Fiery Furnaces 'Remember' Life on the Road

New York's Fiery Furnances have spent the start of the summer on the road. And so far, things haven't been pretty.

"We always have extreme weather when we go on tour," one-half of the duo, Matthew Friedberger, tells Spinner while hiding out from a downpour. "We've had forest fires, hurricanes -- we've had things cancelled because of a hurricane."

The brother-sister outfit of Matthew and Eleanor wrapped up their early summer dates with a performance at Bonnaroo last week, but they've lined up a free show in New York City next month. It's all part of promoting their forthcoming album, 'Remember,' a double-CD or triple LP, if you prefer vinyl, of live recordings collected over the last several years of touring.

"We wanted to have a live record because we play different live and then if you're going to have a live album, at this point, it had to be retrospective," Friedberger says. "We want it to be [like] someone remembering the old days. There are the same versions of different songs, one song interrupts another song ... [it's] how you hear music."

And though he freely admits taping one's live sets has become easy these days thanks to simply plugging into the sound desk, Matthew said the Fiery Furnances attempted to give 'Remember' a real feel. From standing by the bathrooms, where the bass is overpowering to standing in the center of a venue, 'Remember' tries, across it's dozens of tracks, to capture various authentic aural snapshots.

"It's pretty easy to get a stereo recording of the show," he says. "I wanted a big part of it to be different quality recordings of a live record. A big problem with live records is it doesn't sound like a band live."

Recordings of the group's early 2008 tour however, where they "Democ-rocked" out, taking in receipts and slips of papers from their fans, before spontaneously creating songs, didn't make 'Remember.' But, the tunes, which came out of the dates, might make the next one.

"We have a bunch of songs written out of the ephemera people had on them," Matthew says. "We [weren't] asking people to work on something, 'cause that's unfair -- that should be for their own band. It was just supposed to be whatever random things, printed on receipts they'd have on them. You can have the cashier number be the scale that the chords are based out of or be the intervals of a tune."