Matt Friedberger of The Fiery Furnaces–the other half of the band is his sister Eleanor–knows enough about music that he can casually reference a particular track on a particular Soft Machine record, but he’s picky and blunt enough to declare he’s not a fan of that group in his next breath.
He’s also comfortable enough to admit the second Fiery Furnaces album, “Blueberry Boat,” just may drive some listeners batty.
If you were still living in Chicago instead of New York, do you think people would respond the same way to The Fiery Furnaces?
Yeah, I do. I don’t think we gain much from being in New York. I don’t feel like we’re from New York, anyway. We’re from Oak Park. Being in New York doesn’t really get you access to more media stuff, especially for a band like this one. We used to play every three weeks, almost, but as soon as someone takes note you play three times a year, at most. I’m not objective about what happens. If we were in Chicago, we might not have been as lucky, but I don’t encourage anyone to come here to play in a band.
If you were in Chicago, people would call “Blueberry Boat” post-rock.
Yeah, the stupidest term of all time. So maybe it’s good that we live in New York and we get called garage rock or whatever instead of getting called post-rock in Chicago, just because we live down the street from Archer Prewitt. Of course, [we used to live] down the street from Archer Prewitt. [Laughs] But that’s how it goes.
No one’s calling you garage rock anymore. Did you intend to make a record that defied that categorization?
We wanted to make a record that sounded different from the first one, and we had record company money, so there was no excuse not to make an elaborate record. Unless we didn’t want to, but as it turns out, we did want to. It was amusing to us, and we thought we could talk the record company into letting us make a record of these long imitations of [The Who’s] “A Quick One” or [The Pretty Things’] “SF Sorrow.” That’s how it’s supposed to sound–the later British ’60s story song, half-druggy, half-vaudeville montage.
You’ve called the record “potentially annoying.”
Sure. You exaggerate it to make it interesting or fun for you, but you know that exaggerating it that way is going to ruin it for other people. You know you have to make it particular enough for anybody to like it, but by making it particular, people are going to be annoyed by it. If they were all three-minute songs–think of Fountains of Wayne. There’s a reason for what they do, and I’m annoyed by it, even if I understand what they’re trying to do. Our record is annoying past that. There are long sections of out-of-tune, out-of-time things, besides it all being exaggerated. But there are people like Eleanor or me who think it’s funny.
The Fiery Furnaces
When: 10 p.m. Friday
Where: Empty Bottle,
1035 N. Western Ave.
Tickets: $12
