Ezra Furman Quotes
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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.
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I feel like my consignment and fear from people pushed me to become a performer.
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I always felt like I had a punk album waiting to be made.
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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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We punk fans have so much energy to give to the fight against injustice, i.e. the abuse of the poor by the rich, i.e. climate change.
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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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We music fans go to shows for transcendence; it's like being called to prayer.
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A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.
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I don't really believe in trying to erase every Woody Allen movie from history. For one thing, that's kind of unfair to all the people who worked on those movies or albums or whatever it is. What did they do wrong to have their work erased from culture?
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I don't think I'll ever be able to fully explain the way that the Velvet Underground's records opened a door in my head. But it has something to do with Lou Reed as a mythic figure: a person who fitted no category, who defied limits and trends and definitions.
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You have to be an anti-racist to not be racist. Because it's just a cultural tide that will pull you into it if you're not swimming against it.
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We need a lot more visibility of queer people in public life. People gotta get used to it.
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I was pretty much into punk rock and that's all I cared about. I was into Green Day and the Ramones. I wanted to get a guitar so I could play punk songs because this kid taught me power chords at summer camp.
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I've always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music.
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I like going to bed early and getting up early, but that doesn't happen on tour.
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What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life.
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Some part of me hopes for a guardian angel to protect me and other people who need protection.
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I want to be a force that tries to revive the human spirit rather than crush it, to open possibilities rather than close them down. Sometimes a passionate negativity is the best way to do that.
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I think there's a large worry in queer communities about imitating straight people, when queerness has its own identity and maybe can be a radical force that should be dismantling stuff that locks people into structures.
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One of my goals in making music is to make the world seem bigger, and life seem larger.
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I think most of the work of songwriting is thinking of great phrases - I'm addicted, always on the hunt for a really great phrase.
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I guess I just do being a man different than some.
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I just don't care that much about the band name. I'm not so precious about it. The Harpoons were different people, but The Boy-Friends were and are the same people as The Visions. I changed it to The Visions when we made 'Transangelic Exodus' because I guess we didn't feel so friendly and boyish anymore.
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Sometimes there's a day where I don't feel good being out in the world, and I feel unsafe in the world in general. And an anxiety about just showing up in the world. It's kind of irrational, but people do say things to me out in the street about how I'm dressed.