Ezra Furman has a love for songs as things that can cut across space and time and create a heart-to-heart conversation between an artist and a listener. That's why he formed a band in February 2006 and started to play show after show, even in the days when there were only a few people in the audience. All he really needed to make that open-hearted art that he wanted was one person, anyhow. Soon, though, lots of people started to come to his shows including Minty Fresh Records, the label that first signed him. Ezra was still in college and became a unique and bizarre breed of college student: the up-and-coming indie rock star college student. It was a strange and cool thing to be.
Rewind five years to find a fourteen year-old Ezra Furman making frequent rounds at open mic nights around Chicago and his hometown of Evanston, Illinois. He with his recently acquired, first guitar, bravely and furiously charming unsuspecting audiences with music and imagery that was almost suspect coming from such a young (and very young looking) Furman. It had the rawness and energy of youth but that too was seemingly beyond his years. This youthful energy and lyrical enlightenment continued to grow and bend in the coming years in Ezra as a solo artist and as the frontman of his own band.
Ezra's first album, with his band The Harpoons, "Banging Down the Doors", was made in an achingly honest and enthusiastic spirit. You can listen to it and hear that it is the work of twenty-year-olds full of all the fire, emotion and joy that rock n roll music should have. He and the band were frantic to enter the music world and show all that they could be. Ezra played the acoustic guitar with raw aggression and the band used their collective musical genius to turn his songs into great full-band pieces with real power. It was emotional, confessional, playful, angry and poetic. And people liked it.
Now he has graduated from college and has finished his second album with the Harpoons, entitled INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY, and it is really a big step forward. When the band's guitarist left the band before they made the new record, they were worried they wouldn't be able to be the same band they once were. It turned out they were right: the band evolved into a new Harpoons with a new approach. Ezra put down the acoustic and picked up an electric guitar. Sometimes when you lose something you rely on, such as a fourth band member, you find out what you're really made of. Ezra now believes his band can do anything. Everything became intensified: the angry songs are angrier, the tender songs more tender, the happy songs happier, the sad songs sadder.
The last record had a song called "My Soul Has Escaped From My Body." Ezra feels that every song on this record could have that title. "The album is about your soul busting outta your chest--how our humanity cannot be suppressed, and how that which inside cannot be kept inside" explains Furman, "That's how I've always felt about being human."
Ezra Furman presents to you his new record about being a human being, even when the world tries to turn you into a monster. He really hopes you like these songs about the secret things that wait inside us to be released, and about the triumph of the human spirit.
