When she was a kid growing up in Chicago, Ezra Furman watched John Hughes’ seminal 1985 high-school-angst movie The Breakfast Club. She watched it a lot. “I’ve probably seen that film 90 times,” says the 35-year-old singer-songwriter, on a video call from a hotel room in Seattle, where she’s on tour to promote her sublime new album, All of Us Flames. “Ally Sheedy’s character was always my favourite. She’s got her claws out in such a cool, outsidery and feminine way. I kind of want to look like her, but really, that exact same thing is just in me.”
On the new record, Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club is the subject of a tender, ethereal song — called, helpfully, “Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club” — that articulates just how formative an influence Sheedy’s secretive outsider, Allison, was on Furman: “The black shit on your eyes, your purse full of junk. I build my world on versions of your VHS visage... I watch her flicker on my TV, the teenage girl I never got to be.” It’s emblematic of an album that explores aspects of Furman’s identity — she came out as trans last year; she is also Jewish and the parent of a three-year-old son — alongside wider, connected ideas about community and togetherness, and finding solace therein.
“The songs are still pretty young,” says Furman — who, now she mentions it, does look a bit like Allison, “black shit” on her eyes, dark brown bobbed hair that she keeps having to re-tuck behind her ear — of what inspired the record. Incredibly, it’s her ninth, since forming her first band, Ezra Furman and the Harpoons, with friends from Tufts University in 2006; she also soundtracked the Netflix show Sex Education.“I’m still understanding why in 2020 I started to write in the first-person plural about underground communities, or organising our lives around love and care. Me personally, I need those things: I’m a parent, I’m a queer and trans person who’s more vulnerable to attacks than I thought. I need to know who I can depend on and who depends on me. I didn’t know that consciously, but that’s where my heart was headed.”
You may have clocked that she started writing in 2020, ie: mid-pandemic, when many of us were also having frequent — nay, sometimes bad-tempered — thoughts about the nature of togetherness. During that period, Furman’s home in the suburbs of Boston was “crowded, happy, but also too full”, so in order to write she would get in the car with her guitar and drive to “somewhere where I couldn’t see houses or buildings”, such as Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau famously found inspiration two centuries before. (“I don’t think I even went to the pond. I just went to the parking lot.” Because the cultural legacy was too much? “I think it was just closed.”)
Musically, she was “thinking a lot about Bob Dylan and The Shangri-Las. Both have this kind of majesty to their songs, but from completely different directions. I was trying to see how these teenage-girl groups from the 1960s and serious protest singers have something in common. You know, how, ‘Let’s run away together, they’ll never understand us, we’re gonna make a new world’, overlaps with, ‘A day is coming, burning like a torch, when the wicked will be judged and the poor will be vindicated.’ They both want to destroy — or remake — the adult world.”
Even without hearing All of Us Flames, which was recorded in LA with producer John Congleton (Angel Olsen, St Vincent), you maybe getting a sense of its scope, from the lush, escalating anthem “Train Comes Through”, which opens the record, to the heartbreaking, expansive synths of the single “Forever In Sunset”, to which it might not actually be possible to listen without punching the air, Judd Nelson-style, while simultaneously bursting into tears. There is some big American songwriting here, recalling not only Dylan or The Shangri-Las, but Lou Reed and Patti Smith and Springsteen. “I guess maybe what you can hear there is ambition,” says Furman, “or trying to match what I feel are the stakes of life with my tone as a singer and writer.”
There are quiet moments, too. All of Us Flames is about finding comfort, but it is also about acknowledging pain. On the album’s final track,“Come Close”, a guitar ballad that’s so delicate it’s almost a lullaby, Furman recounts a time she gave a stranger a hand job through a car window, and another time when a trench-coated man on a street corner asked her for a kiss. “Those are real, true stories from life,” says Furman.“I don’t want to be approached in a sexual way on the street, of course, and yet I have some kind of fellowship with these people. People who are truly lost, in a way. That broken feeling that comes from being a rejected creature.
“I guess queer people are expected to be strident,” she continues, “and be all, ‘I don’t care what anyone thinks’, and that’s important, but there’s the other part of it, where you’re not strident and proud, and you’re just feeling the poison and letting it get to you, which is a big part of my emotional life. The voice of transphobia, the voice in my head that I can’t shut off. I feel that song is where that kind of feeling lives.”
What, then, does she make of Allison’s transformation at the end of The Breakfast Club, in which, influenced by the voices around her, she ditches her big black jumper for baby-pink ruffles and an Alice band? “Come on,” says Furman.“No one likes that version of her better.” But, ever alert to nuance, she turns it over. “Then again, I don’t want to be a snob about it. I think the moving thing is, I don’t know... She does seem happier at the end.” Furman laughs drily. “She’s not as cool, but she seems happier.”
All of Us Flames (Bella Union) is out on 26 August
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
