Just when you thought you’d never hear a straightforward recording
by the Fiery Furnaces again, along comes their new album I’m Going
Away (Thrill Jockey). It’s the most classic-rocking record of
their career and the least cluttered since 2005’s EP, and it
couldn’t come at a better time. After seven years of flaunting their
restless creativity, siblings Matt and Eleanor Friedberger take it easy
for once—and the result is their most lived-in album, and one of
their best.
I’m Going Away sounds the way it does for a reason. “For
this album, Matt and I made a real effort to write the songs together,”
says Eleanor over lunch at Five Leaves, a bistro near her Brooklyn
apartment. Though their 2003 debut, Gallowsbirds Bark, was
largely cowritten, the bulk of the Furnaces’ catalog has been penned by
Matt alone. Matt is a master embellisher, as anyone who’s read his
interviews can confirm, but his fractured lyrics and musical fripperies
can be exhausting. This time, the siblings vowed to keep things simple.
“We talked about writing songs together in a short amount of time,
which we did in my house over a couple of weeks last fall,” says
Eleanor. “We wanted to record at home and not go to a studio; we’d
recorded the live record with Jason Loewenstein, so we wanted to do a
whole studio record with him.”
Ah, the live record. That’s Remember, a 2008 double-CD that
takes the Furnaces’ cut-up style to its furthest extreme. Most live
albums mix together tracks taken from different concerts;
Remember splices together different versions of each song
within the song—”Blueberry Boat,” the opener, features
nine audible edits. Eleanor herself, while pleased with the disc, uses
the word “jarring” to describe it. It began as something relatively
straightforward—the group played their live medley of 2006’s
Bitter Tea at Eleanor’s apartment, with Loewenstein
engineering. “Jason had been recording our shows, and it’s kind of hard
to hold back when we had so much material. So we decided to keep going.
All the editing—that was something Matt wanted to do. With
‘Blueberry Boat,’ it was shocking for me to hear at first. It’s really
exciting, because it’s such a record of how much we’ve done over the
last few years.”
Remember was also something of a dead end: How much further
can you take that method? Besides, Eleanor wanted to shift the dynamic
of the group, which began in 2000. “I’d already been living in New
York,” she says of the band’s origins. “Then Matt moved [here]. It
seemed natural to ask him to play with me—he was the best
musician I knew. I already had a lot of songs, but I knew he could help
me make them better. [At first,] it felt very much like it was my
thing. And then it became our thing together, and then it felt almost
like it was Matt’s thing and I was helping him.”
Of course, the Furnaces remain mischievous. In July, the duo
announced on their website that each Friedberger would separately
remake I’m Going Away in its entirety, with new arrangements:
“Only the words will remain the same. Though in Eleanor’s case, the
singer remains the same. The song, never. Or mostly never.” Was this a
joke?
Nope—it had been sent in for mastering a week before Eleanor
and I spoke. (They plan to issue the rival versions digitally, with
download coupons available at the merch table on tour and, down the
road, a vinyl release for sale at shows.) In some cases, Eleanor
reverted to her original arrangements: “Like the song ‘Even in the
Rain’—I had made a song and played it for Matt, and he changed
the arrangement but kept all the words.” The opposite happened with
“Ray Bouvier”: Eleanor threw out Matt’s more complicated structure and
retooled it with three chords. “We actually use my arrangement when we
play live because it’s easier to play,” she says.
All of this sounds like a hell of a lot of activity, especially in
an age when two or more years between albums is standard practice for
indie-rock bands. Eleanor claims the Furnaces have no game plan:
“Unfortunately, we’re so disorganized. Matt and I are really starting
to crave some more consistency and structure [in] our lives. We’ve been
both blessed and cursed by not having that much success.” 