by Sam Cohen
Most people don’t love Philadelphia as much as Francie Medosch; that’s why she no longer needs to live there. After spending the majority of her career with Florry in Philly, she moved to Vermont last year. Growing up in the Philly music scene helped shape Florry’s sound; however, their music has always been fit for the mountains.
Since 2018, when Medosch wasn’t working part-time jobs at dispensaries and record stores, she’s been the frontwoman of country rock band, Florry. Florry takes equally from country pickers, power pop, and jazz vocalists, with a secret weapon in Francie. In 2025, they released Sounds Like…, inaugurating a new set of fans who would soon learn Florry has always had it.
Although Medosch is the driving force of Florry, thanks to her improvisational picking skills and ingratiating vocals, she is joined by an all-star band of DIY players. In full, Florry is Jon Cox on pedal steel, John Murray on electric guitar, Collin Dennen on bass, Will Henriksen on fiddle, Katya Malison on backing vocals, and Joey Sullivan on drums.
Outside of habituating to Burlington, Vermont, Sounds Like… consumed most of Francie’s 2025. So, hibernating to start the year is everything she could ask for. However, like always, relaxation is short-lived, as Florry will join Ratboys on their North American tour. Before getting back on tour, Francie and I went on tangents about Kurt Vile, the Philly music scene, and why Alex Chilton is the greatest rock n’ roll star.
Florry by Connor Turque
Sam Cohen: You’ve had a nice break from touring to start the year after a busy 2025. How has the break been?
Francie Medosch: It's been super nice. I went to Sardinia with my girlfriend, and that was super dope to travel around Sardinia and see the sights. I’ve been mostly hanging out with my friends and my family. We're getting ready to record some stuff soon and planning on some new releases. We're wrapping up one thing right now, and then we're gonna start recording an LP of some sort around the end of April.
SC: Your upcoming tour with Ratboys is a dream country rock bill. What are you looking forward to about the tour?
FM: I'm excited to see my bandmates and play some music with them every night. That's always the most fun part of touring for me. We have a headline show in Chicago at the Empty Bottle at the end of the tour, which I'm really excited about. It's about to sell out, and we’re playing with this band called National Photo Committee. I haven't actually even heard their music yet, but I hung out with some of them on our last tour, and they were just so nice.
SC: The last show you played was the opening slot for Yo La Tengo during the Hanukkah run. How do you find out about that?
FM: I found out about it through James McNew, who plays bass and other instruments in Yo La. He just kind of texted me. I've known James since I was like 1, and he's been a fan of my music for, I mean, that whole time. He's a nice, supportive figure for me in the music industry and stuff.
SC: How was the show?
FM: It was obviously amazing. Everyone loves Yo La Tengo, me included. I would go with my mom to see them a lot when I was in high school. I’ve seen them over 10 times with my mom, and we've been to the Hanukkah shows. But, honestly, it was pretty surreal. It was definitely a life goal of mine to do that and bring my family to one of those shows. Yeah. I mean, I could say more, but it was just really surreal.
SC: Go ahead! I love hearing about those shows.
FM: Those shows are such perfect life moments. There's so much love in the community of music listeners. It's just such a warm, fuzzy feeling; probably the pinnacle of rock music.
I got to dance with my sisters, my cousins, my girlfriend, and my mom. I was just like, ‘Wow, this is as perfect as it can get.’ You play a lot of fucking shows as a touring musician, and Yo La Tengo is just like one of the greatest bands ever. It feels very easy to say that they’re classic rock n’ roll at this point.
SC: Are there other shows you've done where you've had that same surreal moment?
FM: All our tours with Kurt Vile are like that. Especially the more we play with him, because we didn’t know him at first, and now he's a good friend of ours, and we've hung out outside of touring and stuff. So when we tour with him, it's really easy and so smooth.
SC: Being from Philly, I imagine it was kind of a given, but how did you discover Kurt's music?
FM: I don’t think he even knows this, but I had never listened to his music before we were asked to tour with him. I grew up in and around Philly, and I had obviously heard of Kurt Vile, and I saw the mural in Fishtown.
I remember being a kid and thinking, ‘Wow, that is fucking so weird,’ and just thinking his vibe was weird. But you know, you need him; he's just a special person. The tour that we first did with him was the Watch My Moves Tour. That album is so fucking good. I can't believe it, like, when I listen to that, I have so much respect for him, because he has put so much work into building a musical world of his own. It has its own flowing continuity and stuff, and not a lot of people have been able to do that.
Neil Young has done that a lot with his ‘It's all one song’ joke. But Kurt has really successfully done that for himself. I can't wait to see his music just grow and stuff. I feel proud just knowing him. I think when we're all older, he's really gonna be hailed as this really important figure of music and stuff.
SC: I agree he has this way about him, like Jeff Tweedy or Neil Young, where the music never gets sour, and the legacy grows and grows.
FM: It's all so him. It's crazy, how so him it is. Obviously, bands like Wilco are fucking fantastic, but that also functions as a band, but with Vile, it's his universe. It's just the brain of Kurt. It's all his crazy mind and his world…we’ve talked about Kurt a lot [laughs].
SC: Other than Kurt, how did the Philly music scene shape your path towards becoming a musician?
FM: If I ever felt like stopping music, Philly would always nudge me and get me back in. That happened like two times over the earlier part of my doing music, because I was going through college and stuff. I stopped making music for a month, then I met these people and formed a band with them. And then I was able to keep doing it.
