Ezra Furman talks community, tenth album 'Goodbye Small Head', and her day festival A World Of Love And Care • Interview • DIY Magazine

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”: so says Ezra Furman in the self-penned bio for ‘Goodbye Small Head’, her compelling forthcoming tenth LP. If poetry is an overflow, then her discography to date is a veritable flood, linked across sonic and appellational changes by an ever-present, visceral howl of emotion.

“Making art is really so analogous to having dreams,” she muses today, speaking to DIY over Zoom from her home in Boston. “You don’t know what your dream is while you’re having it, and you don’t know exactly what it meant after you had it, but I do think [both making art and dreaming] reflect what’s going on with you in your unconscious [mind].”

Crucially, though, Furman’s work has also always felt remarkably prescient, reflecting not just her own inner workings, but contemporary anxieties shared by people the world over: take 2018’s ‘Transangelic Exodus’ - released a year into Trump’s first presidential term - which blooms from the conceptual seed of queer angels on the run from oppression; or her last offering, 2022’s ‘All Of Us Flames’, which gives voice to the parallel marginalisations of trans folk and the Jewish diaspora. “It always feels like I’m just following my own personal experiences and private emotions to write what I write,” she says thoughtfully, “and then when I look at what I’ve done, there’s something about [it] that rhymes with the present moment in public life.

“This record, especially, feels so first person singular,” she continues, describing the thematic heart of ‘Goodbye Small Head’: “this is happening to me, I’m alone, and I’m overwhelmed with these experiences of beauty and pain.” And yet, she acknowledges, the album is far from insular - rather, its themes and execution are “very mid-2020s in some public way”.

“I really feel like the record ended up being some kind of embrace of weakness.”

To not only still have new things to say, but to also still have resonant, relevant things to say, is a feat few other artists this far into their career are capable of. Furman, though, is one for whom reinvention has long been a hallmark. “I think I definitely reached a point of exasperation with my own established style,” she nods. “I think that was in the mid 2010s, and I kind of did have to burn it down and restart in a bit of a different place for ‘Transangelic Exodus’. And that lined up in a weird way - I mean, in a probably not coincidental way - with maturation of my queerness and transness, and in some ways becoming a new person.”

If ‘Transangelic Exodus’ was the sound of Furman stepping further into her true self, then ‘Goodbye Small Head’ is the sound of her stepping down from any sugar-coated pedestals she’s unwittingly found herself occupying as that self - of her saying “‘no more role model stuff, just be fucking real’.” Because, we wonder, being a trans woman in the public eye must encode specific, significant pressures: to be ‘strong’ in the face of adversity; to maintain a sense of optimism in spite of concerted, institutionally ratified attacks. “Yes,” Furman nods. And that must be quite a load to bear? “I have to think about this before I say it because I don’t want to….” she trails off, and it’s some time before she answers.

“I really felt like it became my purpose to go around to these rooms full of queer people and be like ‘it’s gonna be okay’. I talk to people after shows, and they sometimes get a little intense, [saying things like] ‘you saved my life’ or ‘we need you, you have to keep doing what you’re doing’. And I take those things as some of the greatest honours of my career - it’s truly one of the greatest things about the work that I do, to meet people who feel sustained by this art in a way that I have been sustained by music that I have loved. But also, if you hear that stuff too many times, you hear them saying ‘you can’t stop or we will die’.”

“Having a band is an opportunity to create your own little micro-culture.”

As such, ‘Goodbye Small Head’ is all the more powerful for its refusal to soften the blow. Flying in the face of toxic positivity, or the empty activism of Instagram infographics, the album makes no bones about the sheer, crushing weight of having your very existence debated, derided, and distilled into a flashpoint issue for political pointscoring. “I’ve been spending a lot of time accepting my own overwhelm and just looking straight at the sheer size of my feelings, trying to say [them] in the most stark, honest way,” Furman affirms. “Lifting the veil. I want to stop hedging, I guess, or minimising, or making something clever to deflect from how it feels.”

“The new world is flawless / You’ve got to have good skin,” goes ‘You Mustn’t Show Weakness’, the first of two LP centrepieces: “You’ve got to have it together whatever the weather / Whatever secret storm you were born and living in”. Then there’s ‘Submission’ - the second of the pair, it’s a gut - punchingly stark surrender that whips away any of its predecessor’s lingering bluster to reveal a gaping wound. (“We’re fucked / It’s a relief to say / We’ll see no victory day”).

