The Fiery Furnaces, the most original band in music today, are sailing back to our shores for another dose of nautical nonsense and fantastic rock and roll. I spoke to one half of the brother sister act; the enigmatic genius, Matt Friedberger about little sisters, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Bono.
“Its easy to work with your family because you don’t have to make up when you fight – with a sibling you’re so used to fighting and having sharp words you don’t have to put everything right and don’t have to mend the disagreement. The solo work is just for things I don’t think the band will go for.”
Matt Friedberger knows the positive side to family conflict. As one half of the brother-sister duo The Fiery Furnaces he has spent the last five years recording and touring with his younger sister Eleanor. His enigmatic lyrics and arrangements combined with his sister’s rock-solid charisma have made them darlings of the indie rock scene. They’ve supported the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Shins and got rave reviews from everyone that mattered.
Matt and his sister formed the band in New York, 2001.
“I’d been travelling the world and decided to come to New York. My sister was playing guitar around the traps and we ended up ‘coincidently’ meeting up. I’d been playing keyboards my whole life, so maybe she arranged the meeting. Forming a band seemed like the most natural thing to do and it just fell together.”
Their first album, 2003’s Gallowsbird Bark, was a nice slice of bluesy music hall folk rock that got decent reviews and put the band’s eclectic production and antique songwriting on the map.
It was 2004’s Blueberry Boat that got everybody talking. An amazing, sprawling album that incorporated everything from pirates to Alice in Wonderland to childhood kidnappings (often in the same song) it yielded comparisons to The Who and ecstatic reviews from fans and critics alike. There was NOTHING else like it.
They followed this up with 2005’s EP, a poppier collection of B-sides (including the joyous anthem ‘Comes the Summer’). Opinions were divided on the next release, ‘Rehearsing My Choir’. Its stream-of-consciousness speeches by Friedberger grandmother, Olga Sarantos, who speaks half the lyrics over Matt’s keyboards. Their latest releases continue this pattern with new Furnaces slab ‘Bitter Tea’ harkening back to Blueberry Boat bombastics and Matt’s solo albums Winter Women and Holy Ghost Language switching off pop with noise.
Matt is calling me from a hotel room somewhere in the Midwest, “geographically halfway through the country. Everything looks very flat- there’s a contrast between wild and tamed.”
“Its fun to have simple lyrics, fun to have wordy, Bob Dylan or Mark E Smith imitations. The new album is going to have long story songs.”
Note that he said story songs, not story albums. Asked about the fan-project ‘Blueberry Boat Chronicles’, which tried to assemble Blueberry Boat into a coherent narrative, Matt said, “Rehearsing My Choir tells a story, but Blueberry Boat and Bitter Tea don’t tell one story- each song tells an individual story. I write things that I think it would be fun to hear Eleanor sing. I’m not going to go out there and say ‘oh I hit my girlfriend. I think I’ll write a song about it.’”
“Often I’ll plagiarize a phrase from a book. For ‘Quay Cur’ , things were taken from a ship captain’s logs. ‘Benton Harbour Blues’ has Sir Walter Raleigh quotes to give it a real Elizabethan style. Many of the references are things that are only meaningful to me, Eleanor, and our friends. There’s no “you didn’t know that, you didn’t get the song”.
“What do people need to know? We like to play aggressively live. We don’t want people to expect a sampler or quiet, precious art-rock.”
What about the band’s old love shows? Are they done with the 60 minute epics of improvisation, with songs flowing into each other and bits surfing in other bits?
Well, yes. The old shows rose out of Matt asking “what’s the point of playing our records live? You could just go home and put on the record. We started playing with moving bits around, putting the start on the end, and went down the slippery slope to being big Frankenstein records live. For the new tour me playing electric guitar is a big enough change to the arrangement.”
Lucky for veteran fans who wanted to sing along to the stirring chorus of ‘My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found’ you don’t have to look dumb when they play two bars and it leaps into a 10 minute monologue about life in wartime Poland.
“We’ve got a really good band. We usually change bands but we think we’ll keep these guys. We simply do not get nervous on-stage and never have. Eleanor is the centre of attention because that’s her job as lead singer”.
