Good question. Hard to answer. Very vast subject for me. Never could say it all.

But basically: I believe in God. The idea is that a transcendent force caused everything to exist, and this force wants things from us humans. I believe in that. I have plenty of doubt, but it’s like the doubt I have about love existing. It’s usually boring and unhelpful, for me, to doubt it. I have felt it, and having felt it can never surely attest to its nonexistence. It is frustrating to talk about because God is necessarily totally beyond words and even concepts: words are a flagrant reduction of God’s overwhelming reality. I’m stealing thoughts from theologians now, but only because I think they’re true.

I’m upset at the culture we live in and the way it treats the idea of God. Evangelists have stolen away with it and most people I know are at least a little bit disgusted at the mention of religion. People don’t get that when you see it on a billboard or wherever, it’s a perversion of something real; it’s a distortion of a great thing. Loud fools have caused all this atheism among intelligent people, and I think it’s a damn shame. God creates a spiritual and ethical challenge that I would never want us humans to be without. But it’s more than that. I’m at a loss for words.

I also think God needs our help.

My recommendation for an intelligible way toward God is through the Jewish tradition. Here’s a book I’ve loved since I was fifteen—“I Asked for Wonder” by Abraham Joshua Heschel—which I think is a good place to start on reading religious writing: http://www.amazon.com/Asked-For-Wonder-Spiritual-Anthology/dp/0824505425 

I did get Blunderbuss, at a record store (great place, Exile on Main Street) on tour in Champaign. I’m still processing it and am halfway through my second listen, so I’m not totally sure what I think of it— but I do like that it’s bizarre, unexpected in a lot of ways. Certainly musically interesting. Then again, it gets me a little nostalgic for Jack White’s simple and direct early White Stripes songwriting style.

I can’t shake the feeling of similarity between Blunderbuss and The Year of No Returning— first solo album, glowering face on the cover, yes that opening lyric about a bloody nose, the masochism of “Love Interruption,” the general restrained but menacing mood of the thing. Also I have the suspicion that we were recording our albums at precisely the same time. I was thinking about asking Jack White what he thought, but I don’t know how to get in touch with him.

I will be in Chicago this summer for at least one show: June 17th, the Taste of Randolph street fair. I’m not sure if I was allowed to announce that yet, but fuck it.

I’m back from our wonderful, wonderful April tour of the U.S.A., and thinking about music no less than usual.

Perfection can be a scary goal, a daunting goal. “Nothing’s perfect,” everybody says. “Nobody’s perfect.” I know some people who have a lot of trouble finishing things because they can see that their finished product will be less than perfect.

Here’s a song that’s perfect: “This Kind of Music” by Jonathan Richman. It’s an uncomplicated perfection, an easy perfection. The uncomplicated-ness is part of why it’s perfect. It says what it means, it describes itself. It does everything you want it to without being boring or predictable. It just kills you. You don’t get the sense that he obsessed over this song, that he slaved over it. No, he probably just sorta thought it up one day. To me, it’s about how it’s not hard to do what the song itself does, because what it does is an essential part of being human. And it’s right about that. It’s just a song of enthusiasm and rhythm and joy. Anyone can do it, even if your instruments are broken.

And it’s got a perfect lyric: it mentions rain, the laundromat, taking the bus— things most songwriters would never put in a song about the kind of music they like. Hell, most songwriters go their entire career without mentioning the laundromat or taking the bus or anything equivalent to those human details. Jonathan Richman is a truly great songwriter. The best part is that you can easily listen to the song without thinking about the great lyrics at all, or admiring his craft: you can just dance around to it, and that’s the whole idea. It’s rock and roll, in a perfect way.

I first heard Jonathan Richman because of a punk compilation I had (entitled “No Thanks! the 70s punk rebellion”) when I was nineteen, shortly before I joined a rock n roll band (and that’s no coincidence). The songs I heard were “Roadrunner” and “Pablo Picasso” and I was pretty smitten with them. Then that summer someone gave me the Modern Lovers’ first recordings, and I listened to them a scary amount of times. I lived on their first album for at least a full summer’s worth. LIVED on it. It sustained me.

