Ezra Furman, who recently released his third LP, Mysterious Power, lists 50’s/60’s rock n’ roll, early punk and Jewish theology among his biggest influences. The album’s title track can be seen not merely as a song about the search for love, but also as a search for the divine: “I need you/Call me up right now/I’d call you but I don’t know how.”
“God is a concern of mine,” Furman tells me, “that search for the mysterious and the infinite.” You have to listen carefully for it, but that concern gets articulated throughout his latest album: Whether in “Wild Rosemarie,” when he invokes “God as a shepherd wandering the hills looking for his lost sheep” or on “Hard Time in a Terrible Land” when the singer positions himself for “the good Lord to open His hand.”
“I’m incorrigibly Jewish. I write so many songs, but the ones I end up bringing to the band [backup band, the Harpoons] often tend to have a confrontation with the ineffable.”
Tonight’s show is 21 and over. 8:30 p.m. (doors). $10. The Satellite, 1717 Silverlake Blvd., Los Angeles. thesatellitela.com.
Watch a video of the band’s Bob Dylan-esque single, “Take Off Your Sunglasses,” from their 2008 album, “Inside the Human Body,” below.