The Fiery Furnaces Evergreen--salvation in a pinecone
Fiery Furnaces, the brother and sister band consisting primarily of Matthew and Elanor Friedberger, recorded in the 2000s a number of almost baroque songs chock-filled with filigrees of lyrical and sonic weirdness. But as they cut album after album in rapid fire, Fiery Furnaces developed a kind of textured tunefulness and became a distinguished band—they eventually recorded gems that stack up well against any group of the decade—“Here Comes the Summer,” “Waiting for You,” “Single Again,” “My Egyptian Grammar” (perhaps their best song). “Evergreen,” however, is the track I keep returning to, for a number of reasons. Not only does it tell a story, in Eleanor’s almost staccato, jagged spoken word backed by keyboard and organ, it presents a kind of mysterious and unique woodsy meaningfulness.
Our clearly lonesome narrator presents a picture of lost-love and isolation. They work with their hands, perhaps as a kind of freelance lumberjack, selling honey by the side of the road to supplement their meager earnings. It’s a simple existence of sleeping, eating and drinking herbal tea to stay healthy (they cross themselves before taking a sip). At night it is a solitary existence of eating alone and making the bed, waiting by the phone for a call that never comes, “dabbing off my tears with my favorite fine cone” (a simultaneously amusing and starkly disturbing image—have they lost touch with reality?). They have been hurt by someone and are perhaps in a kind of penitential prison of their own making, returning to nature for a stretch of solace. They are just hanging in there.
“Evergreen” speaks to a kind of obsession faced with a monotone of green—everywhere trees (spruce and hemlock are mentioned specifically). The narrator pins hope to the trees and shoots, at once believing they see a lucky star in the boughs and later making a prayer for keenness to a tiny spruce root and hemlock shoot, getting down on their knees near a stream to do the same. Prayers to baby trees, favorite pinecones—the narrator’s world has shrunken and compressed into a kind of homemade pantheism. The new burgeoning life seems to offer to our protagonist hope and superstitious redemption.
The song suggests when one is surrounded only by foliage and roots, one makes gods of them. Obsession gathers around one’s immediate scenery. There is almost a kind of mystical, even spiritual awareness in this song, as if the trees retain the answers they need to face down rejection and isolation the song implies are part and parcel of their world. Surely this is better that than getting wasted at the bar, axe in hand—the unsettling image that begins the song.
“Evergreen” is such an odd and touching little creation of resilience and hermitage. In a sense the narrator is simply trying to make do in a world that doesn’t care whether they live or die. The song details the human need to find meaning and imbue even baby trees and roots with a kind of magical knowing power. We don’t give up easily, even when everyone else seems to have already done so on our behalf. “I’d get all my winnings ask for special sap in code.” Who knows what that means? I’m not convinced even the hero of “Evergreen” has the answer. Code indeed.