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All those years ago, when rock’n’roll was in its infancy, not all of its practitioners were at ease with its licentiousness – even the most licentious among them. Jerry Lee Lewis might one moment be smashing pianos, but the next be consumed with guilt about his inability to please the Lord. Little Richard would periodically renounce the works of the devil and turn to the word of God. Even now, 60 years on, it is possible to feel torn between the pull of the stage and the need to satisfy one’s faith.
For Ezra Furman, though, it is not the suspicion that he is betraying his religion by playing rock’n’roll that troubles him. It is the difficulty of combining his job with being an observant Jew. “This is the first tour I haven’t been playing Friday-night shows,” he says of his decision to fit his schedule around his desire to observe Shabbat. “This has been the big conflict of being a musician: both my musical and spiritual life are dependent on Friday nights. My mother converted to Judaism from Catholicism, and her parents told her: ‘If you’re going to be a Jew, be a good Jew.’ So they didn’t want us to half-ass it either, and I’m the one who’s most kept it up.”
He has indeed kept it up. Furman’s breakthrough fifth album, Day of the Dog, is a rare beast, a record that audibly celebrates some of his heroes (the Velvet Underground, the Modern Lovers, those early rock’n’rollers) at the same time as meditating on his relationship with God, who crops up repeatedly across its 13 songs. Its worldview – questioning, unafraid of darkness, at times despairing, yet also filled with music of open-hearted joy – is caught by a few lines of the song Tell ’Em All to Go to Hell: “I sleep in the alley/ And I walk through the valley/ Of the shadow of the fabulous four.”
It’s also an extraordinarily knowing record, full of deliberate references. We know this because Furman helpfully provides an index on the liner notes, noting on which songs the following subjects might be referred to lyrically or musically: blood, Bo Diddley, brokenness, car, dark, dog, Frankie Lee Sims, freedom, God, Greil Marcus, joy, love, pain, Psalm 82, punk, Occupy Wall Street, sickness, Tom Waits, train, trash, Velvet Underground, waiting. And beneath the index appears a quote from Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson that concludes: “In the end, righteousness and goodness prevail.”
Day of the Dog, Furman has said, is his manic record, following its depressive predecessor, The Year of No Returning. “I was listening to different music that aimed for wildness, mania,” he says. “And I was noticing that a lot of bands try to do that with speed and volume and distortion. And then it all just becomes a wash of noise. My initial idea was to make a really quiet and fast album, but then it got pretty loud anyway.” What he wanted was something in the spirit of Maybellene: “I’ve been listening to a lot of Chuck Berry, and I assumed the rock’n’roll sound was his contribution. But he’s a really great songwriter, an incredible songwriter. Those songs wouldn’t move if it weren’t for the way he structured the rhythms of the lyrics.”
The result is an album that Furman is willing to concede is “quite good. Of the albums that came before it, I regret a lot of the choices that were made on them. I’m not sure if this is the most satisfying one, or if just not enough time has passed for me to change and regret who I was at the time I made it.” Crucially, as well as being “quite good”, it is also terrific fun, a record that for all its hidden depths is also a breath of fresh air. It is almost impossible not to smile as you listen.
Furman is a genuine oddball. He seems almost removed from the world: although his songs are packed with lyrics that burst out like water through an opened dam, he speaks slowly, with disconcertingly long pauses – there’s one that approaches a minute during our interview. His appearance on stage, too, is not governed by convention. In May, at The Great Escape in Brighton, he appeared with his current band in a smart shirt, tie and blazer, looking like the MC from a high school dance somewhere in Nebraska in 1962, but a few nights later at the 100 Club in London, he was wearing shades, a leather jacket – and a short, red dress.
Though he comes from a prosperous enough family – a dad in the Chicago stock market, a mother writing business reports – he says he never really identified with any group. “I didn’t feel like I was on any teams. I couldn’t join up with the outcast kids, really.” Another Jewish, suburban musician in love with early rock’n’roll became an inspiration. “Lou Reed also seemed that way – he didn’t seem like he was on a team.” To the teenage Furman, who could tell he was neither straight nor gay, but didn’t understand that such things need not be a problem, a singer whose songs proclaimed his refusal to be placed into categories was revelatory.
