Stream: Ezra Furman, ‘The Refugee’

Daiana Feuer on August 17th, 2016

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Ezra Furman has a new six-song EP, “Big Fugitive Life,” coming out this Friday on Bella Union, just over a year since the release of “Perpetual Motion People.” With three rock songs and three acoustic songs, Furman says, “This feels like an end of a chapter for me, musically. A beautiful, insane chapter.” What will come next? He simply says, “We’ve been dreaming big.” That’s exciting. But before jumping into conjectures of what’s to come, there’s plenty to take in right here with “The Refugee,” a narrative song that Furman dedicates to his grandfather, who fled the Nazis during WWII, as well as to all refugees trying to find a place they belong in this present day: “We dedicate this record to refugees of all kinds, all over the world. May all the wanderers find the homes they seek, and and may those with power welcome them as fellow citizens of humanity.”

The theme of drifting and trying to find a place in the world encapsulates each song on the EP in one way or another, as well as the meaning, for Furman, of rock ’n’ roll itself. To him, rock is “a madness that overtakes your mind and body. It’s wanting to go somewhere you’ve never been, knowing you’re on your way.” See saxy number “Teddy I’m Ready.” Overall, he says, these songs “are focused on the theme of the mind unmoored—those of us who have been left to drift unsupervised through the modern world.”

||| Stream: “The Refugee”

||| Also: “Teddy I’m Ready”