“This is the beautiful life”: Ezra Furman on how she made her religious, gender and rock and roll identities harmonise
When Ezra Furman released her ninth album, All of Us Flames, in 2022, many thought that the intense levels of emotional outpouring would lead to a lengthy hiatus before she returned with new material. Even after the conclusion of the subsequent tour for the album, she appeared to suggest that she’d retreat for a while, and that nothing new should be expected of her. Such is the compulsion to write and express her true self, we’re thankfully blessed with its follow-up, Goodbye Small Head, a mere three years later.
This might be a significant distance between releases for someone as prolific as Furman, but she insists that waiting time is valuable to her these days. “There was a time when I thought I could be putting out two albums a year or more, but I had a shift in perspective when thinking about my real musical role models,” she muses. “Some of them have done that fast pace, but I would rather wait five years or more if it meant I could come up with some of the kinds of records that Leonard Cohen or Fiona Apple put out. I’d rather have one Fetch the Bolt Cutters than four albums that aren’t as powerful.”
She may have a point, but we’re not in Fiona Apple territory here. Regardless of how much time elapses between Furman’s albums, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be any more or less arresting or pertinent to the times we live in. All of her past efforts have captured her at a specific yet significant point in her life where she has felt the need to spill every bit of her emotion into her songs, whether it be elation or agony.
Goodbye Small Head arrives at a time when Furman’s life has undergone several momentous shifts. She publicly came out as a transgender woman in the year prior to releasing All of Us Flames, and has used large amounts of the time since to reflect on her identity and journey to yield her truest self. Furman has also become a mother, which has also impacted her endeavours significantly, though she wouldn’t change that for the world. “I’m not the kind of parent who just doesn’t parent for long stretches of time,” she tells me. “You’ve got all these classic male songwriters who have kids, and their kids don’t see them. I’m never gonna do that.”
However, these life changes are things that require ample time to be processed, and given that, Furman understands it would be wasteful of her to release music that fails to capture any sense of poignancy. “I think it really is a matter of ambition and focus,” she declares. “I would like to make these releases the most meaningful thing I could release. I’ve got musical values that I care about. Going back to a record like Perpetual Motion People, I had so many songs, and I’d always ask how I knew which ones mattered. Part of the art, I’ve realised, is figuring out which of these compositions means something.”
Furman may talk about letting songs brew and grow organically, but how long are we talking? “I started writing one of these songs, ‘Power of the Moon’, in December 2018, and I knew there was something there,” she explains. “It just took a long time to get it right. ‘Veil Song’ took at least two years.”
On the flipside, a considerable amount of Goodbye Small Head arrived in a flurry of activity. “I just felt compelled to write songs. It wasn’t part of a unified project, and then at some point in 2023, I started to write songs quickly, and they had something in common. I basically wrote the first two songs on this record on the same day—‘Grand Mal’ and ‘Sudden Storm’. I mean, they changed, but they arrived in a manic state.”
Referring to the songs as having arrived in a “manic state” suggests that the process was an arduous undertaking, and Furman also uses the analogy of the tracks coming over her in “feverish” fashion. But there’s an insistence that they coalesce in a way that doesn’t always reflect chaos. “It turned out that all these songs are about being overcome with surrender to this irrational world of feeling, sometimes in the realm of pain, sometimes in the realm of beauty,” she declares, before proudly asserting that “so much of it sounds so beautiful to me, which isn’t one of the first adjectives I would have used for any other record I’ve made.”
There were some difficult aspects to writing the record, or even presenting her songs to anyone in the first place. “I was really discouraged about making records,” Furman admits. “I doubted whether this was the job for me, like you wonder sometimes if there’s a right time to hang up your superhero uniform.” All of Us Flames was completed in a post-pandemic world, which, she confesses, she was eager to jump into. But reintegrating into a world that had undergone such significant shifts presented its own problems. “I’d become ‘more out’ as trans, and I found that to be harder than I expected to be trans in public in a new way, even though I’d been gender non-conforming and getting shit for that for years.”
The release and the subsequent response to the album was also disheartening for her in many respects. However, she’s able to laugh about her reaction to it in retrospect as slightly melodramatic. “We worked so hard, and then it didn’t win ten Grammys and end transphobia for everyone in the world, so I was sad, which I don’t know if that’s really justified,” she laughed, with an air of flippance. Furman also knows that failing to achieve these lofty goals was no reason to abandon her entire craft, either. For one, there are too many positives about being a musician to ever quit so easily.
“My job is fucking awesome in so many ways. I mean, I go to work and people applaud!”
Ezra Furman
Goodbye Small Head, if anything, arrives as an act of defiance against this way of thinking. Taking its name from a line in Sleater-Kinney’s ‘Get Up’, a band that Furman describes as a “lesbian touchstone”, she was astonished that she hadn’t previously stumbled upon the track until last year. “Once a year, I find some song that I need to hear a thousand times,” she says—an incredibly relatable impulse. “I don’t know what’s behind this, and I don’t think it’s because it’s the best song I’ve ever heard, but it hits at the right time. I’m like, ‘inject it into my veins’.”