I stopped another time, but eventually your friends ask to jam, and as you do, you jam. And then there are all these shows happening, and our friends want to put us on shows. So it's a really natural and awesome scene to come up in. It's different now, but everything changes, and nothing is the same as before.
SC: What's different about it now?
FM: It’s different music, and all the people I know are getting older and not doing as crazy shit at shows as we used to. I mean, I don’t really go to DIY shows these days. I live in Burlington, Vermont, but back then, my friends and I got into the most fuck shit, just acting so stupid. I don't know. We weren't taking it seriously for a while. We were just kind of fucking off and having fun in Philly. I'm grateful that Philly let us do that. Yeah, it's amazing.
SC: Who were the other bands that came up with you guys?
FM: When we started playing music, this band called Blood had just moved to Philly, and we played some shows with them. Their old bassist, Nino, also plays in this band called @ from Philadelphia. They definitely came up at the same time as us.
There were a lot of shoegaze bands. But that's old news at this point, not that shoegaze is old news, but bands like TAGABOW blew up. I think they made it the furthest out of the scene. There’s also Lindsey Reamer, Friendship, Pete Gill, and Michael Cormier, the drummer from Friendship.
I've talked about the Philly scene so many times now that sometimes I wander off when I'm talking about it. But yeah, I was like a child growing up in the Philly music scene. I have a lot of stories from then, but it's mostly involves me being a little freak at shows.
SC: Now that you live in Vermont, what are the little things you miss about Philly? There is such a specific way of life there.
FM: Number one is the food. No disrespect to Vermont, my new home, but they don't really do sandwiches right up here. They have hoagies, but they're not hoagies. They're like torpedoes, where it's a piece of bread on top and a piece of bread on the bottom, and there's this weird white bread that just does not make sense.
SC: You need a roll.
FM: I know. It needs to be a roll that is cut down the middle so everything is held together. They don't do that up here. That is probably the worst thing about the food up here. Besides that, honestly, though, I love Vermont so much. I moved up here for so many reasons. I really had to get away from Philly. I love Philly, I know I'll probably move back there and spend the rest of my life in that area, but right now I need to be here.
SC: In an interview with Kurt Vile, you mentioned you worked at a record store in Vermont. Do you still work there?
FM: No, that was a part-time gig while I was taking a break from touring. That was really fun.
FM: What was it like to have the musician mindset and step into a record store job?
FM: I feel like the dickhead record store worker trope is so classic, and I think it's fun to just pretend and jokingly be like that, or whatever, like when your friends are there. But I think I realized that being a musician, honestly, maybe made me more humble as a record store worker. Because I don't think my taste of music is intense, but I'm able to hide my feelings of disappointment when people buy a shitty record [laughs].
I always try to keep a smile on my face, because I'm like, ‘Music is music, and people have their own taste.’ But some people would buy records, and in my head, I'd be like, ‘You got the wrong one.’
SC: When customers asked for recommendations, which records would you point to?
FM: Definitely a lot of jazz. There are really amazing jazz records at the store I worked at, called Autumn Records in Winooski, Vermont. They have some amazing used jazz. They had a lot of my favorite guys to listen to, John Coltrane, and I went through this period of listening to a lot of Paul Chambers, the bassist. Besides that, I'd always recommend NRBQ.
Other than that, honestly, a bunch of random stuff. Because every day, you just pull new records to listen to, and you get this knowledge of what you have there in the store. And most of it was really good because they had an amazing stock. I was just recommending random shit. I was listening to a lot of Japanese pop music and jazz vocalists, like Julie London and Helen Merrill.
SC: What record stores in Philly would you go to growing up?
FM: I didn't really get into records until I was 12, and I was living in the suburbs at that time, so I would go to Shady Dog Records in Berwyn. I could walk there from my house. When I would go into Philly, I would go to Philadelphia Record Exchange and Beautiful World Syndicate a lot. They have a really good selection, and they don't price up their shit like some other places do in Philly.
SC: Philly Record Exchange is the best; they have great bootlegs. Going back to Sounds Like…,
I think a lot of people heard the album and sorted it into the current country-rock fad. Where did your country roots and country inspirations come from?
FM: I’ve always liked country music. My mom played a lot of different music when I was a kid, and she played enough of it that I never developed an aversion to it, as some people do. As a serious music listener, you start realizing there's a lot of beautiful country music out there. And that kind of happened with me.
I started listening to the more specifically country records that Neil Young made. I listened to International Harvesters and Comes A Time a bunch. I also got really into these instrumental pedal steel and hot pickers albums, where they would have really good musicians play and do these crazy instrumental runs. I like that real beautiful kind of weepy country music vibe.
SC: It’s great to see indie rock embrace its country roots in recent years.
Definitely, and a big part of the country rock movement that people aren't talking about enough is that a lot of these contemporary bands are pretty influenced by Big Star. Or they’re influenced by bands that have been influenced by Big Star. I feel like that's pretty overlooked these days in the music journalism world.
The version of country rock that today's musicians are inspired by is that '90s stuff. But that '90s stuff came from the Paisley Underground scene of the '80s, which was basically born out of power pop and country combining. Wilco is Big Star country vibes, for sure, and all the bands that they've toured with are very inspired by the power pop music scene.
SC: It always either comes back to Big Star or the Velvet Underground.
FM: Well, I feel like more people got to talk about Big Star. I love Velvet Underground, though.
SC: Big Star does deserve their flowers a bit more.
FM: Yeah, they're one of my faves. I love Alex Chilton’s trajectory of just totally blowing it.
Florry’s tour with Ratboys starts on February 25. Their latest album, Sounds Like… is available here.