Splendid: And your work does that, too.

Matt Friedberger: It does that. It's not as good as that, and it's not as thick. That's just the way it goes. There's something kind of spazzy about Bo Diddley, I suppose. Though there isn't much spazziness about Howlin' Wolf, I guess. I like country blues, too.

I never used to play that way for songs. It was only when I started playing with Eleanor, who could sing in a different way to that sort of stuff. She's got a talky, riff-style of singing, so with her, I could try to have songs that were like that, whereas before, I didn't feel free to play like that.

Splendid: Aren't you guys also Os Mutantes fans?

Matt Friedberger: Oh, yeah.

Splendid: I've been listening to their stuff a little bit lately, and they do some of the same things you do. They have this whole tradition of Brazilian music that's kind of heavy and can be very sad, but they mix it up in a blender with all this other stuff and get this almost giddy, happy sound.

Matt Friedberger: Well, they were really thinking about what they were doing. Especially on that first album. They're very seriously playful. Of course, the playing is much better than on our record, but yeah, they were very self-conscious about doing something different to this sort of music. They were doing it along the lines -- they were messing with this Brazilian music and being told to do so by the leading lights of the Brazilian music scene. It's a weird story. On that first record, (Caetano) Veloso was very involved in it. It was a way to play their sort of crazy, out-of-tune and modern song folk styling, the things they came up with, and also play Anglo-American rock music. That's what those first two Os Mutantes records were. It was a definite collaboration... I don't really know what I'm talking about.

They are a real important band, but if you listen to them like you or I would listen to them, it sounds like a particularly good or wackier or with more interesting playing and singing kind of Small Faces. Well, I love the Small Faces, and I love The Pretty Things, those rock opera records, but Os Mutantes sounds a little bit better. Listening to it in the 1990s, when David Byrne reissued it, you listen to it as just really good, different psyche-pop.

Splendid: Maybe it doesn't sound as dangerous as it was at that time?

Matt Friedberger: I don't know. That's the way it works, of course. When they made the record in Brazil, it was meant to accomplish a particular thing, and it would have sounded strange, for instance, having the "Satisfaction" riff in a song. It would have been particularly weird -- this sort of left-wing music using this American, Anglo-Saxon stuff, because rock and roll to them would have been very Northern. The Rolling Stones seem sort of African to us, but to them, they wouldn't have seemed that way at all.

But we don't really know anything about that. It's just a particularly good late '60s record. It's interesting to compare it to SF Sorrow if you listen to them one right after another. It goes pretty well.

As far as them being giddy, and us trying to be giddy, yeah. We're trying to imitate those records, I guess. It's as simple as that. That's what I like. I think I've tried to imitate those records before I heard them. What I'd like to do, they did 30 years before. But when we made that record, I wasn't saying, "Well, let's make it sound like this one song."

We just finished our second record, actually.

Splendid: I heard you were in the studio last week. How's that going?

Matt Friedberger: It's good.

Splendid: Is the new stuff real different from Gallowsbird's Bark?

Matt Friedberger: To me it's not different. To me, it sounds too much the same. But hopefully it's different. The songs are very different. It's all this kind of -- you know The Who Sell Out? It's all "Rael" imitations. There are all these eight minute songs on the record.

Splendid: Did you put the fake commercials in between?

Matt Friedberger: No, we didn't put the fake commercials. But that's what it is, it's not very rock...

Splendid: You know, I was wondering about that; I had heard you were a big Who fan and I was wondering if The Who Sells Out was your favorite Who?

Matt Friedberger: It is my favorite Who. I like all the Who records. I think the most distinctive Who records are that one and Quadrophenia. And then the first one, of course.

Splendid: Yeah, I like their three-minute songs, too.

Matt Friedberger: Of course. I think Pete Townsend would say that the best Who record is Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy. That was the early '70s singles collection.

Splendid: So I was going to ask you who some of your favorite guitar players were, and I imagine Pete Townsend would be one of them?

Matt Friedberger: Yeah, I guess, but John Lee Hooker is my favorite guitar player.

Splendid: What do you like about him?

Matt Friedberger: Well, I think it's what Pete Townsend was trying to imitate -- that heavy, aggressive strumming style. You could get The Complete Modern Recordings, and if you listen to some of it, maybe 1953 recordings, it sounds like the sloppier English blues player, which Pete Townsend did. He was the most sloppy player...more even than a blues player. He was trying to do it a different way.

I like Jimi Hendrix. He's my favorite player, I guess. I like Syd Barrett. I love the first Pink Floyd record. So those are my favorite guitar players.

Splendid: You use the wah-wah pedal a lot.

Matt Friedberger: Oh, yeah, I use the wah-wah.

Splendid: To me, it's got this whole '70s funk aura, reminds me of "Cloud Nine" and some of the Funkadelic records.