It was suddenly obvious to her that this line would become the album’s title after a months-long deep dive into 1990s alternative rock. “Thematically, that’s where my mind was at,” she says, expanding upon its resonance with her. “It’s this feeling of transcending yourself and taking leave of this small way you were thinking.” Furman’s desire to escape old and unhelpful ways of thinking is fully established in this title, and the themes explored on the record are indicative of this personal growth journey that she is embarking upon.
Furman knows she still has a lot to learn in this regard, though, and other recent listening habits appear to have demonstrated this to her. A recent infatuation with Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal has had a profound impact on her in the months since completing Goodbye Small Head, and has encouraged her to reconnect with her spirituality in a way that few others dare to approach. “He’s like an ecstatic fountain of language that mixes the mundane and the holy, the ecstatic and the totally debased,” she enthuses, “There’s no line between them anymore.”
This spiritual reconnection was something she had endeavoured to explore during the creation of the album, not necessarily just in the Judaic sense of her upbringing, but in how certain records “are like mystical texts” and use spirituality as a means of expression. “[Neutral Milk Hotel’s] In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and [Van Morrison’s] Astral Weeks are records that mention religion and worship in some way. One of the points of music is to give up the rational and surrender to feeling in a way that makes you feel exaltation or wonder.”
This questioning of rationality doesn’t just align with her spiritual reawakening, and there are ways in which she has imbibed this in other aspects of her current journey in life. “There’s a sense of irrationality to transness for me,” she argues. “Where other people see a wall, we saw a doorway. Being trans is something that everyone knows is ‘impossible’, a man becoming a woman—that is not just impossible, that is necessary for some.”
Furman is acutely aware of how the idea of being transgender and devoted to a religion feels oxymoronic, but she still finds ways to embrace them in conjunction with one another. “Religion certainly tends towards misogyny in so many of its expressions through history, but it’s this place where feeling matters. Music also tends toward boys’ club type of shit and misogyny, but it’s this place where overwhelming feeling is taken seriously, and for some reason, music and spirituality are connected for me in that way.”
There’s a line on recent single, ‘Power of the Moon’, where this is illustrated gorgeously: “But I guess we all have our moments / When we find logic constraining / We take the frame from the painting / And let the colours bleed out into the room”. Furman believes that letting this ‘frame’ dissolve is an important human function for allowing different ideas into your life, and that this is where God enters the room for her.
“I used to have such a wall up between my music life and my spiritual life,” she admits. “None of my music friends understood anything about what I’m doing in my religious life, and then there were people at the synagogue, who were like, ‘Oh, you’re a musician, that’s exotic’. They just felt so far from each other, and because they’re totally different, I would never combine them, and maybe I’d even have to choose one over the other eventually. Now I don’t see it that way at all. This is just part of the outpouring of my spirit.”
Of course, Furman has always avoided choosing between the two, although, in 2014, she admits she “didn’t think there was a home for the kind of person I wanted to be in this rock and roll lifestyle.” It took plenty of convincing from bandmates and managers that the two could coexist, and while certain sacrifices, such as not playing on Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, had to be made, the two lifestyles have become harmonious for her.
Reflecting on making these decisions, she says, “That was a moment of maturity that also started the same process of coming out as trans and wanting things that seem impossible to me. I need things that exist at the same time. I need to be religious, and trans, and a performing musician. It even seemed kind of insane to combine any two of those lives, but fuck everybody, this is the beautiful life to me.”
This beautiful life that Furman lives is taking her back out on the road to perform with her band for the first time in three years, and there are plenty of things she wants to see from her upcoming performances. “I want my shows to be these communal events where you could meet somebody else who could matter to you,” she explains. “You could make a friend, or you could make a contact, maybe as an activist, or maybe just as a community member.” With society in turmoil at the moment, whether in the sense of genocidal atrocities being committed across the world or the continued oppression that trans people have to fight against, Furman firmly believes that her shows can offer something to those seeking solace from dark times.
“It feels like we should be going out to communal events for emotional catharsis and survival therapy to feel something besides dread and anxiety, which so many of us are feeling,” she continues. “We’re in a world of crisis right now, and a good way to feel prepared for crisis is to know people you can trust. These shows could be a place of building resilience as communities.”
Goodbye Small Head is an album that embraces everything, the ecstatic, the revelatory, and the painful aspects of life. Furman has sunk every fibre of her being into this record, and the fact that she has made all of its disparate themes amalgamate without any conflict is reflective of how she hasn’t had to compromise any part of her identity to make things work. There has been plenty of soul-searching in the process, but no part of that soul has been lost. And while there are still frictions between the different strands, she declares, “they rhyme, feed each other, make each other stronger, and would all wilt without each other,” boldly asserting, “I insist I must be me.”
