The Fiery Furnaces
The Fiery Furnaces released their first record in 2003 on Rough Trade and have been steadily releasing albums about once a year since then. I’m Going Away (Thrill Jockey, 2009) is their seventh record and is arguably their least orchestrated. The band reached international acclaim with Blueberry Boat (Rough Trade, 2004), which is a lush, orchestral masterpiece full of meticulously arranged, seemingly endless ephemeral pop songs. But I’m Going Away is stripped down and shorter, with more attention paid to simpler presentations of the lyrics.
Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger are the brother and sister team at the center of the band. However, their website lists over 25 other “personnel” that include the extra players in the band (they often tour with a different crew each time), along with illustrators, recording engineers and video-makers. No family is an island.
We met at the crux of lower Central Park to hang out and take photos on a rainy, grey day. Eleanor and Matt wore ’SUP’s complimentary plastic ponchos. After doing a shoot on a big rock and the shore of an algae-filled lake, we tried and failed to go and hang out in the Park Plaza Hotel to do the interview, but instead opted for a nearby coffee shop. Matthew schooled me on American history while Eleanor sat across the table and never took off her classic tan belted trench.
When did you guys move from Chicago to New York?
Eleanor: I moved in March of 2000. And Matt moved in October or November of 2000.
I’ve noticed with your records that there is a really unique sense of place with your songs. The most obvious early example of this is “Tropical Icy Land” from Gallowsbird Bark (Rough Trade, 2003). That’s about a real place, right? Or is it?
Eleanor: It’s 100 percent real. It’s about a week-long trip to Iceland I took. I stayed with a friend.
Have you been back since?
Eleanor: Yes, twice.
I’ve heard since the bank collapse everything there has gotten significantly less expensive.
Eleanor: Well, like I said, I was staying with a friend whose mother worked in a cheese factory. So when I was there, I ate nothing but cheese from the factory and canned tomato soup. And bread.
No putrefied shark?
Eleanor: No, but I did see a goat’s head in a deli case, but I didn’t eat it. That’s the first line of the song.
Do you feel like there are songs with a real connection to place on your new record?
Matthew: Not like on Rehearsing My Choir (Rough Trade, 2005). That was specifically about a place.
Eleanor: I don’t have the tracks in front of me—
I have them [taking out a copy of the CD, the paper case recently damaged in that morning’s rainstorm]. Sorry about the disrespectful condition.
Eleanor: Oh no! Okay, personally, “Ray Bouvier” is a true story about my first–
Matthew: And last–
Eleanor: Yeah, and last time I ever fired a gun. It happened in Texas, where a friend of mine has a large collection of guns. I think I only know one person in New York with a gun. It seemed like a thing that would only happen in Texas. The song is about my friend’s lawyer, who won the Texas State Lottery. And “Charmaine Champagne” is set in New York, in the West Village. Each song has a setting for me, but maybe it’s not completely obvious.
I saw you at the Brooklyn Pool Party a few weeks ago and I noticed you were playing a good amount of your old material. Things from as far back as Gallowsbird Bark, which is what, six years old now?
Eleanor: Yes.
A lot of bands get tired of playing their old material. Yours is clearly re-worked, but it’s kind of unusual for bands to play things that old unless their fans demand it because they have some big commercial hit.
Eleanor: We get around that by playing it different.
Do you have a new way of playing songs every tour?
Eleanor: Pretty much. We don’t do songs the same way for more than, I’d say, about two years.
Matthew: We feel obligated to do it that way. We think that’s what people should do. A song isn’t necessarily identified by its arrangement–the specific arrangement–on the record. Otherwise it’s not much of a song. The modern sense of the song as an artifact has bands often performing them exactly as they are on the record and if not, sometimes people feel cheated. But we think you should give a song something to do. We are being affectionate to the song. Taking the song out into the world in a new outfit.
If the song is, as you say, an independent artifact, it’s interesting to me that all of your records always feel united, very whole objects. Was there a uniting principle in the new record?
Matthew: It was supposed to sound casual, like people playing in a basement, so I guess it was unified in that way. We didn’t necessarily arrange it that way, as with a key change at the end of a song so that it flows into the next song. Although, there is nothing wrong with that and we’ve done it before.
Eleanor: There’s not really another way to describe it that I can think of.
Matthew: I wouldn’t say that it’s laid back, because there are some aggressive bits. We also tried to make it sound like we’re supposed to be trying too hard to sound casual. Some songs have not as much going on in the arrangements as we’ve done in the past and we wanted people to listen to that.
Were you influenced by other people’s records at all?
Matthew: I don’t want to name names but we were going for a ’70s sort of record, maybe a TV sound like the Welcome Back Kotter theme. Have you ever heard the Italian term “sprettura zura”?
No. What is that?
Matthew: It means this aristocratic casualness, a specific kind of not caring. Rock music tries to show this kind of casualness a lot–not trying to think about it too hard. These days, everything is about geekiness. If you are obsessed with details, you are OCD. You are geeking out on something you really like. But from the Bowery Boys in the 1830s to the Beatniks in the 1950s, there have always been people that forced that cult of casualness.
