A conversation with Matthew Friedberger of The Fiery Furnaces from 2004

As the duo reissues its madcap masterpiece, Blueberry Boat, this week, let's revisit my pre-release chat with its musical architect about his influences, from The Who to Chuck E. Cheese to his grandma

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s and 2000s (and crusty mp3 files from the 2010s) to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars and the occasional classic-rock icon.

This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!

THE OPENERS

• Welcome to the post-Peart era of Rush, a.k.a. the age of Anika (which, coincidentally, sounds like it could be a song title from A Farewell to Kings). Pre-sales for the retooled trio’s four 50th-anniversary shows at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena next August begin today (Oct. 10) at 12pm EDT, and if you love standing in a crowd of middle-aged dudes hugging each other and saying “I love you, man” as they wipe tears of joy from their eyes, these Rush gigs are going to make the Oasis reunion tour look like an elementary-school recital. (In case you missed it, here’s my 2010 conversation with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson.)

• Speaking of veteran Toronto bands with proggy inclinations: art-punk provocateurs Fucked Up recently announced the release of Year of the Goat, the final chapter in their Zodiac series of epic experimental pieces. But don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to say goodbye: Year of the Goat will be released in 10 (!) parts, the first of which—“Long Ago Gardens”—was just unveiled in all its 28-minute Queen-sized majesty. (Check out my Pitchfork review of the previous entry in the series, Year of the Horse.)

• This went to air just as last week’s newsletter was hitting your inbox, but here’s
  the panel discussion I produced for Commotion on Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl (remember that?) and the fallout from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime-show announcement featuring the hottest of hot takes from supreme music journos Suzy Exposito, Reanna Cruz, and Emilie Hanskamp. On a side note, I was at a wedding last weekend, and when the DJ dropped “Shake It Off,” at least half of the dancefloor cleared out, so I’ll take that as proof Taylor is officially cooked.

• Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:

  • The Besnard Lakes, “Pontiac Spirits”: Now 22 years and seven albums into the game, the Besnards are like the Voyager 1 of Montreal indie, forever maintaining their steady course into deep space. And this standout from the newly released The Besnard Lakes Are the Ghost Nation shows that no band (not named Spiritualized) is better at blowing up simple, heartugging melodies into symphonic psych-rock spectacle.

  • Austra, “Siren Song”: Electro-goth queen Katie Stelmanis is gearing up to release the first Austra album in five years, Chin Up Buttercup, on Nov. 14, and this ethereal yet urgent single is tailor-made to get black hearts pumping in a world where “Running Up That Hill” has become a gym-mix staple.

  • Sudan Archives, “MY TYPE”: The violin-wielding R&B dynamo drops her club-hopping new album, The BPM, today and this is its peak-hour high point, a delirious disco-rap thumper that feels at once both irresistibly retro and freakishly futurist.

  • Badge Epoque, “Empathic Vertigo”: The former Badge Epoque Ensemble has downsized into the solo home-recording project of ringleader Max Turnbull, but on the upcoming Furry Worried Ape (out Nov. 14), his luxuriant jazz-funk vision remains even if he’s conducting MIDI inputs and sample packs instead of actual musicians. And 10 years after retiring his Slim Twig guise, Turnbull is a singer once again, albeit with a vocoderized tone that fits right in with the mutant guitar tones and slippery strings, like a diseased Daft Punk. An alternate version of this track is also available on Bandcamp, with wiggier guitar solos from BEE alumnus Chris Bezant and lead vocals handled by Marker Starling, a.k.a. the Velvet Fog of Toronto avant-pop.

  • Richard Ashcroft, “Find Another Reason”: It’d be nice to think Ashcroft’s first solo album in seven years would take stock of the current shoegaze revival and inspire him to chase those heavenly storms once again, but alas, the man had other plans. That said, while the new Lovin’ You sees him continuing to unlock new levels of cringe, I’ve always got time for his hungover-acoustic-troubadour mode, and this ballad hits the Side-2-of-Sticky-Fingers bullseye.

