Fiery Furnaces - The blues as a game

About an hour before my meeting with the Fiery Furnaces, I'm told there'll be a small delay (on top of the usual delay), so there's nothing left for me to do but what women do best: shop till I drop. Matt (Eleanor will join us later) and I start our chat by commenting on my fantastic new pink underwear and the record ("Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited"), which led us to talk about things that might interest you more...

Matt: Which CD is that? Oh yes, I've heard about it. Cat Power and Karen Elson! (covering "Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus") That must be terrible. Have you heard the record yet?

Not yet, but I know the Placebo version of "Ballade De Melody Nelson" and I'm not thrilled with it. You know, it's always been one of my all-time favorite songs.

Matt: Well, for a record like that... You can't pick songs people don't know, otherwise the audience might feel offended.

Do you like covers?

Matt: We've recorded a few, but we don't normally do them. I don't like them much, I've got nothing against them and I like folk songs and people who keep playing the same tunes over and over, but for rock I don't think it's fun to do covers. Do you like covers?

It depends: an unexpected cover during a show, or one cover every four albums, can be fun, but I don't trust various revisitations much, or records that are made up entirely of covers. You know, there's a strong French streak in my family and Gainsbourg records were always playing around the house: I picked up this record because I was tremendously curious.

Anyway, let's start the actual interview. I realize you must be sick of being asked this, but could you tell me where the name you chose comes from?

Matt: Oh, the name. I happened to be watching the kids' film "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and, in the film, the boy says to his father: "Dad, we need to put the car in the furnace," and I thought it was a great name for a band.

There's also a biblical reference — it's in the Bible and refers to baptism by fire. I thought that, partly thanks to that, it had a really rock'n'roll sound, and having seen it in a kids' movie, I also find it a bit funny, so it seemed like a great combination of scary and fun to me.

So we could say it's a positive name after all.

Matt: I'd say it's not a negative name.

And it has nothing to do with the movie "Nightmare", like I thought at first. (we smile)

Matt: No, nothing to do with it.

Ok. Another question you're probably sick of: what was it like collaborating with your grandmother on "Rehearsing My Choir"?

Matt: It was very satisfying and everything went really well. You know, I know her extremely well and I knew exactly how to handle the situation.

I didn't write the words for her, but for someone like her, and she liked them, so that was a great satisfaction.

Then in the studio things went off without a hitch, and she was very professional.

We recorded in Chicago, which is basically right next to where grandma lives and where my sister and I grew up. Mom would pick grandma up at home to bring her to the studio, then we'd work for four hours and my mom would drive her back home while we kept working. It wasn't like recording pure rock'n'roll — it was a great use of that family atmosphere.

It makes me think of a classic Sunday afternoon, when you go visit relatives you adore.

Matt: Yeah, the not-so-fun part of Sunday — the one before you go home, take a shower and go out to have fun — but there were moments when it was definitely more fun than going out for a drink.

I imagine you'd already been thinking for a while about making a record with your grandmother...

Matt: Absolutely! I thought her voice on a rock record would be really interesting, because she's not the typical person you'd expect to find on a rock record, but she has a really strong charismatic presence and a very melodramatic voice, and she also has a very funny attitude and a very direct sense of humor: having all of that on a straight-up rock record seemed like it would be perfect, in my opinion.

The whole atmosphere of the record depends on how we wanted to use her personality: they couldn't be just ordinary songs, they had to have a certain melodramatic quality. We talked a lot about the result we wanted to achieve, and I can say the record revolves around some true stories and others I made up for her.

Basically that was the record of the more mature girls, while “Bitter Tea” would be the record of the younger girls.

(Eleanor enters the room)

You have an eclectic and heterogeneous background. How does that blend with your experiences? Maybe with Eleanor's very long trips…

Eleanor: It's hard to talk about, because it's something that simply disguises itself as the ordinary and swells up inside your head. It's a bit like thinking about that cat's fur, or about how, on the way here, I fell asleep in the taxi…

Matt: What do you plan to do with these experiences?

Eleanor: Nothing! (smiles)

Matt: You know, we try to abuse our musical and social influences, we try to use whatever we need to come up with a song that we find surprising or interesting.

There are times when we don't even know how we started writing a particular song: Eleanor writes a song that could be described as a kind of travel diary, while I write a song about a character who resembles Eleanor and goes on a journey. Basically, we "feed" off each other.

Eleanor writes songs about her travels, and I try to work them into something else, "turning her," for instance, into a travelling salesman.

Sometimes you just want to write about the ordinary things you do or that happen around you. Other times you'd rather write about the exact opposite. The same goes for how you develop as a musician: sometimes you can imitate what was done on records you love, and other times you can do the exact opposite of what was done on records you love.

Or the exact opposite of records you don't like.

(Eleanor smiles)

Matt: Yes, that's a very clever attitude (smiles).

Eleanor: Actually, there are so many bands that just make me think: "We can do so much better than that!"

Matt: I could be very critical of what Eleanor just said, but that's exactly why I only worry about the records I love, so that when your record is finished, you listen to it and think: "I did what I wanted to do," and that's a far more positive feeling, as far as I'm concerned.

How do you work on a song? What's your compositional process like? I'm thinking of a particular track like "Blueberry Boat", for example.

Matt: Well... That song came out of some words I had in mind, and I wanted Eleanor to be the Captain of a cruise ship. I wrote the words and the music came out as a kind of vaguely bluesy little tune that then took off in a number of different directions.