What Furman wants for himself is to lead a life that is, as he puts it, “consistent”, in which both his music and his personal life are honest representations of himself. “I’m in this effort to unify my life,” he says, “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. It just kind of struck me that you could really live your whole life as an effort towards beauty, dignity, radical honesty. The worst thing would be just to be good while people are watching and bad when they’re not.”
Part of that life is his relationship with God. Over the past few years, I have spoken to several musicians for whom religion is a vital part of their lives, but often that is more for the sense of community that it brings than the intellectual aspect of belief. For Furman, it is the other way around, by circumstance if not choice. “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,” he says – albeit it takes him a couple of minutes to get through that sentence, which has three false starts and three long pauses following each false start. “It’s a different part of myself, a different culture that I do and don’t belong to. Judaism is a way of thinking, more than anything else, that I think is entirely distinct, and the more you know of it, the more you can enter into that kind of thinking.”
So the sense of community doesn’t matter? “Probably the reason you get that impression is that I don’t have that community,” he says. “I’m this lone guy who’s trying to learn and practise on my own, and that’s really not the way it’s meant to be done. It’s a lonely and painful affair to try to do it that way. I long for community but I haven’t found it, and I keep not living anywhere long enough to establish it.”
During the interview, Furman and I had been talking about some of the old rock’n’roll songs, and when it finishes, I ask if he wants to hear some of the ones I’d mentioned. He nods yes, and I pass over my iPod. For a few minutes he paces up and down the dancefloor of the 100 Club alone, staring at the floor, listening intently. And it’s hard not to think of Jenny, the girl in the Velvet Underground’s Rock and Roll: “Then one fine morning she turns on a New York station/ She doesn’t believe what she hears at all/ She started dancing to that fine, fine music/ You know her life was saved by rock and roll.”
• Ezra Furman and the Boy-Friends play Band on the Wall, Manchester, on 22 September and the Scala, London N1, on 23 September. Day of the Dog is out now on Bar/None.
The ingredients of Ezra Furman
Jonathan Richman
Not just for being another suburban Jewish guy looking for transcendence in the everyday, not just for having a whiny, adenoidal voice that somehow manages to extrapolate the melody despite having none of the obvious tools to do so, but also for the sense of humanity in his work. “My favourite artists are the ones who are human, and you know they’re not in a failure-proof environment,” Furman says. “I think that’s why people use words such as open-hearted, because they’re vulnerable. They don’t have a sense of being invincible. They’re like you could talk to them. They wouldn’t be like Prince. And Jonathan Richman is an extreme example.”
Hear it on: Take Off Your Sunglasses
The Velvet Underground
As Furman wrote on his Tumblr after Reed’s death: “I’m crying because he’s gone. Because I played with my vicious rock’n’roll band last night in Marietta, Ohio, and tonight I’m going to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and there’s this whole world of places I would have never gone near if it weren’t for him, this whole wild life I never would have known. I’m beat up and tired and alone and free and alive. This is what I owe to Lou.”
Hear it on: Been So Strange
Frankie Lee Sims
One of postwar Texas’s finest finest country bluesmen, Sims died aged just 53 in 1970, having faded into obscurity after some regional hits in the 1950s. Furman says he stole the template of Tell ’Em All to Go to Hell from Sims – and you can hear exactly where he lifted its guitar and sax interplay from in Sims’s Walkin’ With Frankie.
Hear it on: Tell ’Em All To Go To Hell
Tom Waits
You wouldn’t say Furman sounds an awful lot like Tom Waits: the voice is different, the music is different. But there’s a similarity, too – in the way both construct fully imagined worlds. Furman sings about an America in which poverty, wealth and God are entwined, offering his own judgment in richly lyrical terms. “People make fun of Tom Waits, but it’s because he’s truly created a strikingly original world, and no one sounds like that. I dream of being scoffed at because people know my world so well.”
Hear it on: Day of the Dog
Weezer
Pop-punk was Furman’s introduction to a music that he felt belonged to him, first Green Day, and then at 14 came Weezer. “That was a huge one,” he says. “It’s funny that they were called emo – to us the essence of emo was Weezer, but I don’t think people would call that early Weezer stuff emo anymore, it’s like powerpop or something. But feeling dramatic at age 14 Weezer was really important – you could be very emotional and mock yourself at the same time.”
Hear it on: Slacker/Adria
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