Features | Interviews

The Fiery Furnaces

By Peter Hepburn | 20 September 2005

Cokemachineglow recently caught up with Matthew Friedberger, one half of the brother-sister indie-rock rock band that is The Fiery Furnaces, in Brooklyn at the very un-rock ‘n roll hour of 9 a.m. Friedberger speaks quickly, with a discernible Chicago accent and a bit of nervousness. He has a clear passion for his records and the music he likes, but still doesn’t take it too seriously. We spoke for almost 45 minutes about the state of modern rock, the difficulties of naming records and and the genius of The Who.

So, how’s the tour coming?
Matthew Friedberger (MF): Hasn’t started yet.
CMG: Okay, so now I look like an idiot. Where do you start the tour?
MF: Brooklyn, and then we go down to DC, and then back to New York, and then we go further away.
CMG: How do you enjoy touring?
MF: [laughs] Sometimes it’s fun to go places and sometimes you want to go home. I like to drive, or at least I’m used to driving long distances, so I don’t mind that. We’re a little band, and we’ve had to be the opening band, and so the schedule is made by somebody else. We once drove to Vancouver, then played in Portland, went to Denver, and then to Salt Lake City, and then back to Seatle, and then to San Francisco. That was ridiculous. Then you’re like a truck driver. Warrior of the road. Nothing to do with showing up and playing. Just going to Subways and truck stops.

You’re always very lucky to get to play in front of people, very lucky. You can never forget that even though you’ve been there waiting to play in some bar in some place and your life is passing you by. You’re still very lucky to play.

CMG: I went and saw you guys play here in DC last fall and I was blown away. You went through the medley that you played on that last tour and it was great. I was curious, who came up with the idea for the medley and how did it develop?
MF: Well, um, I did. I like to run through things as quick as possible. Eleanor never liked to stop to talk, never liked to say anything, and I like to keep playing the whole time ‘cause I love the Ramones, you know, so I was big on the idea that you keep playing or just, “next one, next one, next one.” So, we played one show last spring where we just played one song and then we didn’t stop the whole way and everyone seemed to like it. It made you concentrate more. The thing with rock music, playing it you always make the same percentage of mistakes, because you’re always playing something you can pretty much play. You make mistakes because of not concentrating, so if you have to play medley like that you have to concentrate, thinking, “okay, what’s the song after this song. What’s the song after the song after this.” You might as well do something harder. You’ll still make the same amount of mistakes, but at least it’ll be something harder, so maybe people will let it slide a little more. Or like James Brown, you know? I like all that kinda ‘60s R&B thing where it changes key right in the middle of the song.

CMG: Do you change the medley much night to night or is it pretty much a set form?
MF: In the fall, unfortunately, it was pretty much set. Now on this trip though, we’re not playing a medley. We don’t want it to be our gimmick, and then we’ll play another one in the fall. We’ll see what happens. We’ll see if we can stop. Eleanor was joking to me, “you’re gonna be so bored, so mad.” We’ll see how many we run together, but it definitely won’t be like the arrangement piece. Maybe it’ll be so boring now, when we play, we’ll just be terrible. Before when we played at least we didn’t stop. Now maybe it’ll just be nothing. We’ll see what happens.

CMG: Are you gonna be playing a lot of new material?
MF: No, we’re not gonna be playing a lot of new material. No, not really. We recorded to albums this winter and they’re gonna come out, hopefully, July 19th or if they don’t they’ll come out August 9th or something like that. But we’re gonna record another record in May and we’re gonna work songs from that into the set. That’s one of the reasons we’re not playing a medley—so we can play and add new songs.

The fun thing about playing the medley is that it’s not about the bits—the songs—it’s about the little transitions. But then the problem with that, for like changing it, is that, especially for Andy, our drummer, he learns the transitions as opposed to the songs, so it’s very hard to recombine them. What he knows are ways that they change. We’re trying to do this so that by the end of the trip we’ll be playing nine different songs, where at the beginning of the trip we’re gonna be playing, of songs that haven’t come out, I think only four.

