Top 60 Ezra Furman Quotes

Just being gender non-conforming opens you to trouble from strangers. And violence.

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.

We music fans go to shows for transcendence; it’s like being called to prayer.

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 am frustrated at misconceptions of me, and being cast in a role.

The Velvet Underground is probably the best band that’s ever existed, assuredly the best American one.

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.

I really don’t care about what anyone says unless they are also gender-nonconforming. Then I really listen. I love the solidarity felt between us gender failures.

I think of myself as a tomgirl. A boy who‘s girly in every presentational aspect. And I play guitar and write good songs.

I was rather obsessed with angels.

I see a skill developing of writing about not just feelings that I’m feeling, but things that I deeply care about as well.

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.

Chuck Berry invented rock ‘n’ roll. He was one of the best songwriters of the 20th century.

Far from being a showbiz gimmick, for me dressing as I please has signalled the end of a lifelong performance of straightforward masculinity.

Just being a normal person and having a social life involves a lot of dishonesty for me.

More visibility is more power, but more vulnerability.

I’m not so adept at social media. It’s not my forte.

You have to make a character of yourself if you’re going to be known to strangers.

One of my goals in making music is to make the world seem bigger, and life seem larger.

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.

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 think of myself as someone who’s trying to be a great songwriter and a great performer. And I mean really great.

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.

A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.

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.

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 going to make the music I wish someone else was making.

I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn’t get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn’t interested in having to follow.

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.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.

I guess I just do being a man different than some.

I take it hard whenever anything happens that makes, I guess, queer people feel less safe and less welcome in the world.

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.

My Jewishness and queerness are very interwoven, and, although they sometimes conflict culturally, intellectually and spiritually they deepen one another for me.

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.

We need a lot more visibility of queer people in public life. People gotta get used to it.

I first got into music when I heard punk, and it was saying maybe it’s OK if you don’t live up to the expectations various authorities have for you.

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.

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.

My bassist Jorgen Jorgensen opened up my life to a lot of great, obscure old soul records.

We take a lot of inspiration from punk rock and early rock ‘n’ roll from the ’50s and early ’60s.

It’s one of the guiding philosophies of my life – not fearing any authority on earth.

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.

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.

Desperate times make for desperate songs.

Jews like to write and sing. In America, a lot of us have been eager to show that we’re part of American culture. But it all goes back to King David writing Psalms.

I love it when people write rapturously about music they love.

I’m not an actor.

My favourite artists are the ones who are human, and you know they’re not in a failure-proof environment.

You know, a lot of people have an instinct to downplay the fact that they are performing and be, like, ‘There is no theatre here. This is just me playing the songs.’ At some point I just realised how much better it could be if you weren’t shy about being a performer.

I always felt like I had a punk album waiting to be made.

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.

I’ve always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music.

I feel like my consignment and fear from people pushed me to become a performer.

I grew up attending a Conservative day school, Solomon Schechter, until I was about 14, and going to a Reconstructionist synagogue.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t really worship the album ‘Transformer.’ It’s not the best thing that Lou Reed has done.

I’m interested in God. I’m not interested in religion for religion’s sake.