Ezra Furman stayed very busy in 2016, following up last year’s terrific Perpetual Motion People with the Big Fugitive Life EP while touring all over the world — wrapping up things earlier this month in Brooklyn. We’ve been asking artists for year-end Top 10s and Ezra offered up a list that features music, television, prayer, and… oral sex. You can read that, and listen to Big Fugitive Life, below.
Ezra’s only upcoming dates are festivals: Chicago’s Tomorrow Never Knows in January, and the Savannah Stopover in March.
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Ezra Furman – Ten cultural experiences I enjoyed in 2016, in no particular order:
- The Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds song “Rings of Saturn” making me feel things no song has ever made me feel.
- Exchanging blowjobs with an attractive and warm stranger in Nuremberg, Germany and then saying goodbye with no regrets.
- Reading about and discussing Rabbi Meir’s expansive view of reality on pg. 13b of the Talmud tractate Eruvin, no translation, with the Talmud study group known as Svara.
- Hearing Japanese Breakfast‘s song “Everybody Wants To Love You” (and all their other great songs) on their album Psychopomp and then again a month later when we played shows together in Zurich and Vienna.
- Spending my last days in Oakland at packed dive bars while the Oakland Warriors had the best season ever.
- Asking Twitter, in a very bad mood, if anyone wanted to form a loud, fast, dumb and ambitionless punk band with me in Chicago and getting a response from Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace asking if she could play bass.
- Horace and Pete, the stunning series from Louis CK, coming out of nowhere to break my heart.
- Chance the Rapper‘s tribute to Muhammad Ali at the ESPY awards, which moved me to tears of real joy.
- Spending almost all of Shabbat studying, praying, talking and eating with a Sicilian rabbi and his vibrant family at a Chabad house in Leeds, UK.
- Watching M. Ward at the top of his game from backstage at End of the Road Festival in England, just before I went onstage as the Saturday night headliner—to play after a show that good is a privilege that can never feel fully earned, not to mention the tidal wave of love that crashed over us while we played.