CMG: The music that you’re gonna be integrating onto the tour, it’s mostly from the album you haven’t recorded yet? [phone goes dead—Matt calls back a few seconds later]
MF: Where was I? Oh, right, I was trying to excuse the fact that we’re not really gonna be playing much new material. My excuse is that all the songs, they’re rearranged and so hopefully it won’t be too boring. I mean I did decide though that I didn’t want to play too much of the two new records because I wanted to play them all different. The one record, with our grandmother, you have to rearrange anyway, but I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t want to give away the records. I wanted it to be a surprise. I mean, I want people to hear the recordings and then we play them different as opposed to we play them different and then they hear the recordings and then they say, “aw, I liked the way it was played live better. This is no good.”

CMG: Have you considered doing a live album or some sort of DVD?
MF: I don’t like DVDs, but yeah, we’d like to make a live record. We’ll see what happens and if we can record the shows better. Before we’d record them on minidisc but now it’s relatively easy to record live. Okay, it’s not that simple, but it’s easy to record them in stereo. It’s slightly more involved to record them so you can mix it after the fact. Yeah, I think the live versions are as good as the record versions. It’s supposed to be that there’s a version on the record and there’s a version live and then if you want to pay attention to them and the differences between them you can make up your own ideal version of it somewhere in the middle, in your head. That’s meant to be the idea, so it’s good to have live records.

CMG: What can you tell me about the new records?
MF: One is with Eleanor and our grandmother, these long story bits. Like there’s a song maybe four minutes long, the first song, and then it’s 25 minutes and another 28 minutes. There’s lots of narration, lots of girl groupizing where they’re talking with big reverb on their voices. It’s pretty light-textured, it’s not too thick, and the stories are, even though they’re very specific Chicago in the ‘30s and ‘50s settings, they’re pretty coherent. There’s not much mystery. There’re a couple of fanciful things but they’re pretty obvious, one about cursing some rival woman and another about a doctor with a donut factory full of medicinal ingredients. Those songs are obviously not real, but it’s pretty easy to follow.

CMG: Did your grandmother get involved with the writing process on the record?
MF: No, but she corrected my grammar, ‘cause I remember there was one thing were I had her say, “there’s one man I couldn’t get along with.” And she said, “well, I can’t end a sentence with ‘with’.” So she made me change it to, “There’s one man with whom I couldn’t get along.” And other things she objected to, like there’s stories, lots of anecdotes—the songs are based on anecdotes I got from her. It’s a record where the stories in the songs are about someone like her. Some of which nearly happened to her. I wouldn’t say that it’s a biography of her—the stories aren’t her, quite—but she’s the inspiration for the record.

CMG: Do you have a title for the record?
MF: You know it’s funny you ask that because no, we don’t have a title. I have to decide today, ‘cause we’re doing the artwork. The first record we had a lot of trouble with the title and then the second record we decided the title beforehand because we thought, “we’re not gonna have this trouble again.” But now here we are, two records and we can’t decide on a title. It’s not so much that we’re disagreeing, we just don’t know what it’s gonna be.

CMG: What’s the second record like?
MF: The second record has these individual songs, and because the first record is so super-wordy and specific these are really kind of love song lyrics. Only one of them is in a contemporary sort of setting. The other ones are even vaguer than that, where it’s just love songs. They’re colorful little songs. It’s not a story at all, but they go one after another on the record so you can imagine it tells a story if you want, in the way that a James Brown medley tells a story. You can follow the progress of this person, if you’re inclined to do so, but it’s not a real story.

