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May 30, 2025 Web Exclusive By Celine Teo-Blockey Photography by Eleanor Petry

“Everybody showed you a wall and you saw a doorway somehow,” says Ezra Furman like it’s magic or she’s a fairy godmother as she describes the ideas that informed “Strange Girl,” one of the more haunting songs off her latest album, Goodbye Small Head—released May 16, on the Bella Union label. The statement applies more broadly to her experience as trans in an increasingly hostile world: from transgender bathroom bans, to the denial of gender affirming care and rescinding hard-won rights that enabled the separation of sex from gender, it seeks to deny their existence and actively supports their erasure.

But we’re chatting via Zoom video now and here she is. And trans folk have always been here. Furman’s girlish countenance is striking. Endearingly, whenever I’m in the midst of posing her a question, she can’t help but get distracted with her visage and will play with her hair. She takes long pauses between her thoughts but her ocean blue eyes will stop darting about when she settles on the right combination of words for an answer. She’s the picture of poise, confidence, and resilience but she admits that she’s been unwell, has experienced burn out, and has had to recapitulate and surrender to the overwhelming state of affairs affecting our most downtrodden.

She borrowed the album’s title from Sleater-Kinney’s “Get Up,” a song about self-dissolution released in 1999. Watch the grainy, achromatic Miranda July-directed music video and you get the sense that it’s about community and being held, a rallying cry to help you get up once you’ve fallen.

And in these end times, we know what the fall feels like because our phones have the power to suck us into the unfolding minutiae of a genocide or the daily evils of the current administration. It means we’re all grasping for some way to cope with the enormity of whatever unspeakable trauma and tragedy that’s only a doom scroll away. Furman reveals how she fashioned a new coping strategy for herself with Goodbye Small Head.

Celine Teo-Blockey (Under the Radar): Congrats on your 10th album, Goodbye Small Head. I know that it’s linked to the Sleater-Kinney track, but what happened to make you think ‘Yep. That’s it. That’s the one!’ Did you have other titles in the running?

Ezra Furman: Yeah, we had a bunch. You go through all kinds of self-doubt about a title. I would say maybe once every two years, I hear a song I haven’t heard before and there’s no amount of times I could hear it, that would be enough.

I had never heard this Sleater-Kinney record The Hot Rock. I’m a big Sleater-Kinney fan of other albums. And then I heard “Get Up” and it was just like injected into my veins. There have been some other songs like when I heard “Fear as a Man’s Best Friend” by John Cale, I was like, “1000 times, please.” It’s not because it’s like the best song I’ve ever heard. It’s like something gets into my bloodstream like a virus. And the only cure is to hear this as many times as possible.

I think because I was writing these songs and not even realizing it until it started to come together as a record, I was like, “all of these songs are about becoming completely overwhelmed and surrendering to a huge feeling.” That is kind of new for me: surrender, submission. That’s not really been my—

Brand?

Yeah.

It’s fight!

Yeah, fight. My thing has usually been more like defiance. Or fight, fight, fight. And in recent years, perhaps my arms have gotten a little tired of carrying a flag. Hmmm….there’s a lot of ingredients to this moment in my art life. But, it is like surrender. And it is letting a feeling overwhelm you. Looking straight into the face of something that you’re afraid to look at.

You wrote that these 12 songs, as 12 variations on the experience of completely losing control, whether by weakness, illness, mysticism, BDSM, drugs, heartbreak, or just living in a sick society with one’s eyes open. What does losing control mean to you? What does it look like?

Well, look I read this book. I still have it ‘cause I haven’t finished the last chapter. [Goes off camera then returns with a pink backpack and pulls out book.] Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race and Traumatophilia.

Wow, what a great word.

I know! It’s not a word I was familiar with. Traumatophilia is the opposite of transphobia. It’s by Avgi Saketopoulou, a Greek American psychoanalyst. This is maybe too wonky of an answer, but truthfully, this book is a huge ingredient in this record. I haven’t talked about it much. I haven’t talked about it to anybody actually. Traumatophilia refers to not being afraid of trauma, not trying to heal or move past trauma, but understanding that if you’re traumatized its just part of your life now. And what are you gonna do with it? Not how are you going to fix it? But how are you gonna live with it in a new way on different terms? The thing that really got into the record is there’s a kind of becoming overwhelmed and engaging with your trauma that breaks you down, breaks down your whole ego: goodbye small head. Then new things are possible. In that moment, there’s growth.

Is it a bit like experiencing ego death?

Yes. Or, it’s maybe a related thing. I don’t know exactly what ego death is—that’s like an acid kind of term in my mind—or, just ego rupture and what happens next?

Sometimes, you’ll hear people say “you just have to go through it.” So rather than avoid this difficult thing, you just have to let it happen to you.

