ezra-furman
photo: Jason Simmons

Ezra Furman shares new single and video "Driving to L.A."

photo: Jason Simmons
photo: Jason Simmons

Ezra Furman has just released a new single “Driving to L.A.” and with it a video, directed by Joseph Brett “about me and my angel companion escaping from modern-day Nazis.” The video is dedicated to Heather Heyer, the protester who died at the Charlottesville, VA “Unite the Right” rally. Says Ezra:

This video is dedicated to Heather Heyer, killed the day before we started filming.
This is a song of paranoia, escape and ecstatic ego-death. We decided to make a video about me and my angel companion escaping from modern-day Nazis.
The disturbing circumstance of making the video was this:
The video shoot took place over five days in the small town of Strasburg, Virginia on August 13th, the day after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally turned fatally violent, a ninety-minute drive away. This was a coincidence. We had planned to shoot there long before we knew there was a far-right rally scheduled to take place in Charlottesville. So we had the strange experience of making a music video about fleeing white supremacists in Virginia at the moment that the whole country was talking about them, and as the president refused to unequivocally condemn white supremacy.
It is terrible to watch America’s white supremacist roots flourish like this again, not to mention the accompanying misogyny, queerphobia and anti-Semitism. I intend this song, video and my entire career as a protest against those attitudes.
This video is about how fear turns to violence. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t advocate shooting a gun into a car full of people, whether they are enraged white supremacists or not. The video is a fantasy and a nightmare. I think it matches the cultural nightmare we are now living through, one from which I pray we can soon wake up.

Watch that video below.

No word on a new album — Ezra’s last was 2015’s Perpetual Motion People — but he does have a new backing band, sort of (but not really), having retired The Boy-Friends name, and rechristening Ben, Jorgen, Sam, and Tim The Visions. Ezra’s only scheduled show right now is at Chicago’s Thalia Hall on February 26.

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