All he was doing was singing and playing guitar. But what made people stare - blinking to attention - was the way he did it. With the solemn intensity of a chess player, his eyes focused straight ahead, head slightly on an angle, fingers nimbly flicking the strings.
As he travelled he wrote in his journals, guitar by his side. Occasionally, he busked but mostly he wrote about the places he saw and the people he met, from the impressively odd to the impossibly exotic. "A lot of people say your first album can come from years of writing but about 70 per cent of my album Wanted On Voyage came from that one trip," Ezra says.
Wanted on Voyage was recorded in Clapham, south London, with producer Cam Blackwood. "For three months we worked from 10am-10pm each day and had Sundays off. We deliberately didn't invite other musicians to come and play on the record, other than a drummer, because we are bad at drums. "I approached each song production wise as their own thing, I didn't want them to all sound the same."
The funniest lyrics - and there are plenty to choose from - are probably on Drawing Board, a fantasy retaliation aimed at an ex when a relationship goes sour. On Did You Hear the Rain?, two 1980s keyboards were used and the weird beat is actually distorted loops of beat boxing and a didgeridoo. "It was fun to do in the studio but is a ball-ache to try to recreate live."
The album artwork features people in various costumes and each one references a song.
"My dad's wearing a police outfit, which references that song. The people on the cover are my little brother, sister, friends, people from school, and even the first manager at the pub I worked in."
Budapest is, in part, about not making it to Budapest.
Arriving in Malmo from Copenhagen, he met up with some girls he'd been put in touch with.
"They said ‘come on, we've got to go and watch the Eurovision song final, it's funny'.
"We went to a park and watched it on a big screen. It's illegal to buy alcohol after a certain time in Malmo so we found ourselves buying some rum off a man in a park.
"All of that rum ended up inside little old me and I missed my train, which would have led me to Budapest.
"Instead I went to Berlin."
Ezra has more travels ahead. Soon he heads to the United States for the first time.
"I don't know how I'm going to get on with America, we'll see."
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
gamechangershow
gracieabrams