The crazy thing is, from there Jonathan Richman only got better. Usually when you hear a band’s first album and it’s amazing, there’s not much more that’s going to equal it. Richman blows me away every time, more than the last time. This song, for instance, is the song I’ve MOST RECENTLY heard by him. Not the first song I heard by him. It’s the last song I heard by him. I hope you see how crazy that is. That’s just never how it happens.

I guess what I’m saying is, this guy always reminds me of what’s important in music. He makes me want to make records cheap and fast and sticking to the good stuff. Minimalism! It’s worth a lot. The White Stripes taught me that first, and I haven’t forgotten. I don’t know what my next record will be like exactly, but… well, hopefully it’s music that Jonathan Richman would like.

The answer to both of your questions is Little Richard.

August 2011 (I think) the Harpoons and I piled into the van and drove to Rock Island, IL to visit the headquarters of this wonderful website, Daytrotter. They record bands playing live together in their studio. They have a lot of fun musical toys to play with. We’ve recorded there three times. We try to feature songs that are harder to find on our records.

Since Daytrotter has (understandably) become super popular, they’ve only just now gotten ‘round to posting our latest session on their website. Slightly ironically, I am about to go on my first tour with a band other than the Harpoons. Just after going to Daytrotter, I started recording my solo album.

Here is some information about the songs we recorded at Daytrotter.

1) “Panic Attacks I Can’t Relax” - This is one of the first songs Ezra Furman & the Harpoons made. We played at our second show at the Hotung Cafe at Tufts University, to a crowd of ten or fifteen people. I definitely wrote this song because I was listening to a compilation of ’70s punk music (the compilation is called “No Thanks!” and it is highly recommended because it changed my life forever) and I wanted to emulate the bands on it. It was all these bands who released maybe just one album or even just one single, bands who were jumping on this wave of punk and weren’t even that talented but had a lot of fiery enthusiasm. I wanted to write a song that could be like that—I didn’t even want it to be really that good; I just wanted it to be a punk song, like “(I’m) Stranded” by the Saints.

The other reason I wrote it is because I was having panic attacks for the first time in my life. My high school girlfriend had finally left me and the rug was pulled out from under me emotionally and I was freaking out. I would have these horrible, horrible episodes. That plus the compilation were pretty much the reasons I worked up the feelings that made it possible to form a band.

2) “Walking the Cow” - This is a Daniel Johnston cover. Me and Job (the Harpoons bass player) used to play this song whenever we had a chance to play music for no reason (i.e. not practicing, not writing, just playing). We didn’t consider it a song to play live until Andrew (the guitar player, come on guys) joined the band and made it sound really good. I love Daniel Johnston and think he is one of the greatest songwriters ever, and I want to spread his songs around. Also I like when Job sings. He has access to things with his voice that I can’t touch.

3) “The Government Broke My Heart” - This is a song we wrote in a Brooklyn practice space on the day of a show. We played it that night, which I felt incredibly proud of. I believe the goal with this song was to rip off the Black Lips. Job pretty much wrote the melody. I immediately knew I wanted to call the song “The Government Broke My Heart” even though I didn’t know what any of the words should be. Then I went for a walk on the beach of the East River and wrote the lyrics. And then we showed up at Piano’s on the Lower East Side and played it for people. It was a really great New York City rock’n’roll day. Makes me miss that crazy town.

4) “American Soil” - We hadn’t learned this one but the Harpoons thought I should get it on tape. It was new, and I was about to go record it for real the next week. I’m glad we got this raw version. It’s a song that should be served raw, and bloody.

It’s good to hear these before I go on tour again. I hope the Harpoons get together and play rock’n’roll again soon. My new touring band is really great, too, and can do a lot of different things real well  (please come to my shows, y’all; you won’t be disappointed. http://www.ezrafurman.com/site/shows.html) But Harpoons nostalgia remains also.

Ah well: forward I go on my journey through song. Rock’n’roll and true hearts burning down the highway. I love this job! Fuck the world! I wanna live!

noahfurman:

If you’re lonely…

Work… this is work. This is hard work. Talking about work is work.
Thinking is work. Words are work. Words are things, shapes. It’s hard
to compose them, to put them in any kind of order. Words don’t add up.
Numbers add up! Things are everywhere. Everything is something,
…

You know when you and your high-school sweetheart go to different colleges, and you promise to be true, and you see each other at Thanksgiving and all, and after awhile he or she says, “let’s try an ‘open relationship,’” and things get confusing, and you keep saying “We’re totally still together” to your friends and all that?

