Isabella Janet Florentina Summers[1][2] (born 31 October 1980)[3] is an English Emmy-nominated film Composer, songwriter/producer and musician. She is best known as the architect of the sound of the 6x Grammy nominated indie rock band Florence and the Machine and spent 14 years writing, producing, touring, and composing her cinematic sound before making the jump from pop music to composing for film and television.
Early life
Summers lived her first nine years in Hackney, London.[4] When Summers was ten, her family moved to Aldeburgh, Suffolk. There Summers attended Woodbridge School,[5] had piano lessons and grew an interest in music, crediting some influence from mixtapes made by her father with "a very eclectic mixture of everything and anything from Beethoven to Bob Dylan, rarities, poetry, even the Shipping forecast".[6]Hip-hop was a preferred genre, as her neighbours gave her a tape with Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle (1993) and 6 Feet Deep (1994) by Gravediggaz, and she would also spend evenings with fishermen's sons "who smoked loads of weed and listened to hard American rap."[7][3]
Career
Summers moved to East Dulwich,[6] back in London, where she would get a fine arts degree at Central Saint Martins. While there, she bought a set of DJ mixers to learn how to mix, while also doing side jobs such as being a courier for Top of the Pops and transcriptions and film digitizing for Alan Parker.[5] Soon she was working with Dan Greenpeace on his 'All City Show' radio show on XFM London, an experience that led Summers to buy her first MPC which was installed at the cupboard of her shared flat. With the help of a friend she started a studio in a former plastics factory at Crystal Palace, and began making hip hop.[7] During this time, Summers worked with, amongst others, Kashmere, The Iguana Man, IRS Crew, MBC Crew, Inja and The Last Skeptik. She met Florence Welch through art school and DJ work, as Welch was attending the Camberwell College of Arts.[8]
As Summers was hired to remix songs by the band Ludes, Welch became a more common sight at her studio given she was dating Ludes' guitarist Matt Alchin, and even impressed Summers with her singing. One day, as Summers got into a creative rut, which she described as getting "sick of boys telling me what to do", she thought of writing pop music with a woman, and invited Welch to make songs with her. Following a day joining Summers' beats with Welch's lyrics, they began writing demos together, which were produced by Summers by banging on the walls to make drum sounds and using the string sounds from her keyboard. It was also during this period that Summers saw a man on the street carrying a "coffin shaped box" and asked him what it was, it turned out to be Tom Monger carrying his harp, Summers suggested that he play on the demos that became 'Dog Days Are Over' and 'Between Two Lungs'. This led to their performing together for a time under the name Florence Robot/Isa Machine, the project was renamed Florence and the Machine. Summers had only thought of being a producer and songwriter on the project but ended up also as the group's keyboardist, with her second gig being the 2007 Glastonbury Festival. Summers has co-written and produced on Florence and the Machine's first three albums Lungs (2009), Ceremonials (2011) and How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015).[9] As of June 2016, 'Dog Days Are Over' has had over 3,151,000 downloads in the United States alone. The track 'Dog Days Are Over' was used in Marvel's 2023 movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3.[10] 'Dog Days Are Over' was referenced on Drake's track 'Rich Baby Daddy' featuring SZA and Sexyy Red from his 2023 album 'For All The Dogs'.[11]
Summers was invited by the Cy Twombly Foundation in conjuncture with Gagosian Gallery to interpret Cy Twombly's sculptures into music for their 2019 London exhibition 'Cy Twombly Sculpture', the piece titled 'To Neptune, Ruler of the Seas Profound' was interwoven with quotations from poems and literary texts by authors who have served as muses or subjects for Twombly, including Homer, Stéphane Mallarmé, and William Butler Yeats. The performance expands on a composition Summers performed in Rome in May 2022 at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio.[27] Furthermore Summers performed it a third time at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills in 2022 to a sold out audience.
In the summer of 2024 Isabella Summers performed at The National Gallery in collaboration with Pipeline. Summers responded in music and spoken word to two paintings by Caravaggio 'The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula' and 'Salome and the Head of John The Baptist'. The paintings made up the exhibition 'The Last Caravaggio', held at The National Gallery. In Autumn 2024 Isabella wrote the music for the soundtrack to the Vivienne Westwood Tunis Fashion Week 2024 show.
^Interviews, Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews &; ClashMusic (6 October 2023). "Drake - For All The Dogs | Reviews". Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews. Retrieved 6 October 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
