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I honestly feel like I've been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after 'Day Of the Dog' came out.
Ezra Furman
I think I'm becoming a climate activist.
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.
I'm going to make the music I wish someone else was making.
I like going to bed early and getting up early, but that doesn't happen on tour.
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 write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.
I feel like one thing that messed me up was living in a homophobic and transphobic society, and just being the object of mockery and disgust in your average sitcom or movie or person at school.
If I can see the sunrise - and I usually don't - I like to. I'm a big fan of the sun.
Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.
God is close to the brokenhearted, and God lifts up the lonely. That was a message that was explicitly quoted to me and was part of my upbringing: Brokenhearted people and poor people and people who are in trouble should be your focus, and you should be on their team.
I see a skill developing of writing about not just feelings that I'm feeling, but things that I deeply care about as well.
It's always about staying competitive with myself... Popularity is something that may happen from time to time, and I don't trust it and I don't think it means too much. I'm going for greatness.
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.
I'm a shy person whose very presence has become a confrontation. I think that's true of a lot of queer people.
Some part of me hopes for a guardian angel to protect me and other people who need protection.
I love it when people write rapturously about music they love.
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.
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.
We need a lot more visibility of queer people in public life. People gotta get used to it.
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.
Just being gender non-conforming opens you to trouble from strangers. And violence.
I'm a big fan of Louis CK - I think he's a master of standup.
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.
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.
I wear what I want to wear and appear on stage as myself.
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 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.
I take it hard whenever anything happens that makes, I guess, queer people feel less safe and less welcome in the world.
Ezra Furman And The Boy-Friends was a band with a specific mission - to be a really good Rock&Roll band. And we achieved it.
You have to make a character of yourself if you're going to be known to strangers.
I'm not so adept at social media. It's not my forte.
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.
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'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.
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.
I believe an authentic Judaism would legislate total equality for queer people.
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'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.
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.
My Jewishness and queerness are very interwoven, and, although they sometimes conflict culturally, intellectually and spiritually they deepen one another for me.
I feel like my consignment and fear from people pushed me to become a performer.
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.
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.
The Velvet Underground is probably the best band that's ever existed, assuredly the best American one.
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 could write a joke song really easily, but I think something that might be true for my generation is that there's a certain irony or detachedness expected of us, even though we really feel sincere. So the only way to sincerity is through a joke.
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