Front page	From the Event Guide archive! This article refers to an event which took place on, or until, 12 November 2007 Music Interview - Fiery Furnaces A Vision The Fiery Furnaces just get better as they get older, as they are even more well equipped (musically and emotionally) to revisit ideas, sounds and impulses that they have previously looked at in their albums ‘Gallowsbird’s Bark’ (2003), ‘Blueberry Boat’ (2004), ‘Rehearsing My Choir’ (2005), and ‘Bitter Tea’ (2006) through to this year’s ‘Widow City’. Something they do beautifully is to elevate the seemingly ordinary, or imbue the everyday with a kind of gilded enthusiasm that transfers fluidly. Perhaps this has something to do with their sibling relationship – it inspires a kind of giddy, conspiratorial and almost innocent revelry that is founded from childhood – and since they now filter that sense through adulthood, it serves to provide interesting music with curious ideas at its core. ‘Rehearsing My Choir’ involved the Furnaces’ Grandmother as narrator for stories past but brightly lit, while their new album finds the siblings trawling through the 1970’s spectrum, inspired at Yeats) on rotation. Just another day in the life of The Fiery Furnaces, as Matthew Friedberger tells Siobhán Kane. The quality of your new record is so rich, what changed in your process this time around? Well this time we wanted a rock rhythm section playing; and we wanted to piece together a more conventional rock band set-up. I went back to playing more bass, and we had also been working with drummer Bob D’Amico for about a year and a half and knew that we wanted to incorporate him somehow. The record seems rooted in the ’70’s in various ways. We really wanted to make a record that used popular sounds of the ‘70’s, and we also wanted our lyrics to be helped on by popular facts of the time. So we started researching a lot of women’s magazines - these things are always around when you’re not looking, and at the back there were all of these ads for not especially mass-produced products and such. Then Eleanor made up a ten page script full of these things, and I started to write the songs from that, and it all kind of came together. We didn’t want to make a ‘70’s revival album however; it is just that the record uses a lot of stuff from that period. Have you previously worked from a ‘script’? Yes, in a very general way. First we have an idea of what we want the record to be like, then do our research, get things together and then write the lyrics. We are inspired by phrases or everyday situations, and it is often suggested by very normal things or pop culture - for this record it happens to be advertising. You have a real love of the ‘70’s period, what draws you back to it, again and again? I love The Who, and many of my favourite records are from that period, Stevie Wonder’s ‘Innervisions’, Sly Stone’s ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’. I listened to those when I was twelve! And I still go back to them, I think that they still sound interesting - the keyboard on ‘Music of My Mind’ and ‘Quadrophenia’ and the darker element to ‘Riot Goin’ On’ that is almost depressing – I think those records were unprecedented. When rock music is interesting like that, it isn’t about playing the right notes, or tone – it is about sounds, and the best records are the ones that create a kind of mood, and that period had lots of records like that. I also love the way that you have to listen to those records in long chunks, as it had just come out of the era of the single – and this was all before the manic statements of punk and post-punk. Although I love that stuff too and even with something like PIL, they were brilliant – and had that pop rock thing, but couldn’t have existed without the ‘70’s. It is where rock music was in a kind of young adulthood, and there were new formats of radio, and it wanted to upset the self-satisfied nature of the period. Through your research of advertising of the period, what were the recurring themes? Advertising is interesting, and any old advert is sad because it is essentially obsolete if it is the past, but the ‘70’s had a wave of cheap pop culture feminism, like the Virginia Slims ads – ‘You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby’ type thing. We were thinking about that idea of feminism a lot, because all of our records have in some ways been from a female perspective - ‘lady’ records, but this one is a little different. The ‘70’s had the first generation of pop culture feminism, but by and large we still have a similar rhetoric today. That feeds into the subtle political element to this album. Hopefully, and I also think that even though our last three records were quite personal, they showed that the personal can be the political. I don’t want to be all, ‘we’ve got a social message’, but we are dealing with the real world in our songs – even though some people might disagree [laughs]. I always find it interesting when people use our records when going through their own personal stuff; I get a lot from that. It’s like, when we get bad reviews, sometimes they are closer to understanding who we are than good reviews do, and even though they might mean something as an insult, I take it as a great compliment. Worryingly the insults could also be true! [laughs]. Something you have always been fearless about is looking unflinchingly at the sentimental; and recognising its power. Absolutely! I am really intrigued by the lingo of greeting cards, and that a condolence card that might read so trite one day, takes on a different power two days after your cat died or whatever. And in some ways, the message in the card can be as powerful, or as authentic as that memory of the fishing trip you used to take with your Dad. They are personal lyrics, and even though we look at them with a cynical eye as being manufactured, they are true on some level, and are borne out of people’s common experiences. People use the word sentimental as a kind of insult these days, especially if you are in a rock band – but pop and rock can be mawkish and sentimental, and I am fascinated by it. That is essentially the stock in trade of pop songs, and can be a healthier useful end to sentimentality. I think of something like ‘How Long Has This Been Goin’ On?’ – with its wistful nature. Look at the country song ‘Rosewood Casket’, the lyrics are unblinking, the singer is serious, and through all of these parts, the song becomes even more sentimental because of the seriousness of the subject and the way it is approached. That even while steering away from ‘sentimentality’ it is inherently that – and is a brilliant song. ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?’ by the Bee Gees is another, I hated that song, but over the years it has lost that sickly sweetness, and become so familiar that when I randomly hear it now it makes an interesting song about grief. I am really interested in the way that people deal with sentiment, and I think it is all around us, all the time. It is much more than a mere function, or a social pop artefact. With ‘Widow City’ there is this sense of sentimentality, but it draws on a number of other disparate emotions and influences, can you expand a little further? Well especially in the context of Ireland, because a couple of songs are inspired by Yeats. I won’t claim to know much about him, but a song like ‘Duplexes of the Dead’ was influenced by ‘A Vision’ and it really fed into the advertising we were researching, because there were lots of ads for astrology and numerology - and the psychedelic movement and pop spiritualism of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s was hugely influenced by the 1890’s. So I looked at the preface to ‘A Vision’ and became interested in Yeats’ wife and the idea of automatic writing. This then filtered in to a couple of the songs, one of which is about a wife trying to get her husband into automatic writing. Although the other day I picked up that book ‘Becoming George’ [by Ann Saddlemyer, 2002] and I wish to God I had read that before I wrote the songs, as there is so much more to mine! Ah well. That’s the thing though, stuff kind of suggests itself to me and we run with it, and bring it into the rock and pop thing. It’s a complex relationship, but a good one, I think. The Fiery Furnaces play Whelan’s, on Dublin’s Wexford Street, on Monday 12th November. 8pm. €17.45, available from the WAV Ticketbox, Camden Row, Dublin 2 (1890 200 078) and from all usual outlets. www.thefieryfurnaces.com / www.whelanslive.com / www.mcd.ie / www.ticketmaster.ie ©