Quantcast
 Everett True

Song of the day – 439: Eleanor Friedberger*

Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size Text Size Print This Page

Eleanor Friedberger

I’ll level with you.

I don’t want to come over all Chuck on your ass, but I know next to nothing about Eleanor Friedberger. I had to look up on Wiki to discover she used to be in Fiery Furnaces – a band championed by kicking_k at Plan B Magazine, a man whose taste is almost but not quite as impeccable as my own, but aside from that I know next to nothing about Fiery Furnaces. I did a quick Google for my name in conjunction with theirs to see if I’d ever written anything, but aside from a couple of plays on an Internet radio show … nowt. So one assumes I thought they were interesting, worthy of further investigation one day. A day which will probably never come.

Sigh.

So. I was editing this Victoria Birch review of Eleanor Friedberger live in Sydney, doing some formatting along the way. And this song caught my attention.

This is what she wrote:

This is better. ‘Lost At Sea’ is better. The guitar is no longer wielded like an apology. From here it’s going to be all right (as in everything is right not merely alright). That’s ‘When I Knew (I Was Wrong)’ is the song that makes me forget I’m on a chair with a pitiful comfort to pain ratio. It was dewdrop new to me and even now, a few days on and some sizeable humdrum later I can still remember every word. Sort of, perhaps not, but the essence is there. A girls’ own adventure, road-trip, bullying, dungarees (Oo I do remember this bit, “She was wearing a pair of dungarees and so I sang ‘Come On Eileen’”), a (wo)mance that may or may not be more than that.

I don’t know about all that. I just know that it’s a corking great song, charged and energetic and full of mantra-like repetition and the best use of “yeah yeah yeah” since whenever they were last used so wantonly, and that it reminds me of all those other songs that it reminds me of – yes, it’s Sugar & Tiger good, it’s Royal Headache good – and I’ve already played it five times in the last 20 minutes.

So thanks for that.

Maybe the rest of her material is this awesome. That’d be great.

*Or “Everett True hears an awesome song, makes it Song of the Day. Yes sometimes it’s really that simple.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.