CMG: And then with the record that you’re recording in May, do you have any thoughts on what that’ll be like?
MF: That’s gonna be these pretty aggressive songs, kinda like The Fall, kinda. They’re not wordy at all. The lyrics are maybe two sentences for the whole song, and the music changes and the phrases—you say half the phrase, you say the whole phrase, you say three quarters of the phrase. The lyrics are all from notes from old high school and junior high school notes.
CMG: Are you going to be singing on that one, or is that gonna be more Eleanor?
MF: No, I’m not gonna sing at all on that one. I sing a little on the pop record, but I don’t sing hardly anything on any of these. I don’t sing hardly at all.

CMG: What were your favorite records growing up?
MF: When I was a kid, hmm. The records that I’ve listened to most in my life—cause I haven’t disowned them, you know—I guess are The Who Sell Out and Combat Rock. Sandanista by the Clash and Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. I think really like, “What am I leaving out? What did I used to listen to that I don’t think is so cool now?"

When I was a kid, because I was am idiot I guess, I had Dave Marsh’s list book. This is when I’m 11 and 12 and I’d go and buy the records that were five stars or that seemed interesting from the description. I remember when I bought the Police’s Synchronicity and I remember traded it, I didn’t like it any more, and I traded it for a Ronnie James Dio tape. Then that was it. Then I went to buying only what I thought were the top-quality albums of rock history. I was a 12 year-old snob. I liked Highway 61 Revisited.

CMG: Have you heard the Petra Haden cover of The Who Sell Out?
MF: Yeah, I heard it.
CMG: What’d you think of it?
MF: It’s nice…I hope people listen to that record [the original] more. That’s the greatest rock record ever made, you could say, because it’s a very weird record—it sounds very particular—and it’s one of the most self-conscious records about the problems of trying to make a rock record. Also, it’s very, very good. A few people always said it was good—that rock critic Dave Marsh always championed it. Through the ‘80s and early-‘90s nobody else did. By the middle-‘90s it was normal for indie-rock fans to like it. Hopefully it’ll become more prestigious a record.

CMG: I’m curious, what record from the last few years have you really liked?
MF: Well, I’m really impressed by—even though the music, I don’t like much of it—Cornelius. He had a record, Point, from 2002, and a lot of it’s playing with these cafe beats, sort of pleasant sounds. There’re a couple songs on that record which are very, very good. And that record from the ‘90s is one of the best—even better than those Flaming Lips records—pop-psychedelic records of the ‘90s.

I really liked the Weird War record from last year, called If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Bite ‘Em. It’s really silly, and like the lead song has a rap from Jennifer from Royal Trux, and that’s just too silly. I guess. You can think that maybe, listening to it, “you don’t really need to have a rap. This is a bit much.” The record sounds great. I don’t think they got enough press. He [Ian Svenonius] is pretty famous, but they don’t get enough credit. I never heard anyone mention it, but that’s way better than the other records from 2004. It’s just sounds more intelligent. A record that just tries, and succeeds, to be super-fun, silly, therefore proper rock ‘n roll record.

CMG: Is that what you’re aiming for with your sound, just kind of fun and out there?
MF: Yeah, and then it’s serious as it happens. Like “Straight Street” is meant to be a song of contemporary relevance, but you don’t say, “I’m gonna write a song about U.S. involvement in Asia, or the Middle East. I’m gonna write a song about that. This is what I have to say!” I don’t have anything to say about that. That’s absurd. But then you write a song and when you edit it at the end you think, “oh, this works well as a—not so much saying anything of social or political relevance—but this song works as a little story dealing with the situation.” Stuff like that happens where you get to the end of a song and you manipulate to where you think it’s clever. I don’t mean clever-like-a-puzzle clever, but clever-like-well-put clever. Of course it’s only the best you can do. It’s only good or bad based on whether it’s entertaining in the sense that people can use it however they want, to set the mood or to play along while they’re shaving.