Matt Friedberger: I always thought it was a way to change your sound very quickly. On the record I think there is a lot of wah-wah playing -- making the peddle go up or down while I'm playing. But to me it's just nasty-sounding... It's one of the few guitar effects that really make a difference.

Splendid: It makes the guitar sound more like a human voice.

Matt Friedberger: It's just a horrible sound if you pick it all the way up on the trebly side. I remember when I was a kid, Mick Ronson... I don't even like Ziggy Stardust that much. But he had a trick where he used the wah -wah pedal. He didn't play a wah-wah. He just would use it in three different positions, depending on what he was playing, just as an EQ pedal. For some reason, that always stuck with me. I always thought that was a good thing to do. Especially, so you have a kind of sound to start with, it's an easy way to change it. It's better than a distortion pedal. You don't want to be playing and then turn on the distortion pedal. The wah-wah is a much better way of playing. It's a much better way of playing in a less aggressive way and then all of the sudden making it more aggressive, without just hitting a switch. You have a little more in between. It's not just on or off. It's half way, all the way up, all the way down, and a little bit back and forth. But the wah-wah pedal, some people just hate it.

Splendid: You don't hear it that much anymore.

Matt Friedberger: There's nothing less post-punk than a wah-wah pedal. Maybe...

Splendid: Synthesizer? Because you guys use that, too?

Matt Friedberger: But a lot of people use the synthesizer. Those PiL records had synthesizer. Metal Box did. And Devo, of course. I don't think I was influenced by them, but maybe I was. I saw a band called Brainiac a lot living in the Midwest. They had this sort of Touch and Go Devoism and a synthesizer. They were definitely a Nation of Ulysses wannabe band. But they had a synthesizer.

So as far as the '90s, different sorts of punk coolness, people sort of did use synths at bit, but no one ever had a wah-wah. Well, maybe Neil Hagerty. Royal Trux. I don't know if Jon Spencer uses a wah-wah.

Splendid: But in any case, it's a big part of some of the songs, like "Crystal Clear" and "Two Fat Feet".

Matt Friedberger: Right. It's supposed to stand for that sort of playing. I'm not a good enough guitar player to really play rock and roll guitar. All I can do is indicate rock and roll guitar. The wah-wah pedal is a way to indicate the noise and sonic extremes that good rock and roll guitar playing should have.

Splendid: Who plays the piano, you or Eleanor?

Matt Friedberger: I do.

Splendid: Do you use that when you play live?

Matt Friedberger: Well, I play an organ live. That and a guitar.

Splendid: I've heard that your sound live is a lot more rock-oriented than the album.

Matt Friedberger: Yeah, it is. You know, you're playing in front of people and they're drinking. What are you going to do? You have to get their attention. So it's easier to be aggressive live than to try to be musical. I think that's what you're meant to do. You make a record and there's a lot of silly noises and in the singing you pretend you're in a church choir. And live you play "Summertime Blues". Live, we play rock. Hopefully it's different and it's a chance to get a different crack at a song.

Splendid: Do you both write lyrics?

Matt Friedberger: Yes, we both write.

Splendid: How does that work, because it sounds like the songs are about Eleanor's experiences?

Matt Friedberger: They are. "Tropical Ice-Land" is Eleanor's. "Bright Blue Tie" is a trip of Eleanor's. In "Leaky Tunnel", we wrote the lyrics together, and I was writing the lyrics for her like it was an experience of hers.

Splendid: So how does that work? How do you get into her head to the point where you can write lyrics about her experiences?

Matt Friedberger: I think, especially on the later record, I don't try to get into her head. I try to make it something extreme that she wouldn't normally sing. Something different. Words that you wouldn't expect to come out of her mouth.

I don't know if I can get inside her head. I don't want to presume, but I do know her very well. It's nice with all this London stuff. When we were writing this record, maybe she was in London. You know, before she lived in London. So it was easy for her to dramatize herself, to write about that, and it's easy to think of various different locales. It's fun to do that.

So, yeah, the record's nice. The songwriting is half and half, in terms of the tunes and the words, and then I get to arrange the songs.

Splendid: And she plays guitar, too?

Matt Friedberger: Yeah, on the record she plays a lot of the rhythm guitar.

Splendid: The lyrics have this wonderful surreal quality. Do you see yourself as more interested in evoking people and places and stories through your lyrics or are you primarily interested in the way the words sound, or is it some combination of the two?

Matt Friedberger: Well, I think it's important to have different approaches, because otherwise you're going to get stuck. You're going to get bored. I think that Eleanor went through that, because she liked to write about what was happening to her, and if nothing's happening to you, there's nothing to write about. But sometimes you tell a story and sometimes you let the meanings of the words, you let yourself follow associations of the meanings of the words. And sometimes you let yourself follow associations just from the sounds of the words. With rhyming you do that, anyway. The rhyme can lead to a funny sentence and then the funny sentence can lead to a different rhyming.

