About two years ago, Ezra Furman gave up—first in her mind, and then, it seemed, in her body.
The 38-year-old singer was nearly two decades into a prolific rock-and-roll career. Her nervy, poetic sound had earned devoted fans and critical acclaim, plus a job soundtracking the Netflix TV show Sex Education. But her sixth solo album, 2022’s All of Us Flames—an epic-scale protest album about surviving in a collapsing world—hadn’t generated as much buzz as she’d hoped for, and she told me her label, Anti-, dropped her after its release. (Anti- did not respond to a request for comment.) She felt discouragement mounting, compounded by the stress of touring while raising a young son.
Then one day in April 2023, a stranger on the street pointed at Furman and laughed in her face. She knew why: Furman, a transgender woman, hadn’t shaved that day. The cruelty was “comic,” Furman told me, like something that happens in a movie, but it also damaged what was left of her inner resolve. That afternoon, Furman wrote down a confession to herself: She wanted to end her music career.
The next day, she collapsed and went to the hospital. She reported tiredness and pain in her body; the doctors ran tests but couldn’t figure out what was wrong. She was discharged the same day, and experienced debilitating fatigue that persisted acutely for months, forcing her to cancel a tour. The illness, still unexplained, sometimes slows her to this day.
Furman described these events to me while we were seated at the kitchen table in her Somerville, Massachusetts, apartment. Wearing jeans and a colorfully striped blouse, she spoke haltingly, often taking long pauses to stare into the distance and hum along with the record playing in the background (Portishead’s Dummy). Despite the resignation she felt that day in April, new songs started pouring out of her after the hospital. The resulting album, Goodbye Small Head, came out last week.
That album’s existence might seem to suggest a success story, about an artist triumphing over adversity. But the tale Furman wanted to tell me—the theme that she kept returning to as we hung out in her house and then strolled around her neighborhood on a perfectly beautiful spring day—was mostly about feeling defeated. “I’m in a time of over-admitting how much everything hurts,” she said. “I’m leaning into every feeling, almost soaking it up.”
Furman is one of a kind: a trans, devoutly Jewish former rabbinical student who’s written a book about Lou Reed and sings folk-punk songs in a mercurial tremble. Over nearly two decades, her music has evolved from scrappy college rock to expertly orchestrated art-pop. It’s maintained an idiosyncratic spirit all along, combining references from across rock history—a Bob Dylan harmonica line here, a Cars synth line there—with lyrics that unspool in unsteady, careening cadences. Her claims to fame have had a fluky quality to them (“Take Off Your Sunglasses,” a 2008 track about depression and skiing, was a No. 1 hit in Austria). But to her fans, who testify under her social-media posts about how her work has become embedded in their life, she is one of rock’s best-kept secrets.
Her trajectory has also, it’s long seemed to me, been exemplary of a certain strain of Millennial idealism. When she founded her former band Ezra Furman and the Harpoons in 2006, as an undergraduate at Tufts University, her sound fit in with that era’s boom for literary, openhearted indie acts in the vein of the Mountain Goats and Arcade Fire. She then publicly embraced queerness—identifying as bisexual, dressing femininely in public—around the same time that Laverne Cox featured on the cover of Time magazine and Target’s sales racks started turning rainbow-themed during Pride month. “It felt like pure, weird synchronicity,” she said when I suggested she was part of an LGBTQ cultural wave in the 2010s. “Like I’m finally ready to start wearing these clothes in public and not just in my friends’ bedrooms. And then it was like, trans people are in public. And I was like, What?”
When Donald Trump was elected for the first time, she doubled down on her long-standing penchant for socially conscientious lyricism, joining the burst of rock-and-roll #resistance that erupted in response to the president’s agenda. She posted on social media about defending immigrants and women; onstage at Coachella in 2017, she called out Philip Anschutz, the businessman bankrolling that festival, for investing in oil exploration and donating to anti-LGBTQ causes. (“I support the rights of all people and oppose discrimination and intolerance against the LGBTQ community,” Anschutz said in a 2018 statement. “I regret if any money given to a charity for other purposes may have indirectly worked against these values.”) She also set about recording what she later called an “anti-fascist trilogy” of albums. The final installment in that project was All of Us Flames—a record that, as she told The Guardian, she wanted to be a “weapon of war,” striking against injustice and intolerance.
