A Quote by Ezra Furman

I was like, "Who the hell is Bob Dylan?" I was going to learn one song to appease my mom and alphabetically the first song in the book was "Absolutely Sweet Marie." When I heard it, it was like "Oh, there is something going on here. It's not like my parents' boring music that I don't care about. This is totally electrifying."
I heard Pete Seeger records when I was a kid. I saw Bob Dylan when I was about 12. The first song I ever learned to play was a song by Phil Ochs.
When I first started writing songs, I was probably about ten or twelve years old, and the first thing you think as a songwriter is, 'Can this be a hit? Can this come out, and people are going to hear the song and like the song, and then they're going to like you, and you'll get famous and rich?' That hasn't changed a bit.
When "Here Comes the Sun" started, what happened? No, the sun didn't come out, but Mom opened up like the sun breaking through the clouds. You know how in the first few notes of that song, there's something about George's guitar that's just so hopeful? It was like when Mom sang, she was full of hope, too. She even got the irregular clapping right during the guitar solo. When the song was over, she paused. "Oh Bee," she said. "This song reminds me of you." She had tears in her eyes.
What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.
Like the Birth Of Venus, the song [Yello "oh, Yeah"] denotes the birth of the bro. The song just reminds me of bros looking out over lowered Ray-Bans. It birthed a negative sexual revolution. I was going to a lot of bondage clubs at the time and they did play this song. The song I associate more is that horrible Enigma song with the Gregorian chant. There's something good buried in that song and I might not hate it as much if I hadn't been a sex worker.
I don't get particularly precious about things like this, though. Like the record company said, "We need a radio edit that delivers the hook" - I don't even know what they consider the hook in that song ["Oh No"] - "that delivers the hook sooner." So I'm like, "Okay. I see that." And they were all walking on eggshells, like is this going to be sacrilegious to me or something, to mess with this art I've created? And I'm like, "Great. I get to tinker with it, I get to mess with my song some more."
A panoramic vision of Bob Dylan, his music, his shifting place in American culture, from multiple angles. In fact, reading Sean Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America is as thrilling and surprising as listening to a great Dylan song.
My favorite Bob Dylan record is the very first one where he sings one Bob Dylan song and the rest of them are his interpretations of the Dust Bowl-era folk songs, or even going back as far as the mass influx of people coming into the U.S. during the gold rush. His interpretations of those songs are incredible.
What is good is what it's going to lead to, like the song "Jai Ho." If good numbers are going to come in the future, it bodes well for a lot of things. But then, who's going to maintain that. That's the question. So far they could never lead to an Indian song, like a normal film song in this that they can relate to.
"Like a Rolling Stone" [of Bob Dylan] is a kiss-off song like none before or since.
When I heard 'Jesus, Take the Wheel,' I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you're a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.
Sometimes I'll write a song first and then I'm like, "Oh this person will be great on this song." But there are some artists I know what want, like off the top I knew I wanted Brandy and Faith Evans. Their music is like the soundtrack to my life, so it was a personal thing for me. So once they said yes, I wrote songs specifically for them.
It seems like if they'd given Bob Dylan a pen and paper in the cradle that he would've come up with a great song. I'd love to write songs like that.
I have plenty of good friends that I think the world of - and Bob [Dylan] is one of them, and I like his music - but with some others... their music I just don't care too much about all of it. Some of it I like.
I wrote 'Love Foolish,' and when I heard the music for the first time, it felt like this was a song that Twice hadn't done before. I thought the song and music had a very mature tone, so I wrote the lyrics to match. I was inspired by the music directly.
When I first heard that song, it was a ballad but it had a lot more. It felt like a gospel song when I first heard it and it just moved me.
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