The Fiery Furnaces: Memory-Based Rock Music as Literature

Abstract

This article addresses the topic of “sound-based recollection” through the work of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, musicians best known as brother-sister rock duo The Fiery Furnaces. Though the Friedbergers work primarily within music and not literature or film, I argue that their music is literature, especially in the way Matthew's lyrics and Eleanor's performances of those lyrics engage with their personal memories, including their creative recollection of objects and traditions they refer to in their songs. After exploring how the music industry's indie rock category parallels the book publishing industry's literary fiction category, I illustrate how the Fiery Furnaces' allusions to history and popular culture connect the listener's memory of cultural objects to the songs' newly adapted versions. Narrative components like temporality, order, and character, customarily associated with literature or film, are central to the Fiery Furnaces' musical reminiscence. The article concludes by tracing the evolution of those elements in the songs to the endpoint (indeed the “moral") of the Friedbergers' attention to memory, biography, and fiction: that neither music nor text is sufficient to replicate the past, but that a literary approach to music and memory can playfully embrace that reality.