Oakland-based indie rocker Ezra Furman, an observant Jew who describes himself as gender fluid and isn’t shy about expressing his Jewishness in his music, just released his most explicitly Jewish song yet.
Furman told the website Consequence of Sound that “The Refugee,” which he uploaded to the SoundCloud music streaming site last week, is his “first song entirely concerned with my Jewish background and present, a song dedicated to my grandfather who fled the Nazis as well as to all of the refugees desperate for a home today.”
The song follows a character (presumably based on his Jewish grandfather) who is displaced from “frosty green Poland” and is forced through a difficult migration, which involves “sleeping in churches” and eating grass “like a goat.”
“This is the sound of the Jew who refuses to die,” Furman sings at one point in the folky waltz, which features Eastern European-sounding string and clarinet melodies.
The song is in his newly released six-song EP “Big Fugitive Life,” on the Bella Union record label (https://soundcloud.com/bella-union/6-the-refugee).
Furman is currently on tour in the UK. — jta