WWW.MTV.CA: When Florence Welch was asked to write a song for the upcoming “Snow White and the Huntsman” soundtrack, she was given the opportunity to watch a select few scenes from the film itself … and almost automatically, she found herself drawing inspiration from a rather unlikely source: Namely, Charlize Theron’s wicked Queen Ravenna.

“The Queen is just this incredible character; so hungry for life but so dead inside. She’s sort of eternal, but inside there’s nothing. She’s kind of like charcoal or something,” Welch told MTV News on Thursday (March 29). “[There are] these amazing scenes where she’s kind of picking out birds’ hearts and eating them. [She has] this thirst for youth and for life, but for what kind of life? This darkness, but she’s so beautiful, so it’s this kind of juxtaposition between beauty and, ultimately, death.”

So, in a bit of a, uh, non-traditional move, Welch ended up writing a song called “Breath of Life,” which is sung very much from the perspective of the Queen herself (“I got a lot of material from her!” she laughed. “Beauty, death, life … it was pushing all of my buttons.”) So you can imagine her surprise when, after submitting the song, she found herself sitting in London’s Abbey Road studio, watching it all come together under the care of famed composer James Newton Howard.

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