Right. It’s like, “What if even though I’m afraid to feel this, I just dove into it? What if I looked into the brightest light that you’re not supposed to look at?”

But what is that in your every day? Or what does that look like in a song?

See, this is why I like talking to you Celine. Well, I’ve always felt that life, being awake, is fundamentally overwhelming. We all know that the truth is way too large for our little heads to hold—and that’s obvious—there’s just too much true information for us to keep it in our minds. This is also sort of a theological statement for me.

How so?

For me, God is the truth that can’t fit in the human mind. I don’t know—we need to usually forget how huge reality is. It’s my spirituality to have a constant stance of: “I don’t know. I don’t know.” It’s always more than the digestible story that I’m telling. Even if you’ve got to tell that story, it’s always bigger. Any story you can think of is not true because it’s not big enough.

Because there’s more sides to it?

It’s symptomatic of just having an internet connection and having access to unbearable emergencies at all times. It’s one of the first things that comes up when I look at my phone: pictures of dead children. And you can’t feel all of that ever really? You can’t feel all of it at almost any point in your normal life. You have to kind of get through and make it smaller and just put it like, “Okay, that’s going over there. I’m not gonna fully feel that.”

But one of the main purposes of art is to make a space where those feelings are invited in to be fully felt…anything that you kind of can’t function if you really feel it in all of its hugeness—whether good or bad. That’s why we need a place where those feelings, we can just lean right into them and fully feel them, and cry and dance. And, I guess with this album I just started to write about that specifically.

What songs specifically?

This is why the first two songs [“Grand Mal” and “Sudden Storm”] on the record are about having seizures.

If we can tie it in with “Grand Mal” when you talk about the shiver, what is this shiver? Is this an actual seizure physically that you are having? Or is it something bigger than that? There’s a bit in the song where you say, “It’s the circle that holds me a wedding ring rolling across the black tables on a wedding day.” It seems to be about all these things that are going on that you have no control over, but then you look and inside this life that you’ve built for yourself, there’s this relationship and it’s a circle. And it’s like you are safe in there. And that kind of makes it all a little bit better because you feel that the circle holds you.

I love it. I love that. That’s a very beautiful interpretation. And I accept it. I mean, it would be wrong of me to explain these mysteries and also wrong of me to say that I even really know. Because there’s a lot of craft in these songs and in these lyrics, but they are still mysteries to me. I really feel they’re mostly things I found in my brain or maybe, in the world. The way you just explained that—is as beautiful and correct as any thought I’ve had about those lines.

With writing these songs, I’ve been in a different place. A lot of them are less analytically written and less planned, and even more so than older songs, they feel like dreams that I had. Or just little precious stones I found. And then I have to make the setting for this stone. It takes a lot of craft to make a ring, but the ring maker does not make the diamond. The diamond was found.

So what is the shiver?

I cannot say too much about it. Because I don’t wanna make it small. I can say that I wrote these first two songs on the same day. And there were various things going on, and I knew some people going through some really, really impossibly difficult things. Also, I had just spoken to a friend who is epileptic and she was telling me about her seizures. She’s kind of mystical about them. She’s an artist to the core, in a different way than I am.

Yeah.

And we talked about what seizures are: a burst of electricity in the brain that is too much for the brain and body to handle. And so everything shuts down. So instantly I’m like, “Oh it’s like looking at the face of God.” It’s the moments when you see how large everything is. So, the shiver on some boring level, it’s the shiver of having an epileptic seizure, it started there. But I was having a shiver that day. I had an almost frightening day of songwriting ‘cause I was like, “I can’t, I am writing this so fast.” I was kind of having a hypomanic episode maybe.

I don’t know what it’s like to have epilepsy, but what I do have is a volatile little brain that sometimes gets hit with a bunch of too-muchness. It just gets overwhelmed with feeling. And I’m like, well, we kind of all have that. And then so yeah, it was like this shiver when too-muchness or just pure feeling shivers right through you and you’re just undone. You’re helpless. That’s terrifying and debilitating, but is there something that you learn on a day like that?

And is this after you had that episode where you stumbled in the bathroom and you lost consciousness?

It was probably about six months after that illness. And I had sort of bounced back from it. But then bounced back into it. And I was living on different terms and I still am. I’m still just dealing with a weaker system. And so the experience of succumbing to weakness and having to say, “I cannot continue the way I have been. I cannot continue to be strong”—it applied to a lot of things.

Interesting.

It’s not just applied to my medical health and my physical strength. I mean I burned out on touring so hard then coming home and snapping back into parenthood ‘cause I had missed so much parenting. I burnt out on living in an increasingly publicly transphobic world and being like, “We will prevail. We will win. We are strong. And what they say doesn’t matter.” And in fact, it does matter. It doesn’t bounce off of me. It hurts me and it weakens me. And so it’s that moment of saying, “I lose, they win. I succumb, I submit. I cannot be strong and defiant because it’s too much.” [pauses] I had so much trouble writing the song, “Submission.” This is not what I wanna say to people: “We’re fucked. We’ll see no victory.” That’s the opposite of what I’ve always insisted, that despair is a sin.