Now Trump is back in office and flirting openly with authoritarianism—but the defiant energy that swept the arts during his first administration seems dissipated and tentative. After years of gaining visibility and public sympathy, trans people find themselves undergoing concerted political assault: repealing their access to medications, bathrooms, and passports that accord with their gender identity. Goodbye Small Head isn’t responding to these developments by rallying the troops or offering reassurance. It’s a sumptuous shrug of an album, the sound of a onetime warrior owning up to weakness and burnout. “I’m really moving away from a sense of, like, There’s things I want to be saying to the public and I want to carry certain flags,” Furman said. “There’s a lot of fists in the air in our culture, and I’m a little fatigued in the arm area.”
Some of that fatigue can be traced back to an event in 2021 that, by all rights, was an occasion for pride. That’s when Furman first posted on social media about being transgender—and revealed that she had a kid. Her coming-out wasn’t a huge surprise to many of her followers, given that she’d long sung about the complexity of identity in ways that suggested she might be trans. (The title of her 2018 album was even titled Transangelic Exodus.) She finally made her transness explicit because, she told me, she figured that other queer people might be helped by her example. Certainly, she herself would have benefited from seeing a transgender mother in popular culture years earlier.
But her announcement reached more than just trans people, and more than just her fans. CNN and Fox News, who had never covered her music before, ran stories about her transition in the anodyne tone of everyday celebrity gossip. (One line from Fox News: “Furman’s fans will also be pleased to know she signed off her Instagram post with a promise that new music is on the way.”) This meant that she was suddenly an object of consideration for all sorts of people she’d never intended to reach. Under Furman’s coming-out post on her own Facebook page, one commenter wrote, “Why are you coming up on my timeline? I don’t follow people with an agenda.” Others left harsher replies—accusing her of being a sinner, an attention whore, a mentally ill child abuser.
Furman had, it seemed, walked into a trap. “I didn’t understand that I had created clickbait,” she told me. By the 2020s, visibility—that watchword of the movement for queer acceptance—was becoming freighted with new dangers. Backlash to trans rights had swollen into one of the animating causes of the Republican Party, whose leaders were evangelizing the notion that gender nonconformity was a social contagion that targeted children and threatened to undermine civilization itself. The news media and social-media algorithms seemed ready to capitalize on the way that the mere sight of a trans person in public life could incite controversy. Furman’s post of self-expression wasn’t just accidental clickbait; it was, to many onlookers, ragebait.
Furman read every hateful comment she received online. Initially, she tried to wave them off: “I’m like, Psh, okay, buddy. Wow, you’re really out of touch, huh?” she said. “And actually, while I’m saying that, the poison is already sinking into me. And some child in me fully believes everything they just said.” The vitriol didn’t harden her shell—it hurt her. The conventional wisdom to “shake it off” isn’t working for her, she said. “I don’t know what else to do except start crying.”
Reflecting back on that episode, and the way that anti-trans sentiment has only continued to build in American culture since then, Furman said she’s been thinking about the roots of the hostility against people like her. “My life and my identity was known to all, including me, to be impossible or ridiculous,” she said. “Just like: A boy becomes a girl? This is not something that happens. I like to think of trans people as people who were shown a wall and saw a doorway, made a doorway. They just did something impossible.”
The impossible becoming possible is a hard thing to process—and easier to reject or mock than to understand. She mentioned the slogan “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” popularized by the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro. “I think it’s out of the same playbook of, like, Women’s feelings are why they can’t be serious, rational people.” (Which, she added, is ironic because “they’re so emotional over there on the right.”) Furman described herself as a “defender of the irrational” in multiple spheres of life. Whether as an artist, a religious person, or a trans person, she’s going out of her way to honor the importance of her inner life—her beliefs, her feelings, her desires—even when it’s socially inconvenient to do so.
What she’s realizing lately is how difficult that kind of life is to sustain. When the stranger on the street laughed at her in April 2023, it was a reminder that she couldn’t just opt out of visibility. Every time Furman steps into public, she’s opening herself up to judgment from society. If she stops putting care into her appearance—into passing as a cisgender woman, thereby avoiding drawing attention to her transness—she potentially becomes some “illegible, laughable thing” to others. She doesn’t know exactly why she collapsed. But she suspects that it had something to do with the fact that being trans requires constant assertiveness, which is an exhausting posture to maintain, day after day, year after year. “Trans people just have to be strident personalities—we just all have to,” she said. “What if I don’t keep feeling strident?”
