Ezra Furman Quotes
-
I love it when people write rapturously about music they love.
-
I believe an authentic Judaism would legislate total equality for queer people.
-
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.
-
I think of myself as someone who's trying to be a great songwriter and a great performer. And I mean really great.
-
More visibility is more power, but more vulnerability.
-
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.
-
Ezra Furman And The Boy-Friends was a band with a specific mission - to be a really good rock'n'roll band. And we achieved it.
-
The Velvet Underground is probably the best band that's ever existed, assuredly the best American one.
-
Far from being a showbiz gimmick, for me dressing as I please has signalled the end of a lifelong performance of straightforward masculinity.
-
I'm just grateful to people who are willing to admit how bad things feel for them.
-
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.
-
I honestly feel like I've been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after 'Day Of the Dog' came out.
-
I thought as a kid, "Maybe I don't want to start a punk band necessarily. I just want to learn to be a great songwriter," and got really into trying to figure out how that could be possible.
-
If you're trying to deal with being a marginalized person and trying to confront a larger population that isn't the same as you, you can be friendly about it, and invite everybody in, or you can be angry about it and be hostile and attack the systems that you want to destabilize.
-
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.
-
You have to make a character of yourself if you're going to be known to strangers.
-
A lot of bands break through with their third record: the White Stripes, the Clash, the Replacements.
-
I wear what I want to wear and appear on stage as myself.
-
People get stigmatised for their bodies and for their differences. Then those people become very vulnerable.
-
I'm trying to be an activist, and I think of that as separate from my work as an artist. But it isn't.
-
I'm interested in God. I'm not interested in religion for religion's sake.
-
Judaism is a way of thinking, more than anything else, that I think is entirely distinct, and the more you know of it, the more you can enter into that kind of thinking.
-
I grew up attending a Conservative day school, Solomon Schechter, until I was about 14, and going to a Reconstructionist synagogue.
-
Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.