Yes, I remember that.

And I believe that, I think despair is a sin. But you know what? Sometimes, we all sin. And then what do you do? What if it was okay that you felt not only like you’re losing hope but it’s over. And you’ve been defeated. The enemy has won. What if you feel that fully and didn’t try to fight it. I keep coming back to Raina Maria Rilke. “Just keep going. Let it all hit you. Beauty and terror. No feeling is final.”

“Jump Out” sounds like a song from Transangelic Exodus, it must tee up with the theme of losing control in a sick society. But you can jump out. That is a way of taking control. Of course, you might get hurt jumping out, but you’re also going to get hurt staying in the car. So, even in those moments, you have choices.

That’s a good way to put it. Exactly.

Is that something that actually happened to you? Because when I read the lyrics, I was like, “Was Ezra in an Uber and someone was mean to her?” And I was remembering that time when we met in L.A., when those people at the bodega were mean to you when you tried to buy something to eat.

People are mean to me all the time Celine—I hate to tell you. It’s a very regular occurrence, but I have not jumped out of a moving vehicle. I think I was trying to find how it feels.

Do you see how I think it sounds like Transangelic Exodus?

Yeah. It’s got the vehicle, it’s got the desperation. Absolutely. I think I keep returning to songs like that on every record. I think back to my earliest songs, there was always a recurring theme of “I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to get out of this small space.”

By coincidence, for this thing I was writing today, I was listening to my first album ever, Banging Down the Doors by Ezra Furman and the Harpoons, and I hear “I’ve gotta get out of my head. I’ve gotta get out of my I life as I know it, out of my childhood.” You can really hear me being 20 years old and it’s a live question: “Can anyone hear me right now and am I trapped in here?” And that’s when you think about those things.

Do you feel like you’ve moved on from that? Like in a lot of ways, you’re not trapped in that body or that state of mind. Do you feel like, “Gosh, I’ve traveled so far?”

I am so much more free than I was when I was 20. It is startling to listen to a recording from 2007, just to realize like, “Yeah, I got out of a lot of really bad patterns.” I just learned a lot. And yeah, I’m singing songs about “get me out of this car” but it doesn’t… [long pause]

Well, I think it’s hopeful.

I do think any cage I get out of, I’ll always wanna get out of the larger cage. And any threshold I breach, I always want larger and larger, higher and higher, you know? I think this is an important principle. I am actually not interested in ever feeling like I have finished my work of growth.

If you’re going to do that work as an artist, then as a listener, it’s our job to listen and take in that world I guess.

There’s a difference between embracing suffering versus asking for more. We know the toxic myth of, “We want our artists to suffer because that’s when they really make powerful work.” I think it’s a misunderstanding of what’s happening. I think what makes good art is when somebody is asking for more and they don’t have to be in a tiny cage, there are always thresholds to cross. I really believe in the beautiful discipline of never being satisfied.

I’m going to ask you one other thing about “Grand Mal,” the music is quite different from the raw punk of 20-year-old Ezra Furman and a lot of your albums since. It’s like a cool dip in the ocean, a palate cleanser. It signals that this album is going to take me somewhere different.

I’m glad you said that. To me it’s so much more beautiful. I would not describe most of my music as particularly beautiful or beauty focused, it’s sort of a new element here. It’s not like nothing was beautiful before. But it’s a new focus. Part of that is what we associate with beauty—and it is orchestral string instruments. They are gorgeous, smooth and harmonically just wonderful instruments.

But there’s also something else I think that I’ve been trying to put into words that I think you’re picking up on: something immersive about this album. It feels like you could put it on and close your eyes and let it just wash over you, even though it has a lot of anxiety and harshness. I can’t put my finger on why it’s like that. A big part of that has to do with my band. My band mates were almost sort of co-producers with the producer [Brian Deck] and with me. In terms of musical arrangements it was very collaborative. We made demos, sent a lot of things back and forth with lots of overdubs. Then Sam Durkes, the drummer, just started putting samples on things.

And you liked it? Did you ask for it?

No. That’s the thing. I sent him songs. It was so surprising to me he sent it back with the sound that opens the record. And I was like, ‘Okay, I had this. This was going somewhere but now—the collaboration level has come to a new height.” They’re getting really good at showing me musical ideas that absolutely would have not occurred to me.

How does that fit in with what you said that “there comes a time where a woman is left in a room to unravel and we need music for those times too?” Because they were always songs that you wrote with your band and now, you’re still not writing them alone.

