YOUNG American singer-songwriter Ezra Furman is the latest in a string of top performers to step up to the mic in Sally's front bar in recent months.
It's a rare solo performance from Ezra whose band, The Harpoons, have performed across the States as well as festivals in Europe. And he arrives in Sallys this Friday night on high local recommendation.
Ezra hails from Evanston, Illinois and formed his band in Boston while attending college there. He has been writing music since the age of 13 and is currently based in New York city.
He has released two albums on Minty Fresh Records both as Ezra Furman and the Harpoons and his song, Take Off Your Sunglasses, is currently being played on radio throughout the US as well as MTV2.
Ezra's first album, with his band The Harpoons, Banging Down the Doors, was made in an achingly honest and enthusiastic spirit. You can listen to it and hear that it is the work of 20-year-olds full of all the fire, emotion and joy that rock n roll music should have. He and the band were frantic to enter the music world and show all that they could be. Ezra played the acoustic guitar with raw aggression and the band used their collective musical genius to turn his songs into great full-band pieces with real power. It was emotional, confessional, playful, angry and poetic. And people liked it.
Now he has graduated from college and has finished his second album with the Harpoons, entitled Inside the Human Body, and it is really a big step forward. When the band's guitarist left before they made the new record, they were worried they wouldn't be able to be the same band they once were. It turned out they were right: the band evolved into a new Harpoons with a new approach. Ezra put down the acoustic and picked up an electric guitar. Sometimes when you lose something you rely on, such as a fourth band member, you find out what you're really made of. Ezra now believes his band can do anything. Everything became intensified: the angry songs are angrier, the tender songs more tender, the happy songs happier, the sad songs sadder.
The last record had a song called My Soul Has Escaped From My Body. Ezra feels that every song on this record could have that title. "The album is about your soul busting outta your chest--how our humanity cannot be suppressed, and how that which is inside cannot be kept inside" explains Furman, "That's how I've always felt about being human."
