POP
Conversations with one-half of the acclaimed Brooklyn-based indie rock band (he composes the majority of music and lyrics; his sister Eleanor primarily sings and pens a few lyrics) are dizzying verbal dissections, fascinating tangents and forceful yet reasoned rants about everything from the rise of technology and its impact on music to focus groups and the guilty pleasures of '70s rock. It's a ceaseless, intellectual curiosity reflected in the band's idiosyncratic output, evident on such ambitious, wonderfully complicated works as Blueberry Boat, Rehearsing My Choir and last year's Widow City.
The Star-Telegram caught up with the amiable Friedberger (who revealed that his father lives in Fort Worth) at a tour stop in Ohio; the group -- in concert, the band's quirky, dense sound is augmented with three other performers -- will perform in Dallas today with beloved Welsh rockers Super Furry Animals.
Are there a lot of literary influences on your work?
Rock music lyrics are ... often very word-conscious, whether it's Tutti Frutti or Desolation Row. If you take the two of those, you can pretty much justify anything. I know as a kid, I thought a lot of [Bob] Dylan lyrics were terrible ... but now, I would never question anything he wrote. You can justify any sort of .... rock music just by other rock music, you don't need to say you read ... the Charles Bernstein mimeographs.
Looking at bands actively working, do you feel as though they're dumbing themselves down?
They're all terrible [laughs]. No, I don't -- I think in guitar-rock land, there are a lot of people who want a certain kind of music they can understand and enjoy within 10 seconds of hearing it and a lot of it is very conservative or they have a very conservative, or maybe even simple-minded, view of the "pop" side of pop-guitar rock.
So does that mean they're playing it safe commercially or being artistically lazy/indifferent?
I don't know -- the bands are pleasing themselves, I'd imagine. It's hard for me to talk about because I don't want to talk about specific bands but to talk about it in general doesn't make any sense. Every band, good or bad, has their own things that don't make sense to you. I mean, usually it happens you'd rather they go in one direction or another; where they are in the middle is of no interest to you, but for them, that's exactly where they like it. ... They've got the perfect balance for them.
Is it difficult to present ambitious, unapologetic albums in a marketplace where the quick hook is prized?
I would think it is, because we're not very popular [laughs]. ... It's very hard to have momentum to keep going ... because we don't have the money to make a lot of records so we become much more like other bands -- a slower cycle. We don't have a lot of songs that stick out prominently on people's MP3-radio-file-sharing thing ... there's other people that can do that and in the division of labor in the world, we have to make records different from that.
Yet, with the rise of MP3s, you find that people don't typically "sit" with albums like the ones you and Eleanor make, listening to them over and over and pulling them apart.
That's the convention now. You can't complain about that as a band; you have to keep doing what you think you're meant to be doing and deal with it or you can try to make product or art that's dictated by the conventions of the institutions you work in -- that's legitimate, too. In the meantime, we're going with making records based on the kind of rock records we liked in the past and to some extent, that doesn't fit well.
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