Ezra Furman: Beyond the Limits of Language
Ezra Furman’s Goodbye Small Head feels is not a treatise. It’s not a manifesto. It doesn’t convert pain into power, or offer catharsis, or wrap itself in clarity. If it offers anything, it’s what John Keats called negative capability: the capacity to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” That line, though nearly 250 years old, could just as easily be one of Furman’s. “Over the years, I want more and more to live in that place of transcendence,” she tells me during our conversation, her voice choppy but warm through my tinny laptop speakers. “Or at least keep reference of it around me. I want to always keep one hand on that transcendent and unknowable.” For Furman, music isn’t a tool to decode the ineffable. It’s a way to touch it—to make visceral what language itself simply can’t...