CMG: You opened for both Wilco and The Shins, but you haven’t seemed to burst into the mainstream consciousness quite the way those groups have. Does that bother you? Do you think it’ll happen eventually?
MF: That we’re gonna burst into the mainstream? [laughs] Everything has gone fine for us. The Shins have sold 200,000 records. We don’t think we’re gonna do that, especially being on the record company we’re on [Rough Trade]. We’ve had enough luck. We don’t think we’re gonna have anymore, really. We think we make up nice tunes. To be a success you first have to dispose of the tunes in the way people are used to—not that we have any new ideas—and then second you have to be really lucky. That’s not gonna happen. Hopefully we can keep making records and keep playing, because you’re very lucky if you get to do that.

CMG:
Where did you come up with the habit of dropping city names and geographic references into the songs?
MF: Good songs should always have city names. City names and place names are funny names. Always try to say something, have someone’s name as opposed to, “the fellow over there” and always try to have, “the corner they’re standing on” rather than, “they’re standing on a corner.” It’s just a way to add concreteness in a spurious way. Also, it’s fun to hear. I think it’s pretty normal, too.

CMG: On a scale of one to 10, with one being haikus and 10 being Tolstoy, how would you rate your attention span?
MF: Well, I hate haikus and I like Tolstoy, so lets say 10.
CMG: How does that play into these giant songs that you’re writing, these 28-minute epics?
MF: Well, I don’t want to give the impression that they’re 28-minute songs. They just go back and forth into each other. [My attention span] makes it easy it easy for me to pay attention to the song that I’m writing. If I can’t pay attention to it than it’s obviously no good. No, I like…

Haha. I’m here in New York City and you really do see it all. A pet pig has just come out of someone’s apartment. Large, black pig. Very handsome looking. About the size of a large dog. I think he’s going to the bathroom. I don’t know if you see that in Georgetown. It’s a guy with a cigarette in his mouth and a large, black pig.

Anyway, I like things where you may not catch things the first time, but you hear that the end of this six-minute song is the beginning of it in a minor key. Just crap like that. It’s fun to notice if it’s structured in some convoluted way. As far as attention spans go, hopefully it’s good for people with short attention spans because it changes all the time and then it’s good for people with long attention spans cause usually it changes for some reason. I’ve read reviews where I’ve got ADD and stuff like that. I don’t have ADD.

CMG: Do you go back and read many of the reviews?
MF: When the record comes out, yeah, Eleanor and I read the reviews. I mean they send them to us. The publicist sends them. I love to read bad reviews because you see if they get you or if it’s just stupid. They’re just not liking the record and coming up with any excuse not to like it. Now we get good reviews, these sort of grudging, wanna-be-clever reviews. Someone said the record was, “like a pink-panda-bear-you-win-at-the-fair version of a masterpiece.” But the record is supposed to sound like a Chuck E. Cheese band playing. An animatronic Chuck E. Cheese band that plays when you win something at skee-ball. People who write reviews or articles about you, five out of six of them don’t read what you’ve said to other people. You try to explain things in your stupid way, but nobody cares. It’s rock record. You put it out there and people can use it however they want. They can say it’s good, they can say it’s bad, they can like it for what it is or what it isn’t. You can’t get worried about that. You’re lucky if anybody even pays attention to it, much less writes about it. Nobody wrote about that Weird War record, and that’s a great record, or at least good comparatively.

CMG: If you were trapped in a gym full of fifth-graders and a bunch of dodgeballs, how many do you think you could take out before they got the better of you?
MF: I could get a lot. I’m a good thrower. Have you seen Curb Your Enthusiasm?
CMG: Yeah, a few episodes.
MF: There’s a dodgeball thing in that, and I think it does accurately represent that if two not-necessarily-in-shape middle-aged men are playing kids, they’ll beat them. Not that I’m in good shape—I’m in bad shape—but I’m not as old as Larry David and can throw harder than him at this point. I think I could hit a lot of kids. Hopefully I wouldn’t do that. I’d let them win. I would take on none of them.

CMG:
Thanks for talking to me. Good luck naming the records.
MF: Thanks. Thanks for calling.