Ezra Furman Quotes
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Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan I heard when I was 13. It was one of those things where it was like, "Hey, the world is much bigger than you imagined as a little kid."
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Chuck Berry invented rock 'n' roll. He was one of the best songwriters of the 20th century.
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I think of myself as a tomgirl. A boy who's girly in every presentational aspect. And I play guitar and write good songs.
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My focus is matters of the heart and matters of the spirit, emotion and passion and stuff like that. But I think I've been getting better at being more specific about what it is I care about. Such as the welfare of refugees and solidarity between threatened populations.
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Lou Reed was an ideal figure to me. He was bisexual, like me, and seemed to inhabit an ambiguous middle place on the masculine-feminine spectrum.
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I write good songs out of fear... fear of failure. Because if they're not good enough, you feel yourself starting to fall.
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I feel like one thing that messed me up was living in a homophobic and transphobic society, and just being the object of mockery and disgust in your average sitcom or movie or person at school.
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I'm not so adept at social media. It's not my forte.
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Not only am I a shy person, I take a little while to say what I mean, especially in a social situation, and usually those move too fast for me to say anything at all.
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I was like, "Who the hell is Bob Dylan?" I was going to learn one song to appease my mom and alphabetically the first song in the book was "Absolutely Sweet Marie." When I heard it, it was like "Oh, there is something going on here. It's not like my parents' boring music that I don't care about. This is totally electrifying."
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Just being a normal person and having a social life involves a lot of dishonesty for me.
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If you get into really learning about the roots of monotheism, it was utterly a radical cultural moment. The Bible was so revolutionary and against all that came before it.
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I heard the Velvet Underground and that changed things when I was like, 15.
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I love it when people write rapturously about music they love. Ezra Furman Love Music People About I love obsessive fandom because I'm an obsessive fan who flips out over music.
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God is close to the brokenhearted, and God lifts up the lonely. That was a message that was explicitly quoted to me and was part of my upbringing: Brokenhearted people and poor people and people who are in trouble should be your focus, and you should be on their team.
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I take it hard whenever anything happens that makes, I guess, queer people feel less safe and less welcome in the world.
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A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.
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It's one of the guiding philosophies of my life - not fearing any authority on earth.
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We music fans go to shows for transcendence; it's like being called to prayer.
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As children my grandparents were refugees. Eventually they got to the U.S. - in 1950 or something. They grew up as refugees. Their earliest memories are of living in a home with their family. It's in my blood, I guess, to have a fear about encouraging fascism.
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I'm a shy person whose very presence has become a confrontation. I think that's true of a lot of queer people.
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I think rock'n'roll essence is what made it good and has a lot in common with what originally made monotheism good - it's against everything that is fixed, all the social structures that you can't go past.
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The Bible was so revolutionary and against all that came before it. It was a force for siding with the oppressed and a rebellion against hierarchical, ancient societies. Now it's institutionalized and all the life has been sucked out of it.
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My Jewishness and queerness are very interwoven, and, although they sometimes conflict culturally, intellectually and spiritually they deepen one another for me.