The Fiery Furnaces push the rock genre
The band’s next album will be a funk record chosen by fans.
Published June 11, 2008
On record, The Fiery Furnaces are playful and whimsical. On their most famous — or infamous, depending on who you’re talking to — album, Blueberry Boat, the band, brother and sister Matthew and Eleanor Freidberger, wrote ridiculously idiosyncratic and winding, fable-like tales and backed them by music that splintered, like the stories, into a million directions. Those directions, more often than not, were places of pop genius: candy keyboard loops, squiggly guitar riffs, popping drums and endearing handclap refrains.
Since that record was released in 2005, the band has toned and honed their songs but not their stories. Their last album, the crunching and stomping rock-indebted Widow City, led off with a seven-minute plus jam called “Philadelphia Grand Jury” and another, “Navy Nurse,” featured lines such as “It’s nice to go nautical when choosing a doormat.” Even though they eschewed their pop tendencies, the record was more of the same, even though, you know, it wasn’t really more of the same.
In many ways, it seems as if The Furnaces live never to be pigeonholed. When asked how the band chooses the direction in which they are going to go for a particular album, Matthew gives a typically sly and obtuse answer.
“No one knows how we choose, we just do,” he says. “There’s nothing past choosing. Just general choosiness, just like you decide if you’re going to buy Diet Sprite or not. It’s the same process.”
Their songwriting process, especially with regard to their more fantastical stories, is a little clearer. The band, as is obvious when listening to their records, is inspired by little things in the nooks of the country, something like, say, a personal ad one might find in Omaha, Neb. Friedberger cites things such as store signs, political campaigns and “employment guides that you would pick at a gas station for free” as things that catch his eye when he’s on tour.
Hunting for these things directly benefits the band’s songwriting, but it also provides for a little fun when the duo is on the road.
“It’s just normal, fun activity when you’re traveling around,” Friedberger says. “You want to enjoy this beautiful country, and it keeps things interesting. I just write them out of my head at the time. We don’t go back hunting for stuff, of all the stuff we write down, we would’ve already used it. You do it kind of for exercise, because if you work out enough of those silly phrases, you’ll be able to come up with them on your own.”
The band is also famous for rearranging its songs for nearly every tour it embarks on, and the sound for this one seems to mirror the relaxed and playful spirit that courses through the band’s songs.
“This tour is very casual, in fact I tried to get us to not practice at all, but we practiced a few times,” Friedberger says. “I wouldn’t say ramshackle, it’s a little bit more, how should I say, free and easy.”
As for new material, Friedberger insists the band’s next album will be the funk record chosen by fans in an “online caucus.” This record will surely push the band further from the album that had them hailed as one of the best pop bands working, but Friedberger doesn’t seem to care.
“We’re a rock band,” he says. “All of our records are rock records we think. They weren’t rock, like heavy, but we think of ourselves as a rock band. That’s the category we are in. Like The Beatles, sometimes they played rock ‘n roll early on, but mostly they were a rock band.”
Which, you know, isn’t really anything to live up to.