After she got out of the hospital, Furman felt that she needed a reset. Though her previous two albums had been recorded in California, she booked a studio in her hometown of Chicago. She also called up Brian Deck, the producer who’d recorded two of the first Ezra and the Harpoons albums nearly 20 years ago. Deck is a veteran indie producer who has worked with the likes of Modest Mouse and Counting Crows, and he hadn’t stayed in touch with Furman. He told me he was amazed to find that she was basically the same person she was as an undergrad: articulate, precise, “slightly socially awkward,” and possessing a “coarse blunt instrument” of a voice, rippling with vulnerability and angst.
This time, Furman was using that instrument differently. Furman’s past few albums have had a rollicking, anthemic sound channeling Bruce Springsteen and the Clash. But Goodbye Small Head is swirling and atmospheric, with dark, catchy melodies that recall ’90s trip-hop and alternative rock. “I think it’s very beautiful,” Furman said, “and I never really felt like we made beautiful music before this.”
In one new song, called “Submission,” a beep that resembles the sound of an EKG machine plays on loop. “We’re fucked,” Furman hisses. “It’s a relief to say / We’ll see no victory day.” The track, she wrote in the album’s press notes, is about realizing that “long-suffering ‘good guys’ have no chance against 21st-century forces of evil.”
In our interview, she told me she resisted finishing the song: “I was like, This can’t be what I’m writing. I don’t want to. This isn’t what anyone needs to hear.” But as she endured painful procedures for facial-hair removal—which meant lying on a table as electrified needles were stuck in her skin—the lyrics kept popping into her head, forcing the song into existence. In moments like those, Furman thought of the line “No feeling is final,” by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “What if we feel really bad?” Furman said. “What if it feels really, really bad and we just let it feel that bad? Or just for a moment, anyway. What’s under there?”
The final song of Goodbye Small Head, “I Need the Angel,” is a garage-rock freak-out that sees Furman screaming for heavenly guidance. It’s a cover of a song by Alex Walton, a 25-year-old trans musician who was once a fan of Furman’s and struck up a friendship with her after the two exchanged messages online. When I spoke with Walton by videochat, she told me she was still processing the fact that her onetime role model—someone whose visibility as a trans person helped inspire her own career—had covered one of her songs. I asked her what Furman was like. “There’s this unerring optimism in her that’s infectious,” Walton replied.
This took me aback. In the four hours I’d spent with Furman, she’d been sardonically funny and a curious-minded conversationalist, but we’d mostly talked about the terrible state of the world and the music industry. Walton allowed that Furman could come off as pessimistic—her music conveys “never-ending struggle.” But beneath that, Walton said, Furman is motivated by a simple idea: “She wants to live.”
Goodbye Small Head does have flashes of resilience. In its one overt protest song, “A World of Love and Care,” Furman yowls, “Who gets left out of your dream of a good society?” The chorus seems designed to ring out at rallies and marches: “Dream better!” The track was a holdover from writing sessions during the first Trump administration, when Furman was working on that aforementioned anti-fascist trilogy. The original demo for the song was thrashing and punkish; the final version is built around pulsing cellos, making for a sound that’s “gentle and threatening” at the same time, as Furman put it.
The rest of Goodbye Small Head, however, isn’t serving up slogans or straightforwardly trying to change the world. The album mostly arose, she said, out of her dreamlike instincts. Furman compared songwriting to religious practices—such as the ones she herself keeps (saying blessings over a meal, observing strict rules of conduct on the Sabbath). “Why do I do these rituals?” she said. “Religious people do religious acts not for any utility. There’s something sacred about behaving this particular way, and even if nobody knows I’m doing it.”
And yet Furman still clearly feels like her work has a concrete, real-life purpose. She likened herself to professional mourners mentioned in the Bible: women who wailed because it was their duty to help their community express and move past emotions that would otherwise be paralyzing. “We need the people who cry and clap their hands together and stomp their feet, because you need somebody to hold all that irrationality for you,” Furman said. “I do think this is my job.”
The post ‘What If I Don’t Keep Feeling Strident?’ appeared first on The Atlantic.
