Q&A

Ezra Furman: “It’s time to make our own culture…” Do you see this as a reinvention?

Oh, it’s more than that. An actual real self has been killed. You have to kill yourself off now and then. We have become a different band, with a different mission – to make 21st-centurysounding music. Until now, I had been paying tribute to the old record bins filled with obscurities from 1962. It’s time to make our own culture.

a lot of these songs sound incredibly soul-baring and confessional. are they?

Hmm. Does it matter if any of those things happened to me? I see this album as a collection of grand fiction. When I walk into a bookstore, I feel that the boundaries between fiction and memoir, for instance, are rather nebulous. Memoirs make a bunch of stuff up, and fiction draws from experience. A lot of my favourite albums are literary, like Lou Reed’s or Berlin, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.

much of this album comes across as a kind of cinematic version of Is that fair?

It’s definitely cinematic. I love Bruce Springsteen, but with him everything is classic, healthy and relatable. He doesn’t get weird! That’s what’s missing, for me. I want a Bruce Springsteen that’s more sick and socially unacceptable and queer. A queer Boss!

Born To Run.