“I was like ‘I can’t write this, I can’t say this - this is not my message to the world,” she says. “[That] we’re fucked? How can I say that? It’s so dark, but it’s true that it felt like a relief to me - it just felt emotionally honest and vital and was the thing that I was afraid to say. And it turns out, you can have the feeling you’re afraid to have, and you can admit how much it hurts and the way that it hurts. And then you’re still alive and feeling a different feeling the next day.”

This, in essence, is the crux of ‘Goodbye Small Head’; across its 12 tracks, Furman admits mortal fear and despair and sheer exhaustion, but nevertheless always stops short of total defeat. “I really feel like the record ended up being some kind of embrace of weakness,” she nods. “All day long, people - trans people in particular - are telling each other: ‘we’re strong’; ‘keep fighting’; ‘it doesn’t matter what people say about you, just ignore them’. But I kind of got tired of being the strong one who has no feelings. It’s just not me. And it’s just not what it’s like to be a person.”

“I think that queer people and feminists and artists who model freedom kind of unlock the imagination of people who are watching.”

The de facto tagline for Furman’s tenth album, then, is not a naive, rose-tinted pipe dream, but rather a passionate plea for community and connection: A World Of Love And Care. Taking cues from the record’s penultimate and closing tracks, it’s an ethos which embodies “this confession of need” - that innately human desire to find common ground with each other, to understand and be understood. And rarely is this feeling more powerfully realised than at live music events. Enter: Ezra Furman Presents A World Of Love And Care - an all-day takeover of London’s EartH which will see Furman joined by the likes of Du Blonde, Modern Woman, jasmine.4.t, and Westside Cowboy. What better way to give ‘Goodbye Small Head’ its very first live airing?

“When we have these concerts, the person at the front of the room can really demand things, and ask people to carry themselves in a certain way,” she considers. “And it’s not that everyone must comply, but it’s an invitation to bring out certain kinds of relating to one another; you can draw a little line around this culture and [say] ‘in here, this is gonna be a place of love and care for each other’. Or a place of passion, or a place of queerness, or a place of expression and different kinds of awareness.

“Having a band is an opportunity to create your own little micro-culture,” she continues. “And it took me a while to understand that the more I talked about what I cared about, the [more] the audience started to change. In terms of demographic stuff-people going ‘oh, this is a queer artist and I’m queer’ - but also in [the way] the same middle-aged, white British, classic rock dudes would keep coming, but I’d watch their hearts kind of soften, and they’d start painting their nails or something.”

We both laugh, but it’s an anecdote that encodes more than just a 6 Music dad copping a bottle of Barry M; it’s testament to the significance of gigs as places of safety and sites of progress, even for the most unlikely of attendees. “I think that queer people and feminists and artists who model freedom kind of unlock the imagination of people who are watching,” says Furman. “That’s what’s going on when I listen to my favourite music, or take in art, or read a certain kind of great writer, or feminist scholarship. I feel more free after taking in the perspectives of people who are demanding freedom. And I think that’s pretty much universal. The more inclusive that message, the more universal it’ll be.

“There is something about creating a little utopia that I’ve only become more conscious of recently. And you know, you walk out into the world and [the utopia] all dissolves in the rain. But you had it, and something about it doesn’t dissolve, it doesn’t disappear. It leaves an impact on me, that togetherness with people - whether I’m attending a concert, or performing one.”

What A Wonderful World

Ezra Furman on the other acts populating her day fest’s stacked bill.
I love the four bands we're playing with - they were really selected with love. I’ve never not been excited about music, but there are so many great new bands... You encounter people online who are just like ‘oh, I wish it was the ‘90s, those were the cool bands’. And I’m like ‘oh my god! You’re dying of thirst, leaning on a water fountain!’ It drives me nuts. And also, the water needs you to drink it to get paid! The metaphor has broken down now, but you get what I mean...

Ezra Furman Presents A World Of Love And Care will take place on 18th May at EartH, London. Find out more and get tickets here.

Goodbye Small Head’ is out 16th May via Bella Union.

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