The Fiery Furnaces had no expectations for their second album, 2004’s Blueberry Boat. The sibling duo recorded it before their debut had even come out, and so had no idea that 2003’s Gallowsbird’s Bark would receive such wild acclaim: in an 8.4 review, Pitchfork called its shambolic rock’n’roll and frontwoman Eleanor Friedberger’s arcane lyricism a “a mess of weird, undulating musical bits that are hugely intriguing despite not always making a whole shitload of sense”. They were busy fulfilling a five-album deal with Rough Trade, a luxury that was pretty much par for the course as a buzzy Brooklyn band in the time of the Strokes and Interpol – not that their Beefhearty blues had much in common with preening rock revivalism. “I thought they were so bad. I just didn’t give a shit about that stuff,” was one of Eleanor’s withering contributions to the scene oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom.
Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger had moved from Chicago: in a classic older brother move, he bought her a guitar and drum kit when she was in her teens, then she roped him into playing with her when he followed her east. “We were a New York band, and there were a lot of bands where that’s what people knew about them,” says Matthew, 52, on a three-way call with his sister, 49. “That seemed to be the distinguishing feature: they were from New York and sort of new-wavy. Why were they meant to be good? I was pleased with the idea that with Blueberry Boat, at least it would be hard to lump us in with them. We wouldn’t seem like an also-ran New York City band wearing leather jackets.”
If his comments sound contrarian, even contemptuous, that’s because they are, delightfully so. Matthew knew that their second album would stick out in that scene: Blueberry Boat was a 75-minute, piratical travelogue-cum-rock opera inspired by the Who’s rock suites A Quick One, While He’s Away and Rael. This one scored 9.6 on Pitchfork, racked up reams of coverage from alt-weeklies across the US and got a very noble 1/10 from NME. “It was a lucky experience to get to do something and have people react to it in its tiny corner of music,” he says. “That’s pretty much a dream come true.”
Blueberry Boat was always going to stand apart, but Matthew hadn’t anticipated how the scene would have softened within just a year as the nebulous concept of “indie” got Garden State’d. By 2004, he says, they were supporting a lot of bands that were “very indie, but it was like Christian rock, or some sort of religious affiliation, and all of a sudden there would be kids sitting on the floor of some dirty venue”. They supported one such band – Eleanor insists that he doesn’t name them when he is clearly itching to – who told them: “I heard your new record: pretty gay.”
One of that band later “asked to see my tits”, at the Sleater-Kinney edition of All Tomorrow’s Parties, adds Eleanor.
“This is devolving fast,” she demurs.
And if this sounds like ancient history, that’s because it is. The Fiery Furnaces lasted seven studio albums, regularly splitting opinion, and no more so than on 2005’s Rehearsing My Choir, on which their grandmother Olga Sarantos narrated her picaresque life story (a CD my dad threatened to throw out of the car window). Being on Rough Trade, coupled with Eleanor’s then-relationship with Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, also made them adjuncts to the UK indie scene for a while. After they quietly went on hiatus in 2011, both went solo, albeit Matthew for seven harebrained albums, generally played on one instrument apiece, released in quick succession between 2011 and 2012, and Eleanor for four beautiful, gnomic records in a 70s songwriterly vein, the last released in 2018. They have just reissued Blueberry Boat for a belated 20th anniversary repress, having got the licence back from Rough Trade, and are about to embark on a brief US-EU tour in celebration.
They felt like one of the most idiosyncratic and daring bands of the 00s, creators of an anarchic and unique American songbook. Those of us who loved them really, really loved them. Among their forthcoming dates are support slots with Destroyer, AKA Canadian musician Dan Bejar, whom Eleanor has supported previously. When he first heard them, he says, he was “struck by the arrangements which were equal part reckless abandon and psychotic rigour. Then the language just got weirder and denser and dazzling. To the point that, in a lot of ways, it felt like an attack on the singer. Luckily, in this case, the singer was probably the best American rock’n’roll singer of the 21st century. So she seemed, you know, unfazed.”
But today the band has just 17,000 monthly Spotify listeners. Searching “fiery furnaces” on TikTok brings up two relevant clips and dozens more Bible-bashers citing Daniel 3:8-25. It makes Blueberry Boat feel like one of the first great lost records of the century. “If the record has lived on in some big way, I haven’t noticed it,” says Matthew. It’s a rare disappearing act in an age where everything is perpetually available. Neither Friedberger is surprised or disappointed, describing themselves as temperamentally unsuited to success. “I feel like we both only have a certain capacity for trying to expose ourselves,” says Eleanor. “To be in public, to share things.”
