The fiery furnaces: it's an old joke that most fledgling rock bands would sell their grandmothers for a record deal; this one made theirs the lead singer. Welcome to the weird, wonderful world of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger

The Fiery Furnaces--singer Eleanor Friedberger and multi-instrumentalist and sometime singer Matthew Friedberger--are the most adventurous band in the country. Experimental is not the word; as David Thomas of Pere Ubu once put it: "We are not experimental--we know what we're doing," and the Fiery Furnaces make the sound of people who get where they want to go.

The Friedbergers grew up as older brother and younger sister in Oak Park, Illinois. They now work out of New York City.

GREIL MARCUS: Tell me about "Teach Me, Sweetheart" on your new record, Bitter Tea [Fat Possum]. It's one of those songs that got under my skin and won't leave. It's about a woman who finds out that her husband's whole family wants her dead--her mother-in-law, her father-in-law, her sister-in-law, her brother-in-law: "He gave orders to spill my blood." It seems to come from some primeval place. I'd love to hear you talk about how that song was written, how you arranged it, and how you recorded it.

MATTHEW FRIEDBERGER: It's stolen from a Russian-folk-lyric book--that whole idea of a bride crying because she's going to be sent off to somebody else's family.

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER: Matt and I were flipping through these books, and then I saw the line "Teach me, sweetheart" and thought, Oh, maybe Matt will like that. I really liked that line. I thought maybe he'd think it was a little too corny, but he thought it was great. Then we just copied the first line from that lyric and made up the rest OR our own.

GM: It still retains that sense of something ancient and faded, whether you made everything else up or not.

MF: Well, [the phrase] "brave young bachelors" is stolen, too--there's a lyric about a woman calling out, kind of offering her wares to the young men. That's how we made up songs when we were starting out. I would give Eleanor a book, and she would copy out lines that seemed striking, and then we would write a song based on them.

EF: It was an easy way for Matt and me to make up stuff together that wasn't embarrassing for either of us--particularly for me, when we first started trying to make up songs together.

GM: The first thing that really struck me on your first album, Gallowsbird's Bark [2003], was the sense of '1 think I've heard this before, but I've never heard anything like this before." I also hear that on "Single Again" on EP [Rough Trade], "Don't Dance Her Down" on Gallowsbird's Bark, and "96 Tears" on Bitter Tea. And yet nothing seems borrowed.

MF: You know, we try to have things be traditional, but we also try to make them sound different. For me, it's not difficult, because Eleanor's voice is always on the straight and narrow. It's really easy for her to strike a tone that's not too sweet or too tough and to have sounds fly around her voice. It's easy to have the music sound different because her voice will bear it. No doubt, sometimes it goes too far for some people. But that's what we find fun.

GM: The music sounds more like landscapes for you, Eleanor, to sing in rather than formal arrangements.

MF: That's how I think of it, because rock music is supposed to be made up of simple, harmonically droney sounds. It's about textures and a setting, and then she's the character.

GM: Eleanor, are you writing less?

EF: Yes.

GM: You wrote more in the beginning.

EF: Yes.

GM: Why are you writing less now?

EF: I wish I could come up with an interesting answer, but I don't really have one.

MF: That's not true. You know exactly why.

EF: Well, it was easy for me to write songs before, when I had a job and I had this routine of sitting at a desk, surrounded by people in an office. In order to not do work, I would look up stuff on the computer and then write notes down to myself. Then I'd come home and have a few drinks and make a song on a four-track. But I just don't have that kind of pattern anymore, and Matt's always written songs, so it's easy for me to be lazy and fall back on him.

GM: So this is really a case of "Don't quit your day job so you can keep making music."

EF: In my case it's more just me being lazy. It's funny--this sounds kind of corny--but Matt just made a couple of solo records, and he gave one to me. I took a train down to Washington, D.C., the other day and listened to it, and it immediately made me want to write something. I even made little notes for a possible song. Maybe I need to do that. Whatever it takes to get me feeling ... I wouldn't say competitive, but just something to spur me on like that.

GM: You may think of yourself as lazy, but if you count EP, which has 10 songs, the two of you have made five albums in three years. It seems like an enormous burst that can't stop.

MF: It's a defense mechanism, to record a lot--both because it's fun and because you didn't get to make records before and you don't know when you're going to stop. For me, it's about correcting the mistakes or what's not interesting about the last record with another record. There's a good kind of dissatisfaction with finishing something. You want to feel that you're not embarrassed by it, but it makes you want to go and do it right the next time as quick as you can. And we imagine we're the kind of band that gets better if we record a lot. We don't think of Fiery Furnaces as an inspiration band--it's work for us to make up songs. We think of what we do as a craft, so why not work more? It's as simple as that.