Ezra Furman Quotes
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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 always maintain that artists do not have any responsibility to do anything except cause no harm and do whatever we want to do as artists.
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I guess I just do being a man different than some.
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In terms of keeping kosher, I've basically just been vegetarian. I want to be fully vegetarian anyway, though sometimes my mom makes chicken soup and I have to eat it. I just love it.
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I've been writing songs since I was a teenager, so one kind of song I've written a lot is about, I don't know, teen angst feelings - feeling unsure of yourself and immature.
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Learning that someone is gay, queer, trans, doesn't tell you much by itself. They could be any kind of person aside from that particular slice of identity.
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You have to make a character of yourself if you're going to be known to strangers.
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The Velvet Underground is probably the best band that's ever existed, assuredly the best American one.
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Far from being a showbiz gimmick, for me dressing as I please has signalled the end of a lifelong performance of straightforward masculinity.
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I was thinking very carefully about going into education, becoming a teacher, maybe becoming a rabbi.
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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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Part of what you hear when somebody says something awful to you is like, 'They're right, I look ridiculous, why am I dressed this way, I should go home and change.' For me that voice is always in my head, right around the corner.
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I believe an authentic Judaism would legislate total equality for queer people.
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We take a lot of inspiration from punk rock and early rock 'n' roll from the '50s and early '60s.
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Listening to songs is like eating and writing songs is like vomiting. You're putting a ton of stuff in, it combines in unpredictable ways, and comes back out in a big mess.
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I get stage fright really bad sometimes, so touring has been hard on me in a lot of ways. But despite that, I love performing.
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If I can see the sunrise - and I usually don't - I like to. I'm a big fan of the sun.
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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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A lot of bands break through with their third record: the White Stripes, the Clash, the Replacements.
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I'm in this effort to unify my life and to live day to day in a disciplined way, to be real at all times, not just in front of people, or not just in a synagogue.
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To have knowledge of Judaism and to be a religious Jew or an interested Jew, is to have a doorway into a worldview that is entirely alien to the rest of the world's worldview.
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It's always about staying competitive with myself... Popularity is something that may happen from time to time, and I don't trust it and I don't think it means too much. I'm going for greatness.
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I'm interested in God. I'm not interested in religion for religion's sake.
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We spent a lot of time making 'Transangelic Exodus' and toward the end of it, my ability and my love for music - that is, just garage music, direct and immediate - started to feel neglected.