The surreal quality, I guess that would mean that you're associating with the meanings of the words. There's some of that on the record.

Splendid: For instance, in "Two Fat Feet", you've got this wonderful line, "You've got a wig in your snaggle tooth and you can't knock it back with no 80 proof." Does that have a story behind it?

Matt Friedberger: We were writing the lyrics together. That's about someone, actually. When we were writing it, there was someone in New York who was playing up their Southern roots. There's no doubt that when they're down at home, they're sensitive lads, you know? But here in New York, they try to gain currency from the fact that they're wild rednecks. So that was what we were thinking. That line right there is supposed to be that. But hopefully it's not as mean-spirited as that. Hopefully listening to it, it's not about that. It's about a fun kind of chagrin, I guess, about how one habit is not going to get rid of another. That's how it seems to me when I hear it. You pile up one pleasure or vice on top of another, but they don't cancel each other out, but that's not so bad.

Splendid: It seems like the kind of lyric that could be a conduit for all kinds of meanings. Probably everybody who heard it would come up with something different.

Matt Friedberger: Yeah, well, that's a good thing. A good lyric should mean a specific thing to you, and you can explain it to someone and they say "okay". But also, rock music is pop music and it's music that people use in their lives, to play in their rooms or to walk down the street with their Walkman. They have to be able to use it however they want to. And hopefully, the lyric that means this to you, they can twist and have it mean something else to them. And it works to them. That's a good rock lyric. Something that can serve those kinds...people can use it for their own purposes.

Splendid: It's kind of a travelling record, Gallowsbird's Bark, isn't it? It has a lot of place names and situations in it, and I know that both you and your sister have travelled a bit.

Matt Friedberger: No, not really. There are lots of hippier kids or rich kids or not even rich kids, but people who have walked through Western China or been to Vietnam and gone to Africa. Eleanor and I are not those people, so we haven't really travelled that much. Eleanor has travelled a little bit. As I mentioned, she likes to write about what she's done, and I put place names in my lyrics because I think that's what it says in the first page of the book of lyric writing. (He puts on a teacher-ish voice here.) "Place names add specious concreteness to your writing." (laughter) So if you're going to say, "I was walking down the street," don't say "I was walking down the street" -- say "I was walking down Madison Street." Or something. I'm just kidding. Hopefully it has something to do with what you're writing. But I like place names. Place names are great.

Splendid: Do you like the music of other places, too?

Matt Friedberger: Sure. Well, I think both Eleanor and I really like reggae. I like it because if you liked The Clash... Johnny Rotten said that all he listened to was reggae, so you have to check it out. So I was a teenager, going into the second-hand store trying to buy Bunny Wailer Sings the Wailers. Augustus Pablo. Eleanor really likes that...now. I think for her reggae was associated with a certain kind of hippishness. To me it was the opposite. It was associated with being cool.

Splendid: I don't know. I think that with reggae, it has to be outside and you have to have a beer in your hand, it should be hot, there can't be snow on the ground...

Matt Friedberger: Yeah, but reggae, you know, is very heavy, heavy music. It can work driving down the street in slush. I really like Bollywood music.

Splendid: Really? I don't know anything about that.

Matt Friedberger: Well, neither do I. I don't know a damn thing about it. But you know that guy who had the hit "Bhangra Beat" -- do you know about that? It's a kind of hip-hoppy thing. That sort of music is pretty funky to begin with. I'm interested in that stuff. But I'm not very careful about world music. I'd like to be.

Splendid: There's so much music. It's hard to keep up with everything.

Matt Friedberger: So much music, and different types of pop music that are very interesting, that you can get all sorts of ideas from. It's like with reggae at the turn of the '80s, when you had this kind of keyboardy sound and drum machine sound. It lost a lot of its cool. I know I listened to Zimbabwean pop. I used to listen to stuff put out by a very small label, and you'd put on the earlier stuff and it sounded great and then you put on the newer stuff and it sounded horrible, really cheesy. It's just the accidents of the era. Yeah, the world is an interesting place (he laughs) and there's lots to learn about.

Splendid: So, I really like "Don't Dance Her Down", and it says in the liner notes that the lyrics are adapted from "Big Jim in the Bar Room". What is that?

Matt Friedberger: It's a folk song. It's not a very well-known one. It's compressing song. It's a male song, a song from a male's perspective. Eleanor changed the gender. She liked it because she was just in England. It was in a book I gave to her for Christmas. Folksong books, guitar-only folksong books, are pretty neat. You can really learn to write songs from them.

