When I say that the Fiery Furnaces’ Blueberry Boat is a wonderful album, I mainly mean two things – two things that are often treated as contradictory.

(1) It is an album of breathtaking ambition, range, and scope. This is the part the critics notice, if often superficially. When your 76:25 length album opens up with a 10+ minute song called “Quay Cur”, and four of the next seven tracks also exceed 7:52 in length, you will be called “ambitious” (or “pretentious” or “difficult”) by any number of people who won’t know, deduce, or even bother to look up, what “quay cur” means (a petty dockside hoodlum). You will see professional reviewers at high-circulation magazines note that your lyrics tell “stories”, even if they pay no attention to the content or method of those stories.

Yet Blueberry Boat has been an underground hit, in part because of those stories and their methods. As Tris McCall (a superb songwriter himself) has noted, it “incorporate[s] elements from children's fiction, classic rock lyricism, old magazine serials, pirate stories, daily newspapers, ad copy, conversations overheard and buried, textbooks, college lectures, even sportswriting. Blueberry Boat might be the first piece of truly American storytelling I've encountered in years that feels unmolested by contemporary Hollywood”. It veers from high-seas pirate adventures to the work-a-day details of being a Special Education student; from a simple moral about kindess-to-animals, to an allegory on the hassles of trying to conduct ethical business in a favoritist world.

It is an album that does all this while serving up an endless stream of new melodic and instrumental hooks. Yes, the brother/sister team of Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger never lie back, undermanned and weary: they invent music for every lyrical mood instead of giving in to the formulaic urge to repeat, to make the second verse the same as the first.

(2) For that reason and several others, Blueberry Boat is also one of the _happiest_ albums I have ever heard.

Here is what the album sounds like: it is like one of those upper-middle-class drawing rooms from the mid-to-late 1800’s, before the phonograph and radio and TV and cars. The best singer in your life was probably someone within walking distance (or at least biking distance), very possibly a brother/sister duo, and the only hit songs they could cover were “hits” as measured in mega-selling sheet music. They generated music only through a piano, and one of those primitive knob-driven analog synthesizers with a ring modulator, and maybe a calliope and drums, and the electricity on their guitars was costly enough that they couldn’t plug’em in much … and either this sentence is much improving on reality, or that opening Christmas scene in Little Women was needlessly barren of cool gadgets. But as our nearby family duo, relaxing from a productive day of university research, made up songs for you from scratch, I think their jolly parade of unfinished tunes and newsy tales would _feel_, at least, like Blueberry Boat.

Because really, I don’t care how obscure the words are, who can be intimidated by a chorus that starts “a looby, a lordant, a lagerhead lozel/ a lungio lathback made me a proposal”? It’s not just that context clues (and a couple actual definitions) tell us all we need (that he’s a clumsy drunk with, nonetheless, a strong back and build). It’s that “a looby, a lordant, a lagerhead lozel” has more fun jumping off the tongue than any chorus I’ve heard in years. We do still love Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein, yes?

The vocal melodies on Boat are varied and sometimes minor-key, but almost all of them are sing-song and bouncy, ready to make alert 4-year-olds join ineptly in. Eleanor’s voice is as articulate and pleasant as a library reading-lady’s; Matthew’s is jumpy, boyish, too caught up in the story to worry about rhythm or hitting more than half of his notes. The drum machine claps gaily along – and none of Boat sounds like it was recorded in an era when “gaily” means anything sexual. The synthesizers wobble and beep and flit, woozily lug themselves up the scales to the medicine cabinet, and sing the wake-up calls of a hundred species of rusty robot birds. A few times there’s an autoharp, Baby’s First String Instrument. Grander moments tug the emotions with fanfares and march tempos. The piano-playing is percussive and often built from simple chords: with the ability to mute half the instrumental voices and re-order the rest, you could arrange Billy Joel’s next five hits from these songs. They’d be good hits.

That’s not even mentioning Matthew’s guitar-playing, built on dazzling solos even when those “solos” fit oddly with the other music that forgot to leave him space. He dazzles not like an earnest pimply teen struggling to reproduce every note and squawk in “Eruption” – although that may once have been him, and he certainly has the speed – but like someone who’s still excited to try out every spot on all six strings of his guitar, spraying out thin, excited notes in every new sequence that occurs to him.

So if some of the song narrators die, and others learn sad lessons, we nod and remember how many imaginary playmates die in the path of pointed index fingers and laughing shrieks of “bang bang, you’re dead!”. Blueberry Boat is an ambitious, allusive, complex, morally serious (at times) game, but it is a game. It is fun. And as the new tunes and sounds and hooks pile on after each other, unwilling to wait silently in line, they make the fun durable and rich.

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So there: that’s the review, my rationale for buying this splendid song-scape by a duo too eager for epics to sit around waiting for Peter Jackson. This section here, and the next (final) one, are just me answering two questions for people who already love Blueberry Boat. The first question, a common one, asks what, exactly, the songs _mean_.

Now, often the question is asked a little desperately for my tastes, because many of the main ideas, at least, are in the open. “Quay Cur” and “Blueberry Boat” are straightforward tales of slave ships and pirates, as to some degree are “Paw Paw Tree” and “Spaniolated”. “My Dog was Lost but Now He’s Found” stars a cruel owner feeling guilty about her runaway dog. “Straight Street”’s narrator is clearly a Syria-based vendor of cell-phone service; “Chris Michaels” is about a romantic triangle; the first part of “Chief Inspector Blancheflower” is a detailed memory of a childhood with Attention Deficit Disorder. And the happier you are with a vague idea what’s going on – a happiness that guides much of my life in and out of music – the more songs you can solve. For example, it’s clear that “ 1917” has _something_ to do with fixed baseball games and the mob. Maybe that’s all it takes for you to lay back and groove to the music.

