Entertainment

Florence + The Machine’s “Wish That You Were Here” Is Your New Lovelorn Anthem

The singer teams up with Tim Burton

In need of a euphoric, emotional dance party? Florence + the Machine has created the perfect track for it, with a sonorous new song off the soundtrack for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. “Wish That You Were Here” is the ebullient track that’s full of enough love, hope, and sadness to capture a kaleidoscopic range of feelings—and the soaring instrumentals to translate them into something beautiful.

Florence Welch has a penchant for creating anthems—songs that reach deep into your core and pull out some piece of humanity that seems to hide, burrowed away in everyday life. She creates music that weaves together all the different angles and nuances of human emotion, rendering them into songs that explode into almost Bacchic celebration. “Wish That You Were Here” takes the same cathartic crash of percussion that made “Shake It Off” an instant hit and combines it with the ethereal peals of harps found in “Cosmic Love.” To put it simply, it’s a mesh of everything that makes the English singer so great.

Welch collaborated with Tim Burton when penning the wistful track, and it’s set to play durning the credits of Miss Peregrine’s Home, which arrives in theaters September 30.

"Having been on tour, I've lived in a sort of magical time bubble, where the days almost blend together. It's amazing, but it comes at a cost—a cost of leaving the people you love behind for a year or two," Welch said of the track. "You kind of feel like if you could sing a song into the wind, maybe the wind could take it to them in a way that you can't with a text or a call.”

Lesson learned: When you can’t articulate your thoughts and feelings into words, say them with a Florence + the Machine song.