Ezra Furman Quotes
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I had so many secrets and so much social repression throughout my life. I guess I'm just a shy person and feel like my true self is unacceptable to most people.
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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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It's one of the guiding philosophies of my life - not fearing any authority on earth.
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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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I always felt like I had a punk album waiting to be made.
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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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A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.
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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've always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music.
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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 music fans go to shows for transcendence; it's like being called to prayer.
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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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I like going to bed early and getting up early, but that doesn't happen on tour.
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Just being gender non-conforming opens you to trouble from strangers. And violence.
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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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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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My bassist Jorgen Jorgensen opened up my life to a lot of great, obscure old soul records.
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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 don't really worship the album 'Transformer.' It's not the best thing that Lou Reed has done.
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I guess I just do being a man different than some.
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My main theme as a songwriter seems to be a feeling of homelessness, of being in motion. The feeling of being somehow unmoored, a radical internal freedom that is very painful and also joyful.
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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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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.