Or maybe not. Fortunately, I’ve run into at least two online writers who have examined the lyrics with obsessive depth. Hayden Childs’s piece at
http://www.thehighhat.com/PopsClicks/005/blueberry.html
stands out as the best single essay on the lyrics as a whole; meanwhile, intense full-length essays about each of several songs from the album can be found at
claps.blogspot.com.
I had planned to do my own song analyses, but after a couple drafts I realized my work was completely overshadowed, so I’ll refer interested parties there.

I will add a meta-commentary about their essays. You could, I realize, read their explanations of the songs and go “are you freaking kidding me?”. In other words, you’re asking if “Mason City” could possibly start by telling us about a bank officer trying to get a loan extention for a client even at the risk of setting a bad precedent. You’re asking if “ 1917” could possibly be about how a Serbian anarchist, having moved to Chicago to escape the Great War, learns by watching the White Sox to feel American for the first time. You’re goggling at the notion that “I walked down the lane of a street they called straight, cursing myself cuz I got there too late” could be referring to “straight” in an ethical sense, and you’re trying to decide if reading the whole song as a parable about naivete versus corruption is a worse reach than anything you ever sat through (or will sit through) in a college English class. You’re saying this is not how songs are written … is it? I understand. I had to decide those things myself.

On a song-by-song basis, here’s what I think: the analysts are right. Believe them. Why?

Because as you read them, pay attention to what is and isn’t happening. Both writers go into amazing depth with amazing patience, tracking down every unfamiliar name, every archaic word, every non-standard bit of slang, every place reference. This is what the worst literary interpretations never do. Bad analysts may operate in a thousand different ways, but they have two things in common. One, they offer daring leaps, maybe even well-research leaps, based on _some_ of the evidence (not all). Two, their interpretations are simpler, less rich, less unique, than the source material. Well, not invariably I suppose: it’s hard to make “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” simpler than it began. But a bad analyst will turn it into something much weirder, but just as ultimately simple.

The rigmorale that Childs or Clap Clap put forth is complex because they respect the importance of each detail, and because usually those details mesh. “ 1917” is full of clues that the narrator is a Serbian rooting for the White Sox in Chicago; many of the clues aren’t obvious to non-Serbs, but they’re there. Most rock songs don’t tell such particular stories, but then, most rock songs aren’t so full of detail; the Fiery Furnaces have populated their world with characters who talk like the local, up-to-date, slang-slinging obscuratinists that all of us are in our own ways. They bring people to life in frustrating, parochial, human ways: as detailed as you or me.

Most listeners won’t notice, and to be clear, Blueberry Boat was an album I loved before I knew what any of the songs meant. But a few listeners put it all together, and it turns out that this particular treasure map led to treasure.

That said, Matt’s account of Attention Deficit Disorder is obviously personal, and as an A.D.D. kid myself, I think both analysts go way too far when they put the songs together and claim they’re one huge meta-story. For one thing, the meta-stories they offer fail where their song interpretations do not: they pick and choose evidence, leap over contradictions, and sweat visibly. For another, I can just imagine people looking over my body of poetry and songs or, since it’s more extensive, my body of essays, trying to elicit some extended argument. There ain’t one. Half the time I can’t remember what I’ve said already, for one thing. And when I do, I make arguments that I know don’t mesh, and I veer from mood to mood, because I bore myself when I stick to the same ideas. A.D.D. has its upsides, and one of them is inconsistency, the hobgoblin of big minds that are still too traffic-jammed to function well.

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The second question a Blueberry Boat fan might ask, stunned and awed, is: “Are there any non-Fiery Furnaces albums that will give me the same kind of thrill?”. I can’t offer you an exact precedent, but I can offer one that I bet would make 90% of you happy. It’s a 1996 album by Viva Satellite called Nishma, and it’s still in print (or available used at Amazon for $1.75).

Nishma is a concept album, or in its own words, a “nonlinear experiment in modern narrative”. It’s cheerful. It uses electric organ and synthesizer liberally, in the service of erratic song structures that charge off in any direction that’ll suit the story. It’s got ordinary-voiced boy and girl singers who seem to have built the album in part to communicate, and in equal part to amuse themselves. Sound familiar? Here, let me play “the Legend of How Saltwater Taffy Came to Be” for you; it sounds familiar now, yes?

It’s fair to warn you of the differences, because they might disappoint you if I didn’t. For one, Nishma’s themes, although ambitious by rock standards, should take a maximum of two listens to understand. For another, the Fiery Furnaces are very gifted at their instruments, and Viva Satellite are not. Similarly, Blueberry Boat’s bizarrer synthesizer parts are barely thirty years too late to be avant-garde; Nishma’s would only be avant-garde if they lugged them back into colonial Yorktown and used them to win American independence by making the redcoat soldiers shriek “I didn’t sign up to fire my musket at bloody magic squawking boxes” and run away. Once you’ve heard Blueberry Boat, Viva Satellite won’t seem quite as impressive.

But that’s also not a fair comparison. Nishma is daring and ambitious by normal standards, and being (relatively) simple has advantages. As much as I love Blueberry Boat, none of its songs are as movingly vulnerable as “Project: Nishma”. Nor are any of its tracks as funny as “Supreme Courting”, or as plaintive and loving as “Great Bird of the Galaxy”. Luckily, you can own both albums.

The Friedbergers made a trade-off; maybe on purpose, maybe just because they’re weirdos. Their songs are touching too, but in a far less immediate way. They have bravely learned or imagined the lives of people far unlike us, and tried to talk those languages; now they must wait behind that barrier, and hope we hum cheerfully as we struggle to catch up. Luckily, they made that easy to do.

Recommended: Yes