Eleanor Friedberger may be best known as one half of the brother-sister duo Fiery Furnaces, but at the rate in which she’s making top-notch tracks under her own name that could soon change. Her most recent effort, Personal Record, is a smart collection of charming love songs void of both time and place thanks to their natural and organic feel. Friedberger is currently touring with Colin Meloy and, lucky for us, the two will be stopping through Madison at the Majestic Theatre tomorrow evening. Last week I caught up with Friedberger to converse about the tour and Personal Record. This is an edited transcript of our chat.
How has the tour with Colin [Meloy] been so far?
“It’s been fun. Every night’s been very different. It’s funny… you’d think that when you’re playing by yourself that you’d have some consistency. Actually, as it turns out, it seems to be wildly inconsistent. Because, with a band, everybody has to work together and you’re playing the same arrangements every night. Now that I’m playing by myself, I find myself playing the songs totally different every night — because I’ve got nobody stopping me!”
And you’re playing on… an acoustic guitar?
“I am not. Colin is. But it worked out because I wrote the songs on my guitar so I could do this very thing that I’m doing now.”
And those songs, which comprise Personal Record, you co-wrote with John Wesley Harding. How did that come to fruition?
“We met — and then we stayed in touch. And we started just kind of passing ideas back and forth through email; the whole songwriting process was done over email. We were never in the same room writing together, and that was something I’d never done before — I’d never really imagined doing it before.
“It wasn’t like I was looking for someone to write songs with; it was all very accidental, and spontaneous. So that couldn’t have been more different from the writing process of my other solo record [Last Summer]. I was very isolated [during that recording process] — I didn’t show songs to anybody and I made demos all alone at home. And after I’d finished doing all the demos, I worked with the producer and kind of turned it into a record.”
So… a pretty dramatic shift.
“Yeah. Personal Record was like, I had the songs written before Last Summer even came out; I’d been playing them live for a long time with my band. It was much more of a collaboration on a lot of different levels. The guys who I had been playing with on tour played on the album, and we had a good handle on what we were doing — it was very planned. But hopefully it does feel very natural!”
Speaking of your band, how democratic are you guys?
“It’s not democratic, that isn’t quite the word… it’s collaborative! If somebody plays something I don’t like I’ll just say, ‘I don’t like that.’ But I mean I’m open to anything at the start. A song like ‘Stare at the Sun,’ I showed that to my band… and I played it and sang it, and it could have gone in a lot of different directions — and we took it in a lot of directions! The version that’s on the album we landed on because the producer was like, ‘this is a catchy way to do it… let’s do this.’ I don’t know if that was the best arrangement for the song, ultimately. That’s why now I can go on tour and I can play and have a different arrangement.
“But I do love playing with other people who have ideas. For me, I want to be the worst musician in the room. I want to be surrounded by people who can play much better than I do and who can contribute, you know, a lot. I love hearing what someone’s going to come up with, and the songs here are cheerful enough where there’s a lot of room for people to put their personality into it.”
What inspired Personal Record?
“The inspiration that I’ve always kind of had, which is the music I’ve always been drawn to for the most part: 1970s singer-songwriter albums. More specifically, I had references for every song [I wrote]. The song ‘Other Boy,’ I wanted to sound like ‘Born in a Prison’ by Yoko Ono. ‘She’s a Mirror’ I wanted to be my take on ‘Lust for Life.’ I’ve always had musical references; the songs don’t sound like them but it’s a good starting point. Especially when you’re working with someone else who’s in charge of making the sounds… which is what a producer does.”
And how was working with producer Eric Broucek?
“It was great because I worked with Eric on Last Summer. And he used to be a house engineer at DFA with James Murphy. So we had access to that studio and he’d worked there a lot… so he knew it very well. And we recorded the basic tracks in five days in New York and then I went to Los Angeles where he lives and we did the vocals and the mixing there. Sometimes things can go wrong, but we were really lucky and everything went very smoothly.”