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THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Matthew Friedberger

The date: June 10, 2004

Publication: Eye Weekly

Location: I was at the Eye Weekly office in Toronto; Matthew was calling in from a motel in Austin

Album being promoted: Blueberry Boat

The context: Today, The Fiery Furnaces are reissuing their 2004 sophomore release, Blueberry Boat, on vinyl with a slightly reshuffled tracklist and a previously unreleased track, “Far Away.” But even though sibling co-founders Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger missed the 20th-anniversary marker by a year, they couldn’t have resurfaced Blueberry Boat at a better time: With cheeky and challenging records by Water From Your Eyes and Geese currently twisting ears into all sorts of unfathomable shapes, it’s an opportune time to revisit an early trailblazer in the Keep Indie Rock Weird campaign.

The Fiery Furances’ Brooklyn zip code and raucous live performances may have initially had some mistakenly pegging them as passengers on the early 2000s New York garage-rock gravy train, but for them, a garage was just that: A big rickety doorway into a dark funhouse where treasured artifacts are discovered amid the detritus. While it’d be tempting to say The Fiery Furnaces were ahead of their time, that assertion suggests a reality where the culture would eventually catch up with them, when they were actually operating on a completely different temporal plane of existence.

Blueberry Boat still sounds every bit as overwhelming as it did in 2004, uncorking a flood of musical ideas that surge through the 76-minute disc like a burst dam. And yet, there’s something oddly quaint and comforting about the album—listening to it feels not unlike coasting through a fairground attraction where there’s a surprise lurking around every corner. After all, Blueberry Boat’s disparate influences—Brit-Invasion mod, new wave, ‘70s AM-radio bubblegum, Joni Mitchell folk, prog-rock, My Fair Lady, Depression-era blues and vaudeville—were all considered pop music at one point. The magic of the record lies in how it makes these familiar reference points sound so freakishly foreign.

I vaguely recall his interview happening at some ungodly hour, like 9am, which seemed like a perfectly contrarian move for this contrarian band. But I was pleased to find that, in conversation, Matthew is as chill and easygoing as his music is fussy and complicated.

How’s the tour going?

It’s fine… not many boos.

How the hell do you adapt an album like Blueberry Boat to a live setting?

We’ve simplified. We’re as raw and rock as we can get. We try to rearrange everything to make things exciting and accessible for a beer-drinking live audience. It’s the reality of the situation—the genre of barroom rock ‘n’ roll—and we try to do something amusing with that. We have lots of older fans—people in their 40s come and talk to us, which we like, so maybe we imagine there’s more of them, because we like having older people and younger people. But we open a lot of tours for bands who are popular. We just came off tour with The Shins, and in Britain with Franz Ferdinand, and there’s lots and lots of young kids who are coming to see those bands. Luckily, some of those young kids came and said they liked us.

So when you’re around a band like Franz who are blowing up right now, does that level of fame seem desirable to you?

I think what you notice is how important the radio is, because you see people really liking the show… they’re jumping up and down and clapping and dancing, but then the song they’ve heard on the radio comes on and they lose it, they really go crazy. They couldn’t control themselves, because here’s a song they’ve heard 26 times played in front of them. You want people to come see you and be excited about coming to see you, so you do aspire to that, I guess.

Does Blueberry Boat feel like pop music to you? Could you ever imagine an album like this crossing over in a big way?

We like tunes. In Britain, the record label, they do have access to the radio, whereas in the US, they don’t have the kind of money that you need to pay radio pluggers to get on the radio. It costs, like, a million dollars.

Like, with a song like “Quay Cur,” which has so many different sections, is there a masterplan at work, or are you following your whims wherever they lead you?