Eleanor: ‘Cult of Casualness’. Ooooh.
Matthew: It’s like Chris Penn says in that movie, the one after Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
You mean Sean Penn?
Matthew: No, his brother, Chris Penn. I can’t remember the name of the movie, but all through it he has this catchphrase: ‘It’s casual’. Instead of saying, ‘It’s cool’, or ‘It’s neat’, he says, ‘It’s casual’ [The Wild Life, 1984].
Funny that you mention the ’70s because my editor and I both agreed that the new record has some strains of Patti Smith.
Matthew: Like the third record, where it’s all singer-songwriter? I don’t remember the name of it. [Easter, 1978]
Eleanor: I’ve never listened to Patti Smith.
Really? That surprises me a lot.
Eleanor: I didn’t even know what she was like, what her personality was like, until I read a story about her very recently. What I was surprised to find out is how ambitious she was. Extraordinarily ambitious. But I get compared to her a lot.
What are you reading at the moment?
Eleanor: Right now, just the New Yorker. There were three issues in my mail from tour. [To Matthew] But you’re reading about Walt Whitman?
Matthew: Well, 1830s and ’40s New York.
I don’t know much about that period in history at all. Before the Industrial Revolution?
Matthew: Before the second Industrial Revolution. It’s interesting because during that time in New York, Brooklyn grew tremendously. I think it grew to four times its size between 1820 and 1850. They called that revolution a Commercial Revolution. Subsistence farmers had to adapt to the new kinds of commerce. Walt Whitman’s father had to adapt and he couldn’t do it very well, and so he wasn’t very successful. It also coincided with the religious revolution—ending the era of the ideas of Payne and Jefferson—which maybe wasn’t felt as much by the general population, but it had a large impact on artists and writers and the elite.
You guys tour a whole lot. Do you like it?
Eleanor: For the most part. Like anything, it has its upsides. We keep it really low key, do everything modestly. We don’t have a tour manager.
Matthew: Eleanor’s the tour manager. She books the hotels, she takes the money. And she’s the main attraction!
Eleanor: Yeah. I’m the singer. We have our own van. It’s just the four of us.
Do you have any kind of traditions that you like to do in certain cities? For instance, whenever I’m in Portland I try to walk over a bridge because I like the bridges there and the Willamette River is really pretty.
Eleanor: We had a half-hour free in Nashville and I went to a vintage clothing store I like there. I spent about 25 minutes shopping for clothes. But tour’s nice now because we know where to eat. We know where the good bookstore is in the towns we visit.
Matthew: Maybe it’s less exciting.
Eleanor: No, I like it better. On this last tour we had one night off and we spent it in Savannah, Georgia.
That’s not really a big rock ‘n’ roll town, but it’s really pretty, huh? All the weeping willows and large columns.
Eleanor: Yeah, I don’t know why they don’t have a venue because there is that big arts college.
Matthew: That town was built on blood money.
I’m not a Southerner so I don’t want to make any assumptions, but it has always seemed to me that they are more at peace with their past than people in the North.
Matthew: Yeah, I don’t know either.
This interview is making me want to read more about American history.
Matthew: Well, you shouldn’t!
Why not?
Matthew: Well, don’t do it if you don’t want to.
No, it’s interesting! I am kind of reading a history book right now, I guess. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.
Matthew: (scoffs)
Do you think he’s pompous?
Matthew [sarcastically]: Pompous, Nabokov? No. That book is kind of his apology for himself. But he was skilled and hardworking and a lot of people that read his books have that as a reward.
You can’t deny that.
Matthew: There are some writers I like from right now. Tony Harrison, he’s an English author. Jeffrey Hill, he’s English, too. Do you think bands should do genealogies like that?
I guess it depends on the family.
Matthew: Why? Only interesting families should have genealogies?
No, no. It’s more like not every family can find out all the information as completely as he could. For instance, my family came through Ellis Island and I know approximately when, but I’ve looked into it and I can’t find the records. And there aren’t enough people still living who have the information.
Eleanor: You could make it up, which would be more fun! Maybe only sibling bands should have genealogies.
Matthew: No, then it’s boring, because it’s the same. But yes, a lot of genealogies are about filling in the gaps. For instance, there is a book called the Hemmingses of Monticello. Sally Hemmings and her family were owned by Thomas Jefferson and the family of course had lots of… different kinds of interactions with him. [Sally Hemmings bore some of Thomas Jefferson’s children, a fact recently confirmed by genetic testing.] There is a lot of information about them, but still, you have to suss out what is plausible, you know?
Eleanor: Our dad is a historian. Maybe we should pay him to make our family genealogy and put it up on the website. Maybe just like five dollars an hour.
Less than minimum wage! Almost indentured labor!
Eleanor: Well, he’s retired so it would just pad his fat Social Security check.
