For a brief and spectacular moment two decades years ago, it seemed like every band could be the Fiery Furnaces. Every band could make music bursting with ideas, suffused with charm, willing to try almost anything to give its listeners a thrill. Blueberry Boat, released 20 years ago this Saturday, was a double album whose signature tracks stretched past seven minutes in multi-part suites — not a rock opera (though it was fun to pretend that it was) so much as a masterful short story collection about the burning, globalized world. Today it stands as a pinnacle of indie’s artistic ambition, and a dense universe still open to exploration and discovery.
The album’s often-rapturous reception (9.6 Best New Music, etc.) was driven in part by pure surprise. The Furnaces’ debut Gallowsbird’s Bark was, as Natalie Marlin described it last year, a “straight blues rock album.” There were signs of the maximalism to come: the lyrics weren’t Old, Weird America blues talk, but playful expansions of Eleanor’s experiences overseas, veering at times into pure wordplay or surreal imagery. But ultimately, the songs were short, direct, and stylistically consistent; It got them dubbed the next White Stripes, an honor shared by several other Brooklyn bands at the time.
In contrast, Blueberry Boat was inspired, the band said, by the Who’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away.” That song, an early pass at the rock opera sound they’d build into Tommy, has six separate movements that swing wildly betweens genres, each evoking a different narrative mood — an influence evident in “Mason City” or “Blueberry Boat.”
Lyrically, it was something else entirely, expanding the contemporary travelogues of Gallowsbird’s Bark in perspective and in time. The modern-day south London and Regent’s Canal of “Leaky Tunnel” became a tale of 19th-century British merchant marines in “Quay Cur.” Or it became Death Of A Salesman for the open borders age on “Straight Street,” as a cell phone company rep flop-sweats her way through failed deals in Turkey and Georgia — a counternarrative within globalism’s triumphalist period, modernizing the sense of global catastrophe in something like Charlie Patton’s “High Water Everywhere.” Even “1917” could be read as an extended parallel between the Chicago White Sox’s long World Series drought and the unfinished work of the Russian revolution. Whether that’s true or not, the album’s explosion of ideas makes you want to propose the wildest theory you can — then make it real.
If you’re looking for an accessible foothold, there are songs that could slot in on Gallowsbird’s —albeit with Blueberry Boat’s trademark maximalist plots — like “My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found,” “Birdie Brain,” and “Paw Paw Tree.” Or try “Chris Michaels” as a guide to the longer tracks. It can be read as straight narrative — a high school gossip, drunk on power from exposing the high school hockey star’s infidelity, steals a credit card; when she’s put in jail, she copes by dissociating as a prisoner in the 1930’s Raj, returning to reality only when her boyfriend breaks her out — but it can, and should, also be experienced as a rush of words and sounds with a meaning all to themselves. In a never-published interview I did with Matthew, he explained one bit in “Blueberry Boat” this way: “I come in singing, and it goes, ‘We’ll never go home, we’ll never go home.’ And the synthesizer goes, bah bahn bahn bahn bah. It’s kind of blowing a raspberry, ‘Poor you!’ But it’s also meant to be the ship saying, ‘I’m never going to go home, I’m sad too.'”
You hear that in “Chief Inspector Blancheflower,” another song with a frame around its historical fiction. The queasy, detuned synths in the first section reflect the academic frustrations of the ADHD high schooler whose woes Matthew mutters. But then, with a crisply spoken “so I joined the police force,” it transitions to a fantasy about a 19th-century genius British detective — the “coping concept” he’s previously referred to — set to a far more euphonic and propulsive rock song. This is his happy place. Buoyed by this heroic fantasy, he’s able to confront his brother about dating his ex-girlfriend Jenny, But his triumph is short-lived: Jenny tells him off in no uncertain terms. And so he has a few drinks, and then a few more. The song concludes with a furious guitar solo that unmistakably implies something like “fratricide” — one of the crimes the detective was investigating in his fantasy.
But most likely you’re going to start with the first track, “Quay Cur,” the album’s statement of purpose. The sharp break with Gallowsbird’s is audible immediately: the synth sounds you might’ve heard whooshing through the background of “Don’t Dance Her Down” or “Crystal Clear” on their debut take the lead in the two-minute instrumental intro, modulated, filtered, and delayed in a dozen different tempos over a steady beat that sounds like a massive ship bobbing in the harbor, or sailors heave-ho’ing on mooring lines. Here are seagulls squawking, trade winds, the movement of cargo and sailors through a busy port.
After two minutes, Eleanor comes in, singing lines like “Canvasing the quayside trying to earn my keep/ A killick tore it off my neck and threw it in the deep.” If you don’t know the word “killick,” that’s because it was only widely used in the English language in the years 1814-15 and 1917-22. You can go find that out if you want, but you get the idea: A killer stole her necklace, her token of protection, and threw it in the water; now she’ll never feel safe again. It’s a bad omen, a precursor of the ship’s doomed voyage. Matthew adds his own woes as a sailor, and then the song speeds up suddenly into a blues riff, with Eleanor and Matthew giving a rapid-fire chronicle of the many disasters they faced in the south Pacific: captured and towed, shot at by Greek fire, swindled in dry dock with rotten nails and tattered sails, fake pressgang warrants bringing in unreliable crewmembers.
