From the open window of a hospital drops a wounded transangel. The government agents have finally tracked him down and, with his wings in bandages and his lover – Chicagoan art pop genius Ezra Furman – by his side, he jumps in a car and heads for the border, both the FBI and angry Nazi groups on their tail.
GW: Okay Ezra, act one scene one of your immense new album ‘Transangelic Exodus’ and we’re hooked. What happens next?
EF: “You have the wrong idea I think,” Ezra chuckles down the phone from Illinois. “There’s no real story, there’s no beginning, middle, end kind of thing. It’s a situation, it’s a setting. I didn’t want to make it make sense because it has the logic of dreams. The way it came into my life was as a dream, kind of as a vision. It was just this situation I found in my brain, which was setting songs in a car and an angel, and the angel is illegal. We’re wounded and we’re fleeing a hospital and government authorities.”
And so begins the album of 2018. ‘Transangelic Exodus’ doesn’t just drop the listener into the magical-realist world of on-the-run transangels – people illegally born angels and who ‘transition’ by a surgical procedure to reveal their wings – but into a whole new musical realm. Ditching much of the retro homage that characterised Furman’s previous album, this is a future-trash revelation, covering synthetic new wave pop, rusted chamber music, junk shop voodoo blues, distorted Velvets epics and so much more. On the eve of its getaway, we pinned Furman down to dissect this unearthly wonder.
GW: Where did the transangel imagery come from?
EF: “It’s just something I found in my brain. I was developing an ideal of what the record might be and this angel stuff just dropped into my brain and I had to deal with it because I found it so fascinating. It was very inconvenient! I spent a lot of time trying to make it make sense. ‘Why? Why is there an angel? What’s going on with the government, exactly?’ I made it all make sense and then I edited all of that out because I liked it better when it didn’t make sense and had the logic of dreams.”
GW: The album suggests that trans people are being hounded for being beautiful.
EF: “That’s a nice way to say it. It’s not the way I would put it because beauty or not beauty is not really the point, but it is important for people who are bodily visibly different from most people. Being stigmatised for your visible difference is a theme, it’s a theme in contemporary life as well, something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I’ve been thinking about vulnerable people. I’m not wired to be super excited about politics or interested in politics, I’m only interested in who’s in trouble, who’s gonna get hurt, who’s the vulnerable person and who could use more protection. I don’t think this album is intended to be political, it’s about human empathy, it’s an exercise in empathy with truly vulnerable people and part of me wondering how safe I am or am not.”
GW: Having government agencies and Nazi groups chasing the transangel, you automatically suggest that there is political and ideological oppression going on.
EF: “Yeah, I suppose. Hmmm. It resonates with that, but it’s not really a metaphor for that. I could imagine somebody who’s more of a conservative relating to this feeling of government power gone out of control or something, but I don’t think this qualifies as a leftist litany. It’s more of a statement of solidarity with people who feel that they are threatened. I only draw that distinction because my political statement that’s on the album is on the first song when I’m saying ‘A plague on both your houses’, which is really one of my strongest feelings about politics. I empathise with Mercutio from Romeo And Juliet, who says that line, who never cared about this rivalry between these two groups of rich people but had to die because he got caught in the middle of it. That’s who I’m thinking about.”
GW: There’s a suggestion on the record that you’ve had trouble squaring who you are with your religion.
EF: “I guess it’s a troublesome thing, that’s something that religion does to most people, it causes problems, it’s a challenge. It challenges one’s default mode. At its best it should challenge us to be better people. Sometimes people’s minds go to a familiar Christian experience of great guilt being imposed by this social monolith that is the church. I think it shakes out a bit different for Jews – my narrative with squaring my religion with myself is a little different from that.”
GW: There’s a line in ‘God Lifts Up The Lowly’ that says “We’ll never make it on the main streets, they’ll force us back into the alleyways” – are you suggesting the transgender community will never be truly accepted by mainstream society?
EF: “Ooh, that’s a hard-hitting question! That could be the opening of a trap to step into! I’m dancing around it. It’s a little bit too clean to say that the lyrics on this album are meant to speak for or about the trans community specifically. There’s a way that the word ‘queer’ is used and I like the word ‘queer’, I find it quite useful, there’s a broad sense of it that I recognise that doesn’t necessarily refer to gender or sexuality but the perspective that comes from having an experience of being marginalised. I’m sure that the album is about being ‘queer’ in that broad sense, about having to justify to the mainstream the way you live, as queer people are asked to do. Having to explain yourself and defend yourself against accusations of being a degenerate or aberration, it brings all kinds of pain and set-backs but it also carries this power, it gives you this power. Nothing was given to me and everything in mainstream culture was never addressed to me, so I have this power of having a different perspective and a way to attack the mainstream and make it different. I’ve been trying to write about that. There’s this really good essay by Václav Havel called The Power Of The Powerless – I finished this essay and went ‘this is what I mean!’ It’s about how people who are subjugated or held back have this secret power, like gaining strength through darkness and nobody knows that they’re gaining this strength and power, and once it’s out in the light it’s too powerful to quell.”
GW: You sing on ‘Compulsive Liar’ about your years in the closet, how was that?
EF: “It seemed easier than not being closeted, at the time. It was like ‘I think I’m fine mostly being closeted and I don’t need to explain myself to anyone’. It seemed like a viable option but after a while it was no longer viable for me. It was corroding my soul. It’s also about how being closeted gives you these instincts of dishonesty and siege mentality – you don’t know who you can tell and you’re not sure if it’s okay to tell people the truth. And it’s kinda permanent, there’s some closets I may never really get out of. There’s a deep shiftiness to me that I think is just part of me.”
GW: ‘Transangelic Exodus’ feels like the album where you’re spreading your wings musically.
EF: “Yeah, it feels that way for sure. This record is more of a serious piece of work in pretty much every way than anything we’ve made before. We worked a lot harder on it – everything about it I’ve tried to make artful. Everything is a choice, none of the songs are played the way I originally wrote them, from the first demos I made a lot of things changed about them because we really wanted it to sound unexpected, unpredictable and artful. We avoided our first instincts, we scrapped the first draft of everything because the first thing you do is what people would expect you to do.”
GW: Your vision appears to be to brutalise musical history until it sounds like the future.
EF: “Maybe. I mad this album with a lot less regard for musical history. There are no more tracks that are love letters to 20th Century music, like most of our music has been before now. There’s a lot of exciting albums being made now, in the last few years and it feels like a shame to not let myself be influenced by those albums, like Tune-Yards and Kendrick Lamar. It’s wonderful, everybody’s got computers that can do anything, musically there are so many more options than there were in the time of the music that my old records tried to imitate a bit, tuff from 1965 or whatever. I hope it’s exciting. It’s a little bit futurist. The goal is to make the greatest record ever made – I’ll never do it, I’ll never make on that good but I do have an eye toward greatness, trying to throw my hat in the ring of the great musical contributions of our age. I don’t know if I’m achieving that but I think that’s a good thing to have an eye on, to push yourself to do your best work.”
GW: Where will you take it next?
EF: “It’s certainly on my mind. I feel strongly that I have this open field in front of me. I feel this sense of amazing possibility and I feel powerful. I think I get better at writing every year and better at making records every time we do it. I dream of those great runs of really stunning records that some great bands of the past have had. I don’t know why I’m thinking about ‘Revolver’ and such right now, I guess because if you want to do something like The Beatles did in their decade, I think you’d use all of your capabilities and not look backwards.”
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Words: Steven Kline
Photo: Press
