In case you haven’t realized yet, we really like Eleanor Friedberger’s new solo album. Last Summer is that rare gem that grabs you on first listen and then still manages to reveal new details on the fifteenth or sixteenth. It’s both a grower and an object of instant love. Friedberger has been making music for over a decade as one half of the Fiery Furnaces but this is her first foray into solo territory (don’t worry, there’s no talk of the band breaking up). The experience appears to have been a good one since she’s already thinking ahead to the next one. Her current tour, which brings her to Toronto on Tuesday, is technically in support of Last Summer but features a slew of new songs that she wrote in the past year while she waited for the album to come out. Comparisons to Friedberger’s other band are bound to come up. Last Summer has less of the idiosyncrasies that often characterize Fiery Furnaces albums. It takes the band’s poppier, more traditional side and runs with it. But such comparisons should only be a side conversation. Last Summer stands on its own as an accomplished and fully realized work. It’s not just that there’s a depth to be discovered on the album; the pop sound is well crafted and a joy to listen to on its own terms. On Friedberger’s end, it’s all you can hope for from a first-time solo project: an album that solidly establishes her identity apart from the Fiery Furnaces and as worthy of praise as anything we’ve heard from her until now. After over a decade with the Fiery Furnaces, what made you decide to make a solo album now? That’s a question everyone keeps asking me and it’s hard to answer because it wasn’t that calculated. It’s hard to describe why timing is right. But the timing was just right. We had finished a long year of touring after the last Fiery Furnaces album and I knew that my brother was going to be away. We weren’t anxious to immediately start on something else. So I just found myself with time on my hands, which I hadn’t had in a long time. I think a lot of it had to do with being single, actually. [That was] neither good nor bad, it just happened to be the case, and I wasn’t rushing off to go meet somebody after a tour. I was ready to have some time to myself and [making a solo album] is something I always imagined doing without not knowing quite when, where, or how. So I just said it’s now or never. I’m getting old and I needed to do it. One thing I love about the album is that the songs have a distinct sense of place–they mention or are set in very specific locations. Is there any particular reason why that ended up being so prevalent throughout the album? I think that’s just how I’ve always written songs. A big feature of Fiery Furnaces songs is how they’re always just full of proper nouns and place names. The way that Matt [Friedberger] and I started writing songs together is I would tell him stories and those turned into lyrics. And when you’re telling a story it just makes sense to include all these specific details. It makes for more interesting songs. It gives the album a real sense of being about everyday city life. Is a lot of what you wrote a result of personal experiences? Oh yeah, 100 percent. It’s totally autobiographical. No imagination. The chord structures on the songs are not necessarily that complex but the instrumentation is very diverse. Did you always have such a big sound in mind when writing the songs? I made demos for all the songs and it would be funny [to compare them to] the finished recordings. I wrote a lot of the songs, for example “Inn of the Seventh Ray,” on a MIDI keyboard. So I would even play guitar parts on the keyboard for the demos. And I was using Garage Band, which has really crappy sound, but there’s that “big electric lead” [effect on it] and I played that on the keyboard, which went on the demo. Then when it came time to make the actual recording, we got hooked on that sound which is kind of crappy. Eric [Broucek], the producer, played an actual guitar to copy that, but then we also kept that original sound underneath. I didn’t want to make an album that sounded like a girl with a guitar. That’s what I definitely didn’t want to do. It’d be nice, but I’m not a great guitar player for one thing. I wanted to make something that sounded as close to a pop record as I could make. Are there any plans to release these demos? It’d be really interesting to hear rougher versions of these songs. Maybe one day. I like hearing the demos for my own amusement but I don’t know if I need to share them. Maybe years from now. I need to save something for the box set [laughs]. Were there any artists or styles of music you were listening to at the time that influenced Last Summer’s sound? It was really [different] from song to song. On “Glitter Gold Year” I was trying to sound like something off of John Lennon’s first solo album. “One Month Marathon” is kind of a play off of a T. Rex song. For “My Mistakes,” I had heard this John Cale/Brian Eno record from 1989 or 1990 [Wrong Way Up] that I was really into so I was trying to rip off the sound from that. Those artists don’t necessarily have a pop sound the way Last Summer does. Was the influence subliminal to some extent? Not in my mind. But I think that’s the way I’ve always done things. I think that’s how most people make any kind of art, really. You try to copy something, but you can never actually copy something correctly, and then in that process you end up making something new. That’s just the way I’ve always thought about music. I’m not going to make a rock album that’s better than something that’s already been made. It’s just impossible to do something completely new. I always hear some Joni Mitchell in your vocal style. Do you listen to her very often? She’s someone I’ve only listened to in more recent years. But thank you. Very Canadian. Is this a one-time thing? Or do you hope to make more solo albums? I hope it’s not a one-time thing. I have whole slew of new songs that I’m really excited about recording. I’ve been playing them with my band and I’m going to play them solo. I hope to record another solo album sooner rather than later. So should we expect your solo album or a new Fiery Furnaces first? That I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Timing is everything. Eleanor Friedberger plays solo at Soundscapes at 5:30 pm and the Horseshoe Tavern at 9 pm on Tuesday, July 19.
