Fiery Furnaces songwriter burns with complexity

By SEAN MOELLER - For the North County Times | Wednesday, May 28, 2008 9:06 AM PDT ∞

When Fiery Furnaces chief songwriter Matthew Friedberger is dealing with something, it cannot just be. It cannot act as static and it cannot be processed in a standardized way. It needs to exist as a maze with three or more workable escapes, and tangents that may or may not be necessary.

The songs that he and his sister Eleanor ---- both former Chicagoans-turned-New York residents ---- fit onto their extremely dense and fascinating albums are given to adjustments, as community pieces that allowed shape-shifting, only it's still all performed by the principal architects and not in a free-for-all fashion.

An album is not a finished product ---- or, to be more specific, the songs on an album are simply beginning to find their footing once they've been recorded. They then get the live treatment that Matthew Friedberger demands they have. Most of the work that the quirky and wordy band do on the songs that have made up a whole host of thematic albums ---- one happened to be about their late grandmother's younger years and was even sung by her ---- is done privately and then redressed by the band when the time comes to rehearse for a tour. It lends itself to new creations and accents that were never intended in the original recording of the music.

"We play really differently live," Matthew Friedberger said by phone Monday while walking along the water in New York. "I rearrange the songs differently for the live shows. If you're a rock band, playing live is part of the game, so it's half the story. I go along with that. So we wanted to give fans that part of the story."

Releasing later this summer on Thrill Jockey Records is a 51-track live album titled "Remember," and it shows the band ---- which is now a bigger outfit live than it was in the past, when the siblings were the only players ---- bathing all of their songs in significantly different hues and tones, giving them characteristics that weren't evident on the albums.

"I think about things a little differently when considering the album and the live versions of songs," Friedberger said. "When you're talking about an album, the important thing is to listen to everything on the album. When you're at a show, it's fun to have the recorded version in mind when you're hearing it, as long as you're not referring back to it in the context of the record. The live version is supposed to be the more dramatic version of the song."

Friedberger delights in the miscellaneous ways that a song can be messed and tampered with from one night or one version to the next, turning it into a different species altogether. One song that he chose to include on the live album he described as a soft number, a gentle sort when it was recorded for the album "Blueberry Boat" ---- and yet, when it comes to its form on the live album, it's changed considerably.

"It's meant to sound like the song in distress," he said. "As if the song's been kidnapped. It's great when songs can be hijacked in kinds of ways. You always have memories of the songs as they were. You can't help that."

The live album, in Friedberger's opinion, is not a stopgap release, bridging the time between last year's last studio release "Widow City" and the next album of new material, but an important piece of work in the band's bigger picture.

"I think that we think it's a necessary thing for the band," he said of the live record. "It would be weird if we didn't have this record. This is our most personal record."

The Fiery Furnaces with Grand Ole Party, Sybris

When: 8 p.m. Sunday

Where: Belly Up Tavern, 143 S. Cedros Ave., Solana Beach

Tickets: $14-$16

Phone: (858) 481-8140

Web: www.bellyup.com.

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