Chicago native Ezra Furman produces ‘Lousy Connection’ a bombastic, gem of 50s flecked sax pop that possesses the grandiosity of musical theatre. That’s intersected by Ezra’s intense vocal outbursts that chart vividly his eye for the fluctuations of both personal and social consciousness. Like the meeting place between primetime pop strut of Dexy’s Midnight Runners and the graceful bittersweet vignettes of Rufus Wainwright, it documents a twenty first Century in flux see sawing between joy and tragedy, complexity and simplicity, uncertainty and clarity, love and pain.
It’s the second track to be aired from his forthcoming debut album ‘Perpetual Motion People’ out on Bella Union on the 7th of July. ‘Perpetual Motion People’ was recorded with Furman’s current band The Boyfriends – comprising Jorgen Jorgensen (bass), Ben Joseph (keyboards, guitar), Sam Durkes (drums) and saxophonist Tim Sandusky – at studio Ballistico in Furman’s home city of Chicago (though he’s currently based in San Francisco).
“That’s who it was made by and that’s who it’s for. People who feel they can never settle. I’m restless in most aspects. I don’t tend to live in one place for long.” He says of the record “I am always changing the way I present my gender. My religious life is intensely up and down in terms of observance and personal convictions. I’ve always viewed the idea of truth itself as something wobbly, always slipping out of our grasp. That’s what the songs are about: a head that is haunted, a society I cannot join, a lover who is perpetually in the act of leaving. A central idea is the fugitive or runaway, in a hideout built in the midst of an unfriendly or alienated world.”
“The other aspect is a feeling of expansiveness, the largeness of emotion, from joy to pain. Some people think life is small or confined, but to me it’s just big, and I’d say each song has something to say, to declare themselves large. It’s also to do with trying to make something that a lot of people would listen to after Day Of The Dog got some kind of increased attention.”
Ezra is in the UK this month playing a series of dates below, he will be back this summer as well as with festival appearances at Cloudspotting, Port Eliot and Standon Calling.
Tuesday 19th May – GLASGOW – Poetry Club tickets
Wednesday 20th May – MANCHESTER – The Castle Hotel tickets
Thursday 21st May – LONDON – The Lexington tickets
Thursday 22nd October – LONDON – O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire tickets
Photo credit: Cantwell Faulkner Muckenfuss IV
