You Can Watch Teenage Florence Pugh Sing And Play Guitar On YouTube

Florence Pugh had a higher end 2019 than most. Her trinity of breakout roles — wrestling biopic Fighting With My Family, culty cerebral horror film Midsommar, and heartwarming coming-of-age tale Little Women — showcases a diverse span of talent, and her 2020 might be even bigger. She'll be making her Marvel Cinematic Universal debut alongside Scarlett Johansson in Black Widow.


Yet before all this, the award-winning 24-year-old was merely a teenager growing up in Oxford, England, recording herself singing acoustic covers of songs by The Lumineers, Oasis, and Jack Johnson and posting them to YouTube.


A New York Times profile of Pugh published Wednesday (January 8) makes note of her account page, full of videos uploaded between 2013 and 2016 where she appears in "an early '10s teen-girl uniform — crimson hair, cat-eye makeup, beaded ring bracelet" and flaunts a "world-weary look." The webcam-captured clips feature smoky-voiced, no-frills renditions of tunes like "Wonderwall" and "Ho Hey," often with Pugh sitting on a bed with a nylon-string guitar in hand. One finds her fronting a crowd at a battle of the bands at St. Edward's School in Oxford.


Like her MCU comrade Brie Larson — who performed pop songs in malls in the mid-2000s and even saw one hit TRL — Pugh flaunts a musical prowess that's immediate and welcoming. These minimal, intimate moments, captured under her moniker Flossie Rose, shine through; The New York Times heralded her as "more veteran hauled out of retirement than ingénue in search of her close-up" in the videos.


Pugh's page is more than just covers, though. She uploaded a number of originals — or rather, her mother did, "without entirely realizing, up until she developed a following, that anyone could watch them," as a new Vogue cover story reveals. One of those was the sunny ballad "I'll Be the Girl, You Be the Boy," which she called "one of my own happy tunes." "Wrote this a couple of weeks ago as a summer song, breaking down a relationship into just a game girl along with a boy," the video description reads.


Thanks to YouTube's algorithm, some offered videos revealed even more clips of Pugh playing guitar, these ones dating back to 2007 whenever she would've been around 11 years old). Her voice feels more like a tidal wave in the one where she covers Dusty Springfield's "I Only hope to Be With You" throughout an apparent guitar lesson.


As we cannonball directly into awards season, and as Pugh racks up BAFTA (and potentially even Oscar) nominations for her standout year on film, her stories are being quickly written. There's so much to take in.


Yet it's nice to go back to where it all began: with a number of simple chords, some gentle folk-pop, and not an individual face of drawn-out agony because of the horrific inner workings of a Swedish commune.