Speakeasy with Matthew Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces

Matthew Friedberger, along with sister Eleanor, make up the core of this multidimensional indie rock band. Their latest release is an EP released earlier this year on Rough Trade Records. www.thefieryfurnaces.com.

Q: You’ve credited the Who and your fascination with the short rock opera for the inspiring Blueberry Boat.

A:It’s not like in the Frank Sinatra “Come Fly With Me” sense or a Johnny Cash record about Native Americans or work songs or a Genesis record in the ’70s. It’s a notion record; it’s meant to have all these songs in a particular style, so perhaps a genre record. It’s of a fascination with Kit Lambert [theatric directional influence and manager of the Who], and stretches of side two of the rock opera S.F. Sorrow by the Pretty Things. It’s kind of later ’60s, British Beach Boys story songs; half this sort of pseudo psychedelic stuff and half this sort of wacky Vaudeville thing. With the Who it’s a bit different with the straight-faced rock pop mixed with this campy musical stuff. The actual sound came through Eleanor; she is the reason for the songs.

Q: That’s certainly endearing.

A:Well, yes, but Eleanor knows and we knew that was the opportunity she presents to me and herself. If it was a guy singing this stuff, I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. It was only interesting with Eleanor singing. Not just with her as a “girl singer” but to participate in her sort of speech-song authority vocal I thought she had.

Q: With the Lambert fascination still present?

A:The following stuff has been very different. We do like three-minute rock songs all strung together and the record of duets with Eleanor and our grandmother. Eleanor sings the character’s hope, the young woman’s hopes in the songs, and our grandmother plays the same person, sings the perspective of all the disappointing things that happen to her. It’s a very downcast record. Half the songs they play the same person, so to speak.

Q: Characterize this a bit further?

A:This is a bit of a different narrative, more aligned to sort of a ballad tradition. It’s justified on Blueberry Boat by the Who or S.F. Sorrow so you can have these jumps and this sort of kids’ adventure story that doesn’t quite seem to go at first. This stuff with my grandmother is very coherent, realistic. There’s not this sort of jumping a hundred years into pirate lore, sea captains’ log sort of stuff like there is in Blueberry Boat. It comes much more from the other sort of ’60s story song, which is a Dylan lyric. Though Dylan lyrics are very obviously informed by the sort of third-hand surrealism that he got from beat writers, but he is a much more sophisticated example of their fight. I think he’s a better writer than any of them, Kerouac or Ginsberg …