I don’t know if there’s a master plan. They come with some messed-up old blueprints maybe, as opposed to being haphazard. They’re meant to be that way, I guess [laughs]. The joke for this record was to redo The Who’s “A Quick One” and “Rael,” the little mini-rock operas. The song “Chris Michaels” is an imitation of “A Quick One,” these little bits of songs that go in succession, and a song like “Quay Cur” was an imitation of “Rael,” where it’s more pseudo-musically integrated.

How do you remember how all these songs go?

That’s the magic of tape: you can listen to it back. “Oh yeah, that’s how it goes!” We’re not trying to make it difficult.

On a lot of the songs, you and Eleanor aren’t just trading vocals, it sounds like you’re in a game of tug-of-war, trying to seize control of the songs away from one another….

It’s a very friendly and smiley tug-of-war. It’s like a see-saw, actually—how about that? You need the weight of each other to have your fun.

A lot of the songs on this record have a creaky, broken-down quality to them, and you’re drawing from old forms like blues and radio plays… it feels like you’re trying to tap in an old America that no longer exists, or maybe never existed…

Yeah… this may be silly, but I do think of the aesthetic of some of the music, like the funny synthesizer sounds, as existing in between old roadside amusement parks—where you have a Tilt-a-Whirl and octopus rides and fun-fair kind of things—and the sort of transition between that sort of place and the U.S. now, where in strip malls, you have establishments like Chuck E. Cheese that have the pizza restaurant and the video games and you play these different silly games for tickets and there’s an animatronic bear that plays with a showbiz band… that kind of video-game music crossed with amusement-park organ sounds. Yeah, it’s that old fun-fair feel… although that kind of video-game stuff is now 25 years old, so yeah, it’s definitely meant to be evocative of those sorts of places.

So the album’s a comment on corporate America’s co-opting of fun?

[laughs] It’s a celebration of low-rent cynical American outskirts-of-town “fun” in quotation marks.

Did you study music in a formal way?

We’re music fans. Even just growing up listening to ’70s and ’80s American commercial radio, you did hear lots of different things, and if you did dig a tiny bit deeper you heard lots of the pop music you could easily get into from the ’50s to the ’80s. It could be pretty diverse. American classic rock and oldies culture was very easy to hear… you didn’t hear the latest pop hits on American radio so much in 1981. You heard the Ronettes and Led Zeppelin and Chuck Berry and Queen… obviously those are huge popular groups, but the juxtaposition of one after another without even turning the dial was more interesting maybe than it seemed. And that, in combination with used-record buying culture, it was very easy to go buy Augusto Pablo records or to get some strange world music on NoneSuch for $2.50, or you could buy a Yazoo record or a compilation of blues piano players from North Carolina… I don’t think there was a record like that, but you could imagine there was.

And we were lucky enough to have a grandmother who was choir director at a Greek Orthodox church, and she would always try to get our mother to sing in the choir and, as kids, we’d go to choir rehearsal and we’d see people going over and just having fun making a particular kind of music together. So between our mother and grandmother, we’d play the piano and sing Gilbert and Sullivan songs or Christmas carols. One great-uncle had favourite songs he would sing, so we did have a connection with people who would entertain themselves. They would sit with the sheet music and play and sing songs—it was a very familiar thing, and maybe that gave us a connection to older music, so we could imagine someone singing “School Days” in the parlor in 1913 and imagine someone singing Greek songs in a café in the ’30s… it was easy for us to hear lots of different music. Hopefully, in our stuff we can take advantage of that. I don’t think we have properly yet, but we live and learn.

Is your grandmother a fan of the band?

Yeah, she’s one of the more critical of the family members. She’ll say, “it’s great,” or “not much of a tune.” She’s impressed. She always asks about multitracking, like, “how are you playing more than one instrument?” You’re reminded that a recording session isn’t a conductor in the middle with headphones on and everybody playing. It’s me playing 10 instruments. We’re going to do some recording with our grandmother—Eleanor and her are singing these duets where they play the same person in older and younger stages of their lives. Eleanor sings about what the person hoped to have happen, our grandmother sings about the terrible, disappointing things that actually did happen. We’re going to record those between August and December next year.