Until 2006’s Bitter Tea, the Furnaces’ music seemed to demonstrably intensify with each record: as if pushing things as hard as they could while living on borrowed time. “Oh yeah, that was my aim!” Matthew laughs. As a teenager in the 80s, in books such as The Rolling Stone Album Guide, “you read about Small Faces, the Clash – you have two, three, four years and you want to make as much as possible. And see what happens – you wanna go and mix up the medicine and see what basement you can blow up.”
Writing was the only part they really thought about. “It’s kind of shocking to see how much we didn’t take it seriously, except for the music,” says Eleanor. “I’d hear other acts talk about ‘my management’ and we just never had that attitude. Maybe that was to our detriment, but we just don’t have that in us.”
Being siblings made striving and contrivance impossible, says Matthew. “In another band, you can have this wonderful experience working with each other because you can really remake yourself and be another person, and project that to the people who are interested in you. We definitely weren’t ever going to do that. Being brother and sister, we’re not going to be so impressed with each other.”
Back in the day, fans and critics were fascinated by their prickly dynamic. Today, Eleanor generally stays quiet while her brother’s conversational digressions gather pace. Their rehearsals for their forthcoming tour dates are more likely to be spent talking about “family issues with our parents”, says Eleanor.
When it comes to settling debates, says Matthew: “If anything, it’s too polite a committee.”
“I would say we talk too much and there’s more talking than action,” says Eleanor. “That would be my complaint.”
“You’d often say that in any situation,” says Matthew.
They originally planned to reunite and record a new album in 2020. “The pandemic kind of quashed things,” says Eleanor. They put out a new single, Down at the So and So on Somewhere, on Jack White’s Third Man Records that year, and played a couple of dates in 2021, but the fragments of music Matthew had written remained unfinished. “I didn’t know what to write for Eleanor,” he says. “I didn’t know how to push and actually finish something.”
To do so, he says, “it’s fun to imagine a setting. Rock band is a performance style: you imagine the places you’re playing, who is going to be there. If you’re hazy about all that, it becomes much harder to make the decisions to actually finish something that you like. If you’re not going to show [recordings], you don’t finish them. Presumably that’s self-defence – if you don’t finish it, you can imagine it’s better than it is. That’s why a lot of people put things in their drawer.”
They played with such a big band in 2021, he says, that it felt “impersonal” to him. “It was like I was standing on the side of the stage doing the lighting even though I was playing the whole time.”
Eleanor had the inverse experience. “At the last show we did in Los Angeles, it felt so good – the sound, how I was singing – that I thought, if this is the last time I ever stand on stage, I’m going to remember this moment.” After her last solo tour, which finished in early 2020, she had thought: “Maybe I don’t want to do this any more.” It was the first time she had got off the treadmill since the band started. “And for all the reasons one can imagine – the music industry is terrible, it’s more and more expensive to travel and tour, it’s harder to make money. I’d also just moved in with someone and had never really lived in a home with someone before.”
“Except your parents and your brother!” Matthew corrects her.
Now, she’s excited about revisiting her demos and playing again, she says. The band’s forthcoming shows will be far more intimate, with just the two of them on stage. “If it’s just the piano and two people singing, there’s more freedom to make really bad mistakes and for people to notice it and see if it’s stimulating to them or not,” says Matthew. “So that’s fun.”
If they were out of time in the 00s, and disappeared from view in the 2010s, maybe they are better suited to existing now, they theorise. “You can be so much weirder now and no one thinks anything of it,” says Eleanor.
In trademark fashion, Matthew calls this “the Balkanisation of particularisation in these endlessly, specifically curated lives that people are supposed to lead”.
As much as the Furnaces seemed like one-offs in the 00s, Stereogum’s 20th anniversary retrospective on Blueberry Boat made the smart point that “high-concept, big-swing” records by the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Wilco, the Flaming Lips, even the Streets abounded at the time. They exchange various theories about why – breaking genre conventions, technology – until Matthew lands on a conclusion. “I think people felt empowered to waste people’s time in a more aggressive way,” he says. “That’s exciting.”
• The reissue of Blueberry Boat is out now on Everything Nice. The Fiery Furnaces play National Sawdust, Brooklyn (25 October), Pitchfork festival, London (6 November), Botanique, Brussels (7 November), and Le Guess Who? festival, Utrecht (8 November)