One of your diehard fans asked me to ask you whether the listener has a role in the compositional process.

Matt: ...Well, when you write a song, you're the first listener, and that makes me pretty critical of it. Not in a negative way, but maybe in a more objective way: you ask yourself how the song might sound in other versions, and that leads you to surprise yourself as a listener.

If by "listener" you mean "us", then yes, we play a big part, and we're the only listener you can really trust. If there's a conversation going on with someone else, that's a collaboration.

For us, the listening process is really important.

Eleanor: What about the audience?

Matt: People outside the band use our music however they want. They can even go online and remake it themselves; they can attach different stories to our songs than the ones we imagined. You need to make listeners essential — not just us in the first person, but others too — and "guide" them in connecting the story or your emotions with the song.

How do you manage to step back and be more objective about a song you're writing?

Matt: It's a bit like having a switch in your head. Sometimes you think about it constantly, other times it's harder, so you need to go out for a walk. But it keeps changing.

For me, writing songs is a way of keeping myself from falling apart: you write songs and then decide whether what you've written is good, not so good, or even embarrassing. It's really important to be able to have an outside perspective on a track: it's not hard at all to write a melody or some words, what's hard is figuring out whether the result is good enough or not. When I get "stuck", it's precisely because I can't quite grasp the quality of what I've written.

Is there a song that has always haunted you, one where you've maybe tried every possible variation in terms of feel or harmonic structure?

Matt: Oh yes, there's a song that's been with me my whole life, and you know which one it is? "Singing in the Rain"... Also "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head"... When I was little I had a toy that played "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", and in my head I'd sing "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" and "Singing In The Rain" at the same time, because I probably mixed up the titles.

When I realized they were two different songs, I was amazed at how two melodies could sound in your head at the same time. It was a lesson in how you can actually manipulate motifs — before that I only thought about how to perform them. When you perform a piece, you play it the way it's written or the way you're told to play it, but from that moment on I understood how to make it my own.

Could you recreate live what Matt had in his head as a kid, since we were talking about covers earlier?

Matt and Eleanor in unison: Yes.

Matt: Actually, seeing "Arancia Meccanica" ruined the relationship I had with "Singing In The Rain" when I was a kid.

In the '90s, countless musicians tried to break the boundaries of the classic "song" format through variations on pop, post-rock and experimentation. In recent years, though – partly thanks to your records – the classic "song" format seems to have returned as the dominant structure. Do you see this as some kind of "revenge" of the song?

Matt: I think the people making rock music now are more careful than they were a few years ago. That's probably a negative way of putting it: now there are expectations.

…With our longer songs, we try to surprise ourselves and have fun, while still staying very respectful of the song format.

The rules of the song are important, and it's fun to play around with them, just as it's interesting to listen to other people's records and study how those rules have been followed or broken.

I think it's the least people can do to worry about following those rules, even while fully respecting freedom of expression, especially in rock: rock isn't about playing well, it's about making rock in an interesting way. It's interesting to see how people play with the rules and what comes out of it.

Your first EP was one of the most surprising pop records released in recent years. How did you manage to produce such a cohesive record out of so much material? Was it easy to convince the label to release such an unusual work?

Eleanor: It was very easy because they had nothing to do with the record: we asked for a loan and did it all ourselves. The label bought it once it was finished. It was great because we made it exactly the way we wanted. We had very little time, just a week, and when we sent it off, we were amazed that anyone actually liked it.

Matt: We had these songs we'd written together: Eleanor wrote the lyrics, while I had sheets of paper where I'd jotted down, in broad strokes, how the various tracks should sound. Most of them worked fine, but we completely overhauled a couple of them and they turned out much better. We thought a lot about how we wanted our record to be, and we were lucky that it came out exactly the way we wanted.

I think having very limited time and budget helped us achieve that, because we didn't waste time experimenting.

Eleanor: They were songs we'd already played live, so recording them in the studio was very straightforward and incredibly satisfying.

It was great to walk out of the studio with the finished CD and say: "What a great record we've made!" We'd never felt anything like that before.

Do you think your EP could be considered your most "English" record, with all those melodies, the vaguely glam-rock attitude and a certain kind of pop, maybe even with a few progressive elements?

Matt: Mmmmhhhhh… Yes and no, in a way. Yes, in the sense that we grew up in the '70s and '80s, and as kids we listened to the radio, where even American bands sounded like English bands: Queen, Led Zeppelin, Elton John… I found out Black Sabbath were English when I was sixteen! All these English bands had been "naturalized" by Americans after all those '60s bands and… you know, I remember perfectly well Elton John singing on the Muppet Show!

I probably knew subconsciously that Queen were English, because I associated them with the Queen, but Who, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin were, to me, as American as apple pie. All those bands were English in some strange or obvious way, but out of that came a pretty popular Anglo-American culture.

What's your current live lineup like?

Matt: We're joined by a drummer and a bassist, while I play guitar and Eleanor sings. I used to play keyboards too, but now I only play guitar, and that makes our shows noisily rock'n'roll. That's why we rearranged all the songs that had tons of sampled sounds.

Will there be a chance to see you live soon?

Matt: I hope so! There's talk of some Italian dates over the summer.

Eleanor: We don't have any confirmed dates yet, but we hope to play in Italy very soon.

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