gRººv333S,,,n,,,J▲M§ ▬|s|!|O|!| ❤︎|!|t|!|y|▬{{mmxxii}}
..................number4 ....................of50
“Train Comes Through” by Ezra Furman
DV:
At first I was like, of course any salvation has to be collective - like public transit, like a train! Which was very corny. But also: I have spent a very long time dismissing Ezra Furman because she is corny, and her theater-kid energy is something I generally try to avoid, but then I caught “Train Comes Through” and realized I’m apparently a lot more accepting of corny than I used to be. And eventually I realized it’s a train because of the very long tradition of train songs in the folk and rock sphere - Furman’s not even the only one on our list this year - and because she’s very intentionally rewriting that history to include the rest of us - the gamblers and midnight ramblers, the sinners - who are excluded from songs like classic “This Train.” Because in song a train often does mean salvation, but it hasn’t always meant it for everyone. Furman’s making it her job to write a train that belongs to us all. “Train Comes Through” is a song infused with “we”, a plural subject and perspective, as Furman writes us into her new mythology. It equates us with superheroes, with freedom fighters, with saboteurs. She makes space for all of us, reconfiguring the past to create a better future. She makes space for corniness, too: “A broken heart’s your ticket” is peak melodrama, even if it’s also true. But that can be - maybe should be - part of who we are, a little too earnest if we’d just let our guard down enough to accept it. The train might not be here yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
MG:
I’ll confess, I’m not that familiar with Ezra Furman’s catalog -- this is the first release that grabbed me -- so I can’t say she hasn’t always been channeling the sound and energy of rock’s spectres, but she certainly is on All of Us Flames. On “Point Me Toward the Real” she sounds like Lou Reed both in her plaintive drawl and her charming crankiness. On “Train Comes Through” you can almost hear the “woo-woo”s from “Sympathy For The Devil” as the song starts chugging, building steam as the drums and bass start filling in. In her weathered, scratchy fervor Furman sounds like The Waterboys’ Mike Scott shouting through the rain, begging at the heavens. To me, it makes sense that she’d be drawn to rock music, especially the sort from the 60s and 70s because there’s no need to rip up that history in order to see herself included. Lou Reed was publicly out in the 70s and briefly married to Rachel Humphreys, a trans woman and the muse for Coney Island Baby. In her pleas as an “obsessive, detail-oriented, heathen Jew” I hear Furman reaching out to Leonard Cohen’s emotional, piercing legacy. While Ezra Furman is the first and only to make her specific mark, she’s not formed in a vacuum and “Train Comes Through,” like all the best rock music, invites the context and comparison, speaks in communication with the past as it forges a more promising future.