Earlier this summer, Ezra Furman played a show with his backing band The Boy-Friends at Pickathon Music Festival, adorned in a red floral dress, a pearl necklace and Kool Aid-blue dyed hair.
San Francisco-based Ezra Furman plays during Pickathon’s 18th annual music festival. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).
His self-deprecating stage presence was loud and palpable. While most musicians would relish the cheers between songs, Furman disavowed them outright. He would shout back at the crowd, deadpan: “Don’t just do that! You have to make me earn it!” He introduced “Teddy I’m Ready,” the opening track on Big Fugitive Life, which came out earlier this summer, by saying that this song is about “what we call, at this juncture of our lives, ‘rock and roll.’ ”
In a column for The Guardian, Furman wrote, “Far from being a showbiz gimmick, for me, dressing as I please has signaled the end of a lifelong performance of straightforward masculinity. I have always been uncomfortable with masculinity.” In the same piece, Furman, who is gender-fluid, recalls being inspired by the way Lou Reed effortlessly transcended masculine-feminine tropes, a shared theme within Furman’s music.
Big Fugitive Life is only six tracks and 18 minutes long but showcases ample variety and musical prowess. In his own words, Furman describes the EP as a polarizing two-parter. The first half is “our vision of rock and roll — a madness that overtakes your mind and body.” He describes the latter, more glacially-paced half as “acoustic guitar as open wound, a troubled mind on display.” This side finds Furman singing about his Jewish grandfather fleeing the Nazis in the aching track “The Refugee” and an enigmatic, stripped-down lament (the Robert Johnson-esque “Penetrate”).
Honestly, the EP’s first half is more fun. “Teddy” is a barnburner. Furman counters his own cries that he’s “ready to rock and roll,” with non-sequitur lines like, “The truth is just a mole rat crawling underneath the earth / It is naked and it’s gnawing away at the world / And it hurts so bad that I could cry / But they don’t allow no crying in the cold straight world of men / So I build my little fortress / ‘Til I can get even.”
The second track “Halley’s Comet” carries some of the same anguish when Furman writes about the celestial phenomenon (“I find it hard to live this life of nouns and adjectives / While all around us planets shift and comets fly right by”). In the chorus, his tone swings from instructive (“Halley’s Comet only comes by once”) to fuming (“But do you care like I care?!”) in a split-second, like a middle schooler who’s nudging you to test how sincere you are.
On his Facebook page, Furman writes that the band members include Furman and “whosoever is star-crossed enough to join forces with him.” One of those lucky fellas is Tim Sandusky, who plays saxophone on Furman’s records and is the pulsing heart of the music. Sandusky’s sax steps in when a more conventional band would use an electric guitar, such as during the solo on “Teddy” or on “Little Piece of Trash,” when the sax bounces off the rhythm with a youthful, power-pop energy. The sax compresses the heartland-rock of Springsteen into bite-sized tracks but still feels intimate and personal.
This is Furman’s second EP this year, following the Record Store Day release Songs By Others, in which he covers tracks the likes of The Replacements, Beck and Little Richard.
Listen to “Teddy I’m Ready” by Ezra Furman below.