I know.

But now you’re a woman?

Yeah. [She smiles knowingly.]

So there you go!

Honestly, this has all become more mysterious to me—where this stuff [songwriting] comes from. And I think in every record you can trace an unraveling of my ego. And my sense of, I’ve got to make sure every piece is in place and every line makes perfect sense. Even as I feel like I’ve gotten better in some ways at my craft. And I’ve gotten more control over what I write. But it’s gone along with this loosening of the grip. Allowing in things that I don’t understand. Being able to recognize that it’s beautiful to me in a way that it isn’t clever or a good line. But I just found some kind of diamond and I have to let that diamond be itself. All I gotta do is turn it in the light and then put it into a setting, a ring.

The song “Strange Girl” made me think of “Strange Fruit.” I don’t know why, maybe it’s in the pacing of it?

Oh, totally.

Or maybe it’s just the use of the word “strange.” But there is also something languid about it.

I know it feels—I’m trying to remember the most classic Billie Holiday version of “Strange Fruit.” Does it have any beat? I mean ours keeps to its rhythm, but both songs do have something in common. I hadn’t thought of that connection. But they both feel rubato—without a driving beat certainly.

What was the idea behind the song?

It was the last thing I wrote for the record. We thought we had all the songs and then a week before we went into the studio, I was like, “Something’s coming through.” And I wrote that song just in an hour.

Wow.

Again, it’s like a sense of what opportunity arises when things stop making sense basically. I really like those lines— “Her back is turned. You call her name. When she turns, some part of her somehow remains turned away. Towards somewhere else.” One of my favorite writers is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and he said, “To the religious man, it’s as if all objects stood with their backs toward him.” This idea that everything is facing towards God in a way that we’re not gonna be able to fully see because everything is soaked in mystery.

There’s something about being transgender, being transsexual, that is just fundamentally strange. You’ve insisted that something that we very recently all agreed was pretty much impossible, is in fact, true. And necessary. And so real. Everybody showed you a wall and you saw a doorway somehow.

I’ve focused for years on how first, [being trans] that it’s legitimate! Then, no, it’s not just legitimate, it’s actually beautiful. And beyond beautiful, it’s just so strange to insist on this irrational thing that is true. And it’s only irrational because it’s outside of the mind we grew up with. Anyway, I’m not sure I spoke very eloquently about that.

I love it, beautifully said Ezra. So, let’s end with one of my favorite songs off the album “The Veil Song.”

That might be my favorite too.

It’s so dreamy that the last time I was listening to it, I drifted off and fell asleep for a moment. Granted, I have been very tired lately but there is a lullaby quality to it.

[Smiles] That’s such a beautiful compliment to me. I can’t tell you how much that means to me. I would’ve shuddered at that years ago. I would have been so insulted when I was 25.

But there’s a comforting lull to it right? It fits in with what we’ve both said about these songs being able to wash over you, like the ocean when it’s calm. Sonically, it is world’s apart from the opening song and indeed the final track—which is an Alex Walton cover that you’ve given the more familiar Ezra Furman pop-punk treatment. “The Veil Song” in contrast, has this quiet strumming, a different kind of intimacy.

There are two categories of song on this record. For me as a writer, there are the ones that I write all at once in a big rush and it’s done. And the other is the kind that I work on for a very long time. So “Veil Song” I was writing for about two years. And that, more than any other song on the record, I was like, “What is this? What did I find here? What’s happening here?” And it took a lot of work to live up to it, but it was already there right at the start: “Am I ready to get married? Am I ready to die? Am I able to speak? Am I able to speak, a stuttering bride?”

It starts with the image of the flickering projection of a stuttering bride. I wrote the first lines of the song first, and you know, I got married in December, 2017— it’s already years. I almost gave it a different title to explain this more, but then I decided a close reader can find it.

It is supposed to be the day-before my wedding. And you’re riding the bus and there’s this feeling like can I actually get married? Can I actually speak these words? There’s some kind of breach of the ego there. It is like death to love somebody else. You have to breach your borders and you will leak everywhere and lose control if you give yourself to another person and you’ll be seen. You’ll have to [be] real…you can’t hold yourself as a secret if you want to really love somebody and be loved. Still, I can say all these nice pretty things about this song, but it’s all blank and shining like an animal’s eye. It’s as mysterious as death.

That’s why it’s my favorite song on the record. It is mysterious to me, even as much as I know about it and as careful as I was with it. This song is like a miniature version of finding love in my life. I’m like, how did I find this treasure? I still don’t fully understand it.

[Note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.]

www.ezrafurman.com

Furman was on the cover of our My Favorite Movie Issue and you can still buy a copy from us directly here.

Check out our 2020 interview with Furman in episode two of our official podcast’s first season.

Read our 2018 interview with Furman.

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