Then the furious globetrotting comes to a halt, and an icy acoustic guitar emerges, plucking a small, descending arpeggio, and Eleanor sings, in this section’s chorus: “Canyglow, canyglow, canyglow don’t say nugo.” It’s pidgin Inuit, the language formed out of “contacts between Inuit and European whalers and traders,” and it means “kiss me, kiss me, don’t say no.” The ship is stuck, but Eleanor’s working girl, trapped on the doomed ship, has finally escaped, and found love in the Arctic. The song ends with a return of the initial theme, but without the beat, trailing Matthew’s vocals in an exhausted whistle. “And on the 11th day of June ran in at Barehaven to land,” the song concludes. Only five men made it home. Nothing was learned, nothing was gained. We’ve been on that journey with them, felt the distance, but it’s not heroic or tragic. It’s just a mess. In 2004, when America’s global ambitions were already having disastrous consequences, that stance wasn’t nihilistic, or nonsense; it was anti-imperial.
There’s the plot and the structure, but there’s also the wordplay, the sounds of the words; the Friedbergers are big Dylan fans. “Quay Cur” means “dock villain,” but it’s also a pun, “Key Kurr” as pronounced but “Quaker” as read — an invocation, maybe, of the Quakers’ colonial ambitions in the New World, but just as possibly a deliberate ambiguity, a refusal of a single, unitary meaning. A pidgin, like the song’s penultimate section, where the language incorporates Hawaiian, Portuguese, Scandinavian. (Matthew would spend a lot of time playing with language over the next few years.) It’s not just one thing; it’s a lot of things, all at once. Anti-imperial protest music. Closely observed character studies. Swashbuckling historical fiction. Twee. Electronic noise. Blues-rock. A celebration of the idea of just fucking trying something new. Even if it fails. Especially if it fails. This is indie, after all: an entire culture that values a well-intended mess over a glorious victory. It’s better for everyone, sometimes, if the mission isn’t accomplished.
That sense of thrilling possibility was heightened in their live shows. In the 45-minute medley they played on tour in 2004 with Andy Knowles and Toshi Yano filling out the lineup, “Quay Cur” is cut into pieces, starting with a much faster (and less noisy) arrangement of the first verse and chorus, then detouring into a dozen other songs before getting to the “canyglow” section — then going back to play the second verse and chorus. But a year later, with Jason Lowenstein and Bob D’Amico, they’d run through “Quay Cur” without any other songs intruding, at a mostly faster pace with far shorter instrumental breaks, getting through it album order in five minutes. “You go opposite every way,” Matthew told me. “If it’s fast, it’s slow. You play the end in the beginning. You switch the middle. It should be fun.”
Every band could’ve been the Furnaces 20 years ago, because so many were trying out high-concept, big-swing work — Sufjan’s 50 states project, The Getty Address and Rise Above, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, the Nuclear War EP, “Losing My Edge,” Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Fischerspooner, Southern Rock Opera, Carla Bozulich’s Red Headed Stranger, The Sophtware Slump, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, Medúlla and Drawing Restraint 9, A Grand Don’t Come For Free, The Black Parade, Hissing Fauna, Ys, He Poos Clouds, American Doll Posse. Green Day released their own kind-of rock opera, American Idiot, the same year as Blueberry Boat, even covering “A Quick One” in concert. But that’s largely not what we remember now, the era subsumed by New York neo-garage on one end — the various Next White Stripes — and the chiller vibes of indie supremacy that would conquer the charts a few years later.
But it’s still there, still waiting to be rediscovered, on its own terms. The Furnaces were insistent on letting listeners in the act of creation, and in presenting their music as perpetually unfinished, one version among many: a ten-minute song on CD becomes a 90-second fragment within a live medley. (There were plans afoot, at various points, to have fans contribute lyrics.) What this allows and even encourages listeners to do is to rearrange, recontextualize, spin out wild meanings, make it into a story, a poem, a vibe outline for a novel. They refuse to close off any of those possibilities, to dictate how we hear it.
In my interview with Matthew, I asked him if other bands are influenced by the Furnaces. “I hope so!” he said. “You shouldn’t say, ‘I need a limit, I need somebody telling me what to do.’ Well, you’re not sincere then! What, you don’t have confidence? Then there’s something wrong. ‘I need limits…’ Well, why don’t you figure it out for yourself?”
Twenty years ago, I got my start as a music critic by writing about 30,000 words on Blueberry Boat, breaking down the songs in terms of their musical structure, composition, and plotlines. In the process, lots of other fans joined in, provided translations, references, wild speculations. I thought it would be fun to pretend that it had a single, overarching plotline, even though it didn’t, and it was generative. It was connective. It was fun. You should try it.
