Ezra Furman Quotes

I was pretty much into punk rock and that's all I cared about. I was into Green Day and the Ramones. I wanted to get a guitar so I could play punk songs because this kid taught me power chords at summer camp.

I can't remember the first song I learned to play on bass, but the first song I learned to play on guitar was 'For Your Love' by the Yardbirds. That kind of was the beginning for me. I thought it was a great song and I loved the open chord progression at the beginning of that song.

If we can inspire a kid to pick up a guitar - and less and less kids are doing so these days - it'd be really cool because I know how it felt growing up and how special that was for me.

I've played the guitar since I was 12, and just taught myself songs chord by chord.

Music's been with me from the get-go. It was always around me as a kid. Dad got me my first guitar when I was 11 and, at school, if you wanted to be cool you had to be in a band.

I watched my daddy play that guitar, and whenever I could, I would pick it up and strum on it.

When I was 13, I got my first guitar, and I could sort of play Ted Nugent songs, but I couldn't play the solos. But I could play along with entire Ramones songs.

When I was 12, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I found a chord book in a shop, and I stuffed it down my trousers. And that's how I learned to play the guitar.

In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions - one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.

When I was younger, and Iron Maiden and Def Leppard and all that stuff was coming out, I was learning all those songs and trying to play guitar and develop my chops. I was a big fan.

I got a toy guitar at a fundraiser and was trying to write songs with it that were ridiculous. After a week, my parents bought me a real acoustic guitar, and I started taking guitar lessons.

A lot of kids bought guitars and started playing rock'n'roll because of us.

I always wanted to move to New York because of the Velvet Underground, because of the picture that they painted of New York City.

Some of the ideas are kind of inspired by the songs, and I always want to use music to tell the story and give the movie a certain kind of mood. That's always essential to me.

I think that everybody that's coming out to Warped Tour, when they come to see the show, they're always like; let's go see that band that band that band and... that girl. I think that I tend to be that girl sometimes and I think that it's cool that I get to hang out with this Summer camp of smelly boys.

I'm really getting better at guitar. I'm not trapped behind a piano. You can get out and move with a guitar and still direct the band.

Well, it grow together. It's like, first time I try to write a song is the first time I try to play the guitar. And so I can write a song without the guitar. But it really grow together. I really like stay with my guitar. But it just happen, is the inspiration come through man. Because, I personally, it look like, could I write a whole heap a tune, it look like. But I pick special tune to write. Cause a man can think of plenty things. Yuh know wah ah mean.

You want to know how I started playing trumpet? My father bought me one, and I studied the trumpet. And everybody I heard that I liked, I picked up things from.

What I do now is all my dad's fault, because he bought me a guitar as a boy, for no apparent reason. ... I wrote some of my best love songs ever when I was unhappy and my saddest love songs when I was very much in love. When I wrote 'You're in My Heart', which is an uplifting song, I had just broken up with-Now who had I broken up with?. ... Half the battle is selling music, not singing it. It's the image, not what you sing.

[Columbia House] magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith.

To this day, I fondly recall the challenges of building a fire, pitching a tent, climbing a New England mountain, canoeing on a lake. Camp songs still resonate inside me. Competition exists at Keewaydin, of course, but nobody fails summer camp, a nice respite from winters of fortune and misfortune at school.

When I used to write songs, especially on my own, it was just me and a guitar.

I started singing rhythmically, and now I'm learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it

People are part of my music. A lot of my songs are the result of emotional experiences, sadness, pain, joy, and exultation in nature and sunshine and so on...like 'California Girls' which was a hymn to youth.

I bad a piano long before I bad a guitar, and the practice I got just playing those three chords in a basic 12-bar blues song was very important.