As a singer, songwriter, and author whose incendiary music has soundtracked the Netflix show
Sex Education, Ezra Furman has for years woven together stories of queer discontent and
unlikely, fragile intimacies. She has a knack for zeroing in on the light that sparks when
struggling people find each other and ease each other's course. All of Us Flames widens that
focus to a communal scope, painting transformative connections among people who unsettle
the stories power tells to sustain itself.
Produced by John Congleton in L.A., All of Us Flames unleashes Furman's songwriting in an
open, vivid sound world whose boldness heightens the music's urgency. The record arrives as
the third installment in a trilogy of albums, beginning with 2018's Springsteen-inflected road
saga Transangelic Exodus and continuing with the punk rock fury of 2019's Twelve Nudes.
"This is a first person plural album," Furman says. "It's a queer album for the stage of life when
you start to understand that you are not a lone wolf, but depend on finding your family, your
people, how you work as part of a larger whole. I wanted to make songs for use by threatened
communities, and particularly the ones I belong to: trans people and Jews."
She wrote much of Flames during the early months of the pandemic. "I had no time alone
anymore; my house was super crowded," she says. She drove to seek solitude, parked in
arbitrary quiet spots around Massachusetts, and began to write. The songs that came flowed
toward ideas of communality and networks of care, systems of survival cultivated by necessity
among people who have been historically deprived of them