Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.
— Ezra Furman
Some part of me hopes for a guardian angel to protect me and other people who need protection.
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.
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 wrote 'My Teeth Hurt' in April 2018 when my teeth hurt and I didn't have dental insurance.
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.
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.
My favourite artists are the ones who are human, and you know they're not in a failure-proof environment.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Chuck Berry invented rock 'n' roll. He was one of the best songwriters of the 20th century.
I want to make the greatest record ever made. It's the only thing I can think about.
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.
Just being gender non-conforming opens you to trouble from strangers. And violence.
Desperate times make for desperate songs.
I believe an authentic Judaism would legislate total equality for queer people.
My two most fervent interests are pop music and traditional Judaism. Hell of a pair of fervent interests.
It's one of the guiding philosophies of my life - not fearing any authority on earth.
The first music I loved on my own was punk.
I always felt like I had a punk album waiting to be made.
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.
Being in a rock n' roll group, or being a musician, it is in conflict in some serious cultural ways with being an observant Jew, but in a conceptual way, for me, they go together real well.
I honestly feel like I've been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after 'Day Of the Dog' came out.
I'm not so adept at social media. It's not my forte.
I've always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music.
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.
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.
People get stigmatised for their bodies and for their differences. Then those people become very vulnerable.
I guess I just do being a man different than some.
It's a good feeling to not tell people what's going on.
I'm a shy person whose very presence has become a confrontation. I think that's true of a lot of queer people.
I wear what I want to wear and appear on stage as myself.
My Jewishness and queerness are very interwoven, and, although they sometimes conflict culturally, intellectually and spiritually they deepen one another for me.
I was thinking very carefully about going into education, becoming a teacher, maybe becoming a rabbi.
My bassist Jorgen Jorgensen opened up my life to a lot of great, obscure old soul records.
I'm just grateful to people who are willing to admit how bad things feel for them.
I'm going to make the music I wish someone else was making.
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'm interested in God. I'm not interested in religion for religion's sake.
More visibility is more power, but more vulnerability.
I'm not an actor.
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 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.
We music fans go to shows for transcendence; it's like being called to prayer.
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.
There is something embarrassing about asking for money, but if I hadn't done that, I would have not continued to be a professional musician.
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.
