"Driving Down To L.A." is the first single to come from Ezra Furman and The Visions, and as you might expect given the recent name change, it sees the group advance into a brand new frontier.
Opening with eerily twinkling electronics before advancing into a chous so booming it'll shake your very foundations, this is Ezra Furman at his most boundary pushing yet. The track arrives complete with a video Furman states is "dedicated to Heather Heyer, killed the day before we started filming."
"This is a song of paranoia, escape, and ecstatic ego-death," Furman describes. "We decided to make a video about me and my angel companion escaping from modern-day Nazis."
"The video shoot took place over five days in the small town of Strasburg, Virginia on 13 August, the day after the Charlottesville 'Unite The Right' rally turned fatally violent, a 90-minute drive away. This was a coincidence. We had planned to shoot there long before we knew there was a far-right rally scheduled to take place in Charlottesville. So we had the strange experience of making a music video about fleeing white supremacists in Virginia at the moment that the whole country was talking about them, and as the president refused to unequivocally condemn white supremacy."
"It is terrible to watch America’s white supremacist roots flourish like this again, not to mention the accompanying misogyny, queerphobia, and anti-Semitism. I intend this song, video and my entire career as a protest against those attitudes."
"This video is about how fear turns to violence. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t advocate shooting a gun into a car full of people, whether they are enraged white supremacists or not. The video is a fantasy and a nightmare. I think it matches the cultural nightmare we are now living through, one from which I pray we can soon wake up."