Splendid: How much did you do to the song?

Matt Friedberger: To the music?

Splendid: Yeah.

Matt Friedberger: Oh, it's not at all the same. It's much more a lilting tune. The germ of (our version) is a kind of a T. Rex riff, I suppose. It's really a hook, as opposed to a song. It's almost actually funky, in a jokey, fanciful way. It's not supposed to be ironic -- it's supposed to be enjoyable. It's supposed to be very happy. The music is supposed to be happy and we're supposed to be happy about playing this silly sort of music. Not that playing funky is silly, but it's fun when you can't do it well enough. So it sounds a little rinky-dink, and it's meant to. We're a little self-conscious about it. I like it. It was tough because I didn't like -- we played it first live and I didn't like what the drummer played. But we cut the tape. We couldn't change it. I kind of overdubbed a snare drum and two toms and kind of made it better, but the first part is not quite right.

Splendid: Is it hard to work with outsiders?

Matt Friedberger: It's even hard for Eleanor and I to work together, because it's hard to get somebody to do what you think you want to do, and of course, you might be wrong and they might be right. Unfortunately, it goes by too quick with recording, and so that happens. It's just, there's lots of deciding to do in rock music. I'm comfortable fighting with Eleanor about something. I'm not comfortable fighting with anyone else. It's easy to fight with your sibling, because you don't spare their feelings. They don't get offended. Or they might get offended, but 20 minutes later, they're not offended. It's hard. We're not very -- we don't have some big idea. We have to kind of mix up slightly different styles to make it not so deadly dull, to make our simple songs not so bad, and so we really have to sweat the details. It's hard enough for me to get Eleanor to agree with me, let alone other people.

We suffer from not being a proper band. That's for sure. I know on this record, I had played everything. There's another guy, David Hula, who plays drums, and that's about it. Other people can play a lot better than me, so it goes slow in that way, and that's too bad.

Splendid: I had a question about the last song, "We Got Back the Plague" -- it's a political song, isn't it?

Matt Friedberger: Yeah, it is. It's about the 72 hours right before the mid-term elections, and it's just about where he went. Of course, now I can't remember the words. (Karl) Rove had a thing, this different style of grassroots getting everyone out, this 72-hour committee. So that Republicans would go to all the Republicans they knew and say, "Hey, did you vote?" And just about where he was, Cedar Rapids, and Talent who was running for the senate and beat the widow -- I've forgotten all this stuff. And of course, in New York, right after the election, there were two cases of bubonic plague. It came from a couple of people in New Mexico. So everything in there is true.

The conceit of it is that -- it's a lefty song, I guess, but written from the perspective of a God-fearing person, so that's the part about how they read in the book on Sunday afternoon, doing their Bible study. I don't know if that's very interesting.

Splendid: Well, I like the song, but it was only a about the fifth time I heard it that the political references started jumping out at me.

Matt Friedberger: That's him, a man of blood. And that's from people comparing the Bushes to the Stuarts a little bit: Bush I got deposed and Bush II has gotten revenge on his enemies and has everything go his way.

Splendid: The last Stuart, didn't he get beheaded?

Matt Friedberger: Charles the First got beheaded, yeah.

Splendid: I also wanted to ask you about the bio in the liner notes. It's very funny. Who wrote that?

Matt Friedberger: I wrote that. It was a joke because Eleanor was saying that we had to do the real thing, but I thought we might as well write something to get the info out of the way. Like I made sure to include all this stuff about Eleanor, any embarrassing stuff I could remember. She got caught for copying something in college, and worked for the Texas Republican party for three weeks, so I made sure to put that in. I dropped out of college, so I made sure to put that in.

Splendid: It made me miss my brother. It was just so exactly like being a sibling.

Matt Friedberger: That's great.

Splendid: So I'm assuming that you're probably getting sick of all these questions about how you get along since you're brother and sister. But since we're approaching the holidays (Editor's Note: If you hadn't already figured it out, this interview was conducted prior to Christmas, 2003) and a lot of people are going to be spending more time than usual with their brothers and sisters, do you have any advice for people?

Matt Friedberger: Yeah, walk out of the room whenever you feel agitated. That's if you don't see them very much. But whatever you do, don't live with them.

Splendid: You've done that, haven't you?

Matt Friedberger: Yeah. We get along pretty well. We have fights, but we lived together for nine months and we didn't get along at all.

Splendid: Yikes.

Matt Friedberger: That was bad. But find something that you have in common to talk about, whether it's sports or Julia Roberts movies. If you have an older brother or something, really straight, what the hell are you going to talk to him about? Find one thing you can talk about, and stick to it obsessively.

That's if you don't like your brother...

Splendid: Or if you like him in moderation.

Matt Friedberger: If you like him, you know, imagine that you like him more.