Like any good grandmother, Olga Sarantos likes to brag about her grandkids. A few weeks ago she went to her church, Assumption Greek Orthodox in Austin, with a clipping from the New York Times about her two eldest, Matt and Eleanor Friedberger, who play music as the Fiery Furnaces. “I was showing it around and I was surprised because a lot of the people weren’t aware of the Fiery Furnaces,” she says. “But they will be now.”
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The album is a collection of stories and details that made vivid impressions on the Friedbergers long ago. Its 11 songs ping-pong from the present to the past, simulating the nonlinear reminiscing of an older person. And as often as the stories are basically true–the title track recounts how the bishop of Sarantos’s church, where she was choir director from 1960 until just recently, tried to have her excommunicated for a year after she refused to have her choir appear on television on Christmas Day–the details are freely embellished. Sarantos’s close friend Dr. Peter Pane, for example, did indeed own a doughnut factory with his brother, but in “Guns Under the Counter” his pastry ingredients double as remedies: “They used confectioners’ sugar so sweet it was caustic / And chocolate so bitter that it could kill typhus / And glazing so shiny it could set back glaucoma.”
Matt, who writes most of the band’s music and lyrics, says he’d been thinking about making a record with his grandmother for years. As an aspiring songwriter he was harshly critical of indie rock singers–including himself–even if they’d written strong material. “You need some presence on a record to carry it off, so you don’t sound like yet another idiot with a guitar,” he says. “I thought my grandmother, a 50s and 60s Chicagoan, maybe she could be presented as the inverse image of Howlin’ Wolf. She’s an older person so she has this big deep voice and I thought it would be interesting to make up things for her to say or sing over rudimentary strumming guitar or piano.”
Sarantos was deeply committed to her church choir, but music was also a huge part of her social life. “Every time we’d go to someone’s house and my husband knew that they had a piano, he made me take a stack of sheet music so we could play together,” she says. “All of our friends enjoyed singing–there wasn’t anything else to do.”
“The delivery was very difficult sometimes,” Sarantos says. “With all my years of choir directing and singing, that helps. I’m very articulate when I sing. In my choir I would always insist on projecting your consonants into the vowels so your sound comes out better.” In private, Eleanor says, she’s a bit cockier about the accomplishment: “I remember overhearing on the phone after the first day and she was talking to someone and said, ‘Oh, no one could have done it but me.’”
