We had the chance to sit down and chat to the wonderful rising UK country star Florence Sommerville the other day. Check out as we chatted about her new album, touring plans and getting into country!

So, you’ve got a crazy release week this week, right?

Yep! We’ve got press today [time of recording] album launch gig tomorrow. The album and the latest single comes out on Friday. And then Friday I’m opening for (West County in Whittem), then I’m starting to open for Eve Selis on her UK tour. So it’s crazy!

Tell me about the album! Are there any set themes or is it more of a song-by-song thing?

So the album wasn’t actually written to be an album. All of the songs has their own purpose and we put them together because it felt like they needed to go together, like they were part of the same project. Originally it was only going to be a seven song EP. We had the songs written, we’d started working on the songs in the studio, and then myself and my manager took a trip to Nashville where I wrote with plenty of other songwriters and we came back and kinda said to each other that we had all of these good songs. So we upgraded it from an EP to a12-track album! Then we added the four bonus tracks to the CD! It came very organically, it wasn’t too manufactured, we just kept adding things as they fit.

Do you write solo back here too, or do you have writers you work with here as well as in Nashville?

Well when I first started for years I worked on my own. It’s only been over the last couple of years that I’ve been co-writing with other songwriters. I do some in-person here, but I do a lot on Zoom co-writes with amazing artists from Nashville and Australia and up and down the country here. There’s so many good songwriters!

I imagine it’s pretty cool to fly out to Nashville to write with these people in person?

Absolutely! Especially when you’ve been writing with someone on Zoom for so long you get used to what that person’s face looks like on a flat screen. So to fly out there and write with in their living room and then go out to lunch is very nice! I think that writing in person is so much better. Zoom is great and does what we need it to, but there’s no comparison to writing in person!

How does someone from the UK get into country and start writing and performing it?

I love the fact that UK country is moving at the moment because for a long time it was an unappreciated genre so I love that people are starting to recognise it and see the love for it! I was definitely playing before the boom started and there was plenty of ‘play Wonderwall!’ shouted. A lot of country acts that I’ve spoken to I know got into country music because their parents or grandparents played it when they were growing up. But for me, it was something I found myself. My parents didn’t play it that much, they love it now, but they didn’t know it much then. As so many people with my generation grew up with an obsession with the Disney Channel and so I grew up on early Taylor Swift and Miley Cirus’ Hannah Montana and all those sort of things! Yes, it wasn’t always the greatest representation sometimes, but I still think they were good. It’s that subconscious knowing of what country music is, it’s there in your brain!

Then when I started learning guitar and writing my own songs, I was only really learning Ed Sheeran and things like that because I didn’t know what I liked. Someone said that I reminded them of a character from a TV programme, and that it was a show called Nashville. It’s all about the country music and scene over there. I went home that night and watched the first episode with my family and I thought oh my goodness, this is what I love, I just hadn’t been able to put my finger on it. I was hooked from then on and it just grew and grew!

Was it a struggle at first to play country music to British crowds? I imagine it’s easier now!

Absolutely! For so long so many people had a skewed image of what country music was here. It was only the last few years that people have grown in what they see it as. I can remember open mic nights, I started out doing them for years, down the local pubs on a Friday night, older men at the bar were not enjoying me playing Taylor Swift! But to be honest I do think music is such an inclusive and welcoming space most of the time, so I can’t say I dealt with too many disappointed audience members! I do think it makes me laugh sometimes when I’d play my songs but also some covers and things, things that I thought were well known, and I’d speak to audience members after and they’d be like ‘it would be great if you played some covers!’. Like half of my set was covers, but they were covers that clearly weren’t well known. Because I discovered it all myself I found it difficult to distinguish what covers people would know. But it’s growing more and more obscure artists are getting well known now.

For sure! You’ve only gotta look at the festivals, with C2C and Long Road and stuff, the sheer volume of artists that are coming out here now that never would have gotten the chance before!

Absolutely, they’re getting massive UK and US acts playing these festivals!

Have you got a busy rest of the year planned?

Yeah, so I’ve got a show I’m really excited for, playing the Pizza Express for the first time! And we’ve got quite a few shows going into the end of the year too. We’re still in festival season too so I’m playing at Country Calling on the 15th August. I’m so excited, and I think it’s the first year of it and it’s not far from where I live and grew up. So it’ll be nice to be in Essex! I’m really looking forward to the festivals as I’m playing a lot of them with the band. I’ve been playing with the band a little bit at the start of the year but before that I was on my own, which was great but it’s great to share the stage with other musicians as well!

So really looking forward to those festivals and got some more stuff in the calendar for later in the year as well!

Do you write much with the band? Some of the instrumentation is incredible!

Well, a lot of the guitar work came from Adam Sweet, who is the mixing engineer on the album. Honestly, he’s a phenomenal player! The first time that I rehearsed with the band that I’m playing shows with I sent them the track to learn and Christiano, who plays the steel guitar and peddle guitar, said to me straight away he could tell it was Adam playing, it’s just so recognisable. He’s brilliant. And to be honest the whole crew that worked on the album were insane; the producers, the musicians, the guys who designed all the visuals and stuff like that, all insane. I had just such a blast in the studio with them!

And you’re delaying the release to streaming for now right? Just going with physical?

Yeah! So we’re doing a digital download, so you can purchase it on iTunes or Apple Music once it’s out, or you can purchase the CD from my website. The CD’s got four extra bonus tracks, as well. As far as streaming platforms go we’ll be releasing a lot of the tracks as singles later on this year.

I’ve seen a few people do that recently and it seems like a good idea! Streaming is such a difficult nut to crack so constantly getting singles out seems like the easiest way.

That’s the thing, we have this big body of work that we spent so much time and heart and passion on, we didn’t want to go ‘here it is’ and then be done with it. That’s so easy to do because of streaming platforms now. We want to prologue the love for it a little longer!

I spoke to someone the other day about something similar and they made a good point of a few days after you’ve dropped an album on streaming and stuff they’re immediately like ‘what’s next then?’

Exactly! I’ve just spent a year and a half on this album and you’re done in a day and a half!

Do you have a dream tour lineup you’d want to be a part of?

Oooo, that’s difficult! Well, I absolutely adore Ashley McBride, she is my favourite person. I take a lot of inspiration from her. So I would probably chew off my right arm to play on one of her tours. Which wouldn’t be great, because then I couldn’t play guitar! But I’d love to go on tour with Kezia Gill too, of Jade Pennywell or any of those people, they’re all fantastic!

I feel like Ashley’s been over here a fair bit recently so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility!

I mean I’ve seen her live twice and I just missed out on the London Oprey show and she’s on that lineup. Just missed out!