Ezra Furman - Goodbye Small Head [CD]

Goodbye Small Head is the name of the new record from Ezra Furman. Twelve songs, twelve 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. These songs are vivid with overwhelm. They're not about someone going off the rails, they are inside that person's heart. The songwriting here is a revision to William Wordsworth's famous proclamation that "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes it's origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." This poetry, my poetry, arrived in the midst of the storm. It was written as I teetered toward the edge. The band and I had had a run of records that were very communal, very first person plural. We, us, ours. I was trying to exist in and create a shared space with my audience, make anthems for taking care of one another in dark times. But there does come a time when a woman is left alone in a room to unravel. And you need anthems for those times too. GSH also reflects a band reaching a new peak of our powers. If I were a music journalist, I would call this an orchestral emo prog-rock record sprinkled with samples. Thank goodness I'm not a music journalist! I think of this music as cinematic and intense. A friend of mine said it sounded like "the coolest movie soundtrack of 1997," and I'm quite pleased with that description. We've incorporated a small string section into eight of the twelve tracks, and are using samples for the first time-nothing you'd recognize, just some uncredited singing that Sam found online, chopped into beautifully evocative bits. Other than that, this record features something that's become nearly an anachronism: a band that's been playing real instruments together for over a decade, intuitively in touch with each other as musicians. Four players in a room together who know exactly how to respond to one another.We recorded in Chicago with Brian Deck producing; a return to both my city of origin and my producer of origin, since Deck produced my first rock'n'roll records many years ago (Banging Down the Doors (2007) and Inside the Human Body (2008) by Ezra Furman & the Harpoons). In some way I think I was trying to return to some much younger mindset, when all the intensity and fear and emotion of life was less mediated by adult coping mechanisms. When it was all brand new with no filter.Though I wrote parts of it earlier, I think the making of this album really began on the morning of April 11th 2023, when I woke suddenly ill, limped into the bathroom and lost consciousness. At the hospital they gave me all the tests and told me that actually, I wasn't sick, and I could go home now. I stayed in bed for months, exhausted and in pain, no doctor offering any convincing explanation or cure. After a while I began hemorrhaging songs. Many of these songs arrived unexpectedly and left my body violently. All of them seemed to be steeped in the helpless transcendence of being suddenly overcome, undone. The lyrics to album opener "Grand Mal" and it's following companion "Sudden Storm" were written in one hypomanic sitting after talking to an epileptic friend about the mystical quality of certain major seizures. "Jump Out" is a panicked rocker for realizing you are going to have to leap from a moving vehicle because the driver has no intention of letting you out. "Power of the Moon" is an existentialist wrestling match with whoever's in charge of the universe, and "Submission" is the combination of dread and relief felt when you realize the long-suffering "good guys" have no chance against 21st-century forces of evil. And that's just Side A. Is it dark? Yeah! Is it also wonder-struck, laced with psychedelic beauty, triumphant in it's wounded way? Yeah again.