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Ezra Furman offers listeners a chance to 'come undone' on tenth album
Ezra Furman’s new record “Goodbye Small Head” is so detail-rich that its lyrics deserve to be printed out and annotated. Whether a listener is a longtime fan of the Somerville singer-songwriter — whose career stretches back to her Tufts-formed band Ezra Furman and the Harpoons — or recently got hip to her genre-bending vignettes, their notes would likely be just as detailed. They might highlight some of Furman’s striking turns of phrase: “deathless hope,” “the shiver that severs the heart from the brain” and “hourglass avenues filling with sand” all come to mind.
Maybe they’d underline the entirety of the song “You Mustn't Show Weakness,” the title a reference to the work of 20th-century Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Or, on another page, leave a question about a possible nod to the story of Noah’s Ark in the song “Power of the Moon,” where Furman recites the gorgeous line “I think I see a promise from God in a rainbow on an oil spill.” (She previously attended and dropped out of a rabbinical school in Newton, so that’s not exactly a far-fetched idea.)
No matter what a listener scribbles in the margins, it feels like there are a hundred ways to dissect “Goodbye Small Head.” And as they unspool Furman’s poetry and ponderings, they can unravel along with it, too.
“There's the practice of listening to music as a calming or cathartic thing to do, and then there’s ‘I'm sort of crumbling’ music,” Furman said, speaking on the phone from her home in Somerville. “There's something about that music that involves surrender to irrationality and feeling.”
As an outpouring of songs that Furman has called “12 variations on the experience of completely losing control,” “Goodbye Small Head” leads by example. The theme wasn’t intentional when she was writing her tenth record, Furman said, as she documented her experiences with health issues, heartache and headier topics like mysticism.
Furman’s range here is unsurprising. The Somerville artist’s oeuvre spans musical contributions to Netflix’s dramedy series “Sex Education,” penning an edition of the 33 ⅓ book series about Lou Reed’s album “Transformer,” and most recently collaborating with Sharon Van Etten for a track on “TRANSA,” a compilation record highlighting the stories and voices of transgender artists like herself. (Furman shared on social media that she was transgender in 2021).
“Goodbye Small Head” captures that deft flexibility, which is anchored by her band of “soulful, creative, brilliant musicians” who have been by her side since 2012. Some songs, like “A World of Love and Care,” reach toward control, nudging listeners to “Dream better/ Dream bigger/ With me.” Others, such as “Submission,” curl inward with feelings of defeat and exhaustion from being “a consoler of the troops,” as Furman explained.
That’s where the permission for listeners to come undone — albeit temporarily — becomes most apparent.
“You see what's underneath despair if you really let yourself feel it,” Furman said. The concept reframes indulging in less-than-desirable emotions as a responsible act and an essential part of finding a path forward.
“I feel like it's my job as a singer to invite everyone's feelings out,” she added.
Furman is already adept at crafting that invitation, in part from the monthly residency she previously coordinated with ONCE Somerville. Over the years, the residency shifted between pillars of Somerville’s music scene, taking place at ONCE’s now-shuttered ballroom, the outdoor space at Boynton Yards, Crystal Ballroom, and the Rockwell. Furman said that the residency fulfilled some of her goals as an artist “in a huge way” by creating an intimate space for fostering community.
Keeping the residency fresh, however, proved to be a challenge. While the enthusiasm in the room never waned, Furman began to feel stressed about repeating the same show for the same people and was unsure of how to avoid potential stagnation.
“I just felt like, how many poetry readings of the same poet can you go to?” she said.
While Furman hopes to revive the residency eventually, some of the program’s ethos seems to live on in “Goodbye Small Head.” The lyrics of the track “Strange Girl,” for instance, reflect a similar theme as the title of Furman’s residency, “Ms. Ezra Furman Doing What She Wants.”
“Strange is free/ Strange goes where strange pleases,” Furman sings. It’s one piece of the album that’s not intended as a reference, Furman said. Instead, it’s an organic reflection of unlearning the instinct to people-please over the course of her career, examined through the lens of being transgender.
“In a way, it's a real gift that being trans, I am visibly not conforming,” Furman said, reflecting on the lyrics. “Perhaps one day, I'll pass a little more, be a little more stealth, and just maybe it won't be so clear that I'm trans. But I think if that happens, I'll have something of a little bit of grief about it, because it's very helpful to me that anyone can see my difference.”
It’s another example of using surrender as a source of relief – especially if you’re surrendering something as onerous as people-pleasing.
“I like that I just have become a person who is visibly different, that's all,” she said. “Once you're not hiding your strangeness, well, then you can just be strange, and you can do what you want because you've already given up on meeting some free-floating ideal.”
Perhaps that idea, more than anything, is what deserves to be highlighted and shared for years to come.
