female collaborator that the sound of Florence + The Machine was born.”

On how it feels to be a woman headliner: “I’m not religious, but for me the act of singing has always been such a reverential thing. I’ve always felt this peace when I’m singing… It’s something I find quite interesting, because when I’m performing, I don’t really know if I’m in the male or female. I feel like it’s this strange straddling of both. I feel like both the masculine and the feminine exist inside everybody.”

For more from the issue, visit Elle.com/UK!