I feel like your music would appeal most to either younger listeners or older listeners.

We think that’s true, and thanks for saying that. That’s what we imagine we notice: That the 14 year olds and 40 year olds like us more than the would-be hit college kids—I hope that’s true, thanks for saying that.

It’s better than playing for a bunch of Brooklyn hipsters.

You said it. If we can, we’d like to do anything to alienate those Brooklyn hipsters in exchange for having a good combination of retirees and second-graders.

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ENCORES

• So when I asked Matthew “how do you adapt an album like Blueberry Boat to a live setting” at the top of this interview, he offered a perfectly reasonable response about his band’s onstage philosophy. But I would get the true answer to my question on the night of Sept. 12, 2004, when I saw The Fiery Furnaces perform at Toronto’s Mod Club in what remains one of the most astonishing rock shows I’ve ever seen. Here’s my gobsmacked review, which ran in Eye Weekly a few days after:

Your favourite Fiery Furnaces song isn’t really a song—it’s a part, broken down to a fragment, reduced to a morsel. On their latest record, Blueberry Boat, the NYC-based bro/sis duo of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger make prog-rock for the ADD set, tearing out random, fleeting passages from the 20th-century popular songbook—music-hall piano serenades, folky hootenannies, Who-sized rock grandeur, Royal Trux-style blues damage—and binding them together into sprawling song chapters that ultimately prove prog-rock is really just pop music with no gaps between the songs.

The Furnaces’ breathless Mod Club performance on Sept. 12 blew that theory up to atomic proportions—the band took the stage at 10pm and literally did not stop playing for the next 50 minutes, essentially performing a live mash-up remix of Blueberry Boat and 2003’s Gallowsbird’s Bark as an exhilarating, exhausting medley/musical.

Even if you already knew how to guide yourself through Furnaces’ labyrinthine albums, you only held the narrowest advantage over a newbie. In concert, the Furnaces approach their repertoire as a game of 52 pickup, except it’s not just songs they’re reshuffling—it’s the verses, bridges, choruses, guitar solos, everything. And ironically, many songs would take the form of the one musical style the Furnaces have been loathe to associate themselves with: their hometown’s patented post-punk funk.

While the band’s animalistic drummer attacked the hi-hat, the once stoic Eleanor—who used to lord over the stage with a Medusa-like stony stare—turned the barrelhouse blues of “I Lost My Dog” into Devo-lutionary disco, complete with robo-dance moves. But for every time she got her groove on, it was only a matter of seconds before Matthew would rudely interrupt her with the Rick Wakeman-esque keyboard arpeggios of “Quay Cur,” or strap on the six-string to trigger a thunderous, Zeppelinized roar through “Don’t Dance Her Down.”

It all amounted to one ingenious ploy: give the fans everything they wanted to hear while making them feel like they’d never heard it before. And it’s one that challenged not just the conventions of performance, but of spectatorship as well: namely, is applause something the performer naturally elicits through their efforts onstage, or is it something the audience simply feels compelled to express at regular intervals, if only to feel like they’re a part of what’s going on? You could sense the reserved and increasingly restless audience at the Mod Club was waiting for any kind of pause to put their hands together—one that the Furnaces deviously denied them until their final quotation of “Quay Cur” at set’s end.

As much as I’m loathe to paraphrase their country’s president, you’re either with The Fiery Furnaces or against ‘em. But no matter what side of the fence you choose to stand on, we can all agree on one thing: the Fiery Furnaces are a rock ‘n’ roll band like no other.

• If you never got to see the Furnaces in their prime, you’ll have a chance to rectify that this November, provided you live in London, Brussels, or Utrecht. But failing that, you can always turn to the 2008 live album Remember, which provides a suitably brain-scrambling display of the Furnaces’ “automatic mash-up” performance style, and actually ups the anarchic ante by reconstructing each song using different sections from different live recordings.

This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!