Yeah, we’re still together.

I went to South-by-Southwest this year. I told myself I wouldn’t, but it turned out a kind fan in Austin booked me to come play at her house (without my band) and I caved to the pressure to schedule it for the same time as the festival.

The basic reason that I didn’t want to go to SXSW had to do with two things: money and nausea. The money part is easy to explain: nobody who performs at SXSW gets paid, apart from the Jay-Z’s to whom money is like tap water. Independent bands, including mine, have broken the bank year after year to come here, and there is often no reason for them to do so. The nausea is less intuitive. Why would I, who am known to be cripplingly interested in music and bands and etc., not want to go to this Southern mecca full of 2,000 artists performing mostly for free for adoring fans and attentive journalists and music business movers/shakers?

Imagine 10,000 20-somethings who all know they are “something special” and have been told they are by everyone they know. Then imagine them coming together and all trying to become famous. Feel the nausea yet? No? OK, picture them all at an increasingly visibly corporate-sponsored amusement park full of loud drunk sexist rich people, bleeding their passionate noise out of every available building, mostly all feeling close to as cynical as I am sounding. If you don’t taste the rising bile by now, you may not be in my “target demographic.”

I’m trying to be more positive. But this festival does us all a horrific disservice. It makes every musician, every show, every record seem utterly disposal. When you live in the confines of everyday real-world life, going to a show can feel, at its best, totally vital. Buying a record can change your life forever. I know from personal experience that a great band or songwriter can and should provide something rare and precious, an experience you can hang onto for a long time, even years, afterward. Walking down 6^th street getting elbowed by frat brothers on spring break, through near-indistinguishable waves of entitled-kid singer/guitarist whining, is not such an experience.

As an aside, I will mention that Tristen’s show yesterday was truly great. Please look her up if you are not totally inundated with bands that everyone keeps telling you you have to hear. She just goes by Tristen; she’s from Nashville.

But see? Of course there are hidden gems everywhere. The thing is that you get too tired to recognize them. You could easily see something truly remarkable at SXSW and nearly-unconsciously write it off as another pathetically desperate group hoping to get a hot write-up on Stereogum.com. Isn’t that just the way in the internet age of music? There are so many bands, so easily accessible, that the good ones blur with the melee and we become desensitized to the few truly valuable cultural moments. Or what could have been valuable just becomes more noise.

So I’ve been laying low this year. I did a few little shows and I tried very much not to think about what the audience might like to see, and just did what I seemed interesting to me. I’ve never been a big proponent of the ignore-the-audience tactic but I was feeling too nauseous to think for too long about how people perceived me.

Tonight I’m going to play a passionate show for twenty friends in a living room, and tomorrow I’m getting the H out of here. Hopefully I can shake off the willies in time to give everything I have on my tour of smallish American clubs, night after night, for people who might actually really care. Hope there’s still some of you out there.

Theme song for a band that no longer exists—Bar Lights. For Robby Coleman. I posted his more finished-sounding version previously on this blog. Have a good Shabbat everybody.

You may be aware that I wrote customized songs for a bunch of people who ordered our MOON FACE album a couple years ago. People would give me instructions on what they wanted their song to be about, or they would just write some stuff and I would have to think of an idea that might possibly have something obliquely to do with them. Then I would play my acoustic guitar into a computer microphone and hope for the best.

Robby Coleman, California musician, ordered the album and just told me who he was and the fact that he was in a band called Bar Lights in the Antelope Valley outside Los Angeles. So I decided to write him a song called “Bar Lights” as a theme song that his band could play about themselves.

Little did I know he would fire back two years later with this demo recording of his band playing my song. I’m very thrilled by this. I’ve always wanted to hear a band play one of my songs, and they do it really well. Sadly, it seems Bar Lights has broken up, but his new band is called DeFault American and is currently making their first recordings. I’m honored that my song is one of them. Here’s a link to their website: http://www.facebook.com/DeFaultAmerican

I have the original recording I made for him, too. Let me know if anybody wants to hear it. I just thought his was way better, and Tumblr won’t let you upload more than one audio file per day.