Fury Young & “Freer”: A musicians’ journey
By Royal Young
FREER Records’ founder Fury Young’s latest single, “Freer”
“…Evolution is never over. I like that there’s a humbleness to it. The lyrics say freer, happier, wiser, like the process is always ongoing. We’re all just trying to get a little bit more er.” - Fury
In October 2021, as our father lay dying in a downtown Manhattan hospital, I walked with my sibling Fury Young towards the East River. I felt a strange giddiness, a lifetime of masking was over. Even through my surreal grief, I felt free.
“Can I ask you something weird?” I said to Fury, “Do you feel kind of euphoric?”
“I’m so glad you said something.” He replied, “I do.”
Our family has always been complicated, and Fury has always been the one I could be most open with about myself. Growing up a non-binary Jewish kid in New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1980s and 90s, I always felt I had to hide who I was to be safe and loved. Our father, Lee Brozgol, a closeted bisexual artist and social worker, both inspired and darkened myself and my sibling Fury’s personal and creative paths.
When Fury started the Die Jim Crow project in 2013, I witnessed first-hand a combination of our street-life adjacent upbringing, strong community roots, creative passions, and a fierce sense of fighting injustice focused into a musical project that would change the world. It made sense to me as Fury’s sibling that he would be so passionate about lifting up the voices of people considered outsiders by society.
Over the intervening decade, it has been my honor to grow with Fury and the Die Jim Crow / FREER Records project as its Publicist. Getting to know and work with our prison-impacted artists, as well as the community around them, has expanded my worldview, and made me a more engaged person.
Now, Fury is stepping into his own spotlight as a musician and poetic lyricist. On October 3, 2023, honoring two years since the day of our father’s passing, Fury released his first song on streaming, “X-Ray.”
With influences ranging from Bon Iver to Krayzie Bone, Fury hopes to ignite and impassion fans of all stripes with an acoustic futuristic sound that takes listeners out of the city and into the clouds. Local heroes, endless highways, and widescreen wonders fill the canvas of these records, delivered in addictive, raw melodies.
I spoke with my sibling over a deep, cross-country phone call to dive into his latest track “Freer,” a song which inspired the label’s new name. We delved into the imagination behind his music, connections with social justice work, personal growth journey, and the liberation that can come after grief.
ROYAL YOUNG: What does the word or concept of freer mean to you in art?
FURY YOUNG: To continue making art that is you pushing limits. That needs to reflect in the way you live your life too. You need to always be growing as a person and as an artist. So being freer is about trying to expand yourself. Expand your experiences. Expand your art practices.
With each song I put out, I wouldn't say it feels more effortless, but it’s a self-exploration. It’s a universe you’re piecing together. It's a conversation with the audience and yourself, and that’s been the most exciting thing about putting out music. You realize little by little, gradually who you are as an artist.
ROYAL: You talk about how personal growth mirrors and enables your creative journey. The more you’re able to share your authentic creative voice with the world, the more you can step into that and embrace your own freeness. So I'm wondering if your work with FREER Records helped inspire you to take that step of finding your own voice?
FURY: Yeah, it’s been a process. When I started Die Jim Crow, which has become FREER, I was already making songs. The entire time, I've been writing poetry and songs. I have a book of poems published called Meat and Milk. I was playing a lot of music live in Bushwick and on the subway in New York. And probably have about eighty songs stockpiled from the last ten years. I’ve always wanted to do it. But my work with Die Jim Crow took up so much effort, so much time, a lot of TLC, plus blood, sweat and tears.
ROYAL: Sounds to me like you were in a cocoon, building skills and experiences that got you to this moment of embracing your own creative freedom.
FURY: That is super true. Big shout out to Matthew Cullen and Ted Jamison and people that I’ve been working with in the label side of things who are also musicians and engineers, who have helped me finish projects by having more technical know-how. With me having gotten the lay of the land with how the music industry works, how music production works for a decade, it was the best training. The label still takes up a huge amount of time, but now I am savvy enough that I am able to do both.
ROYAL: What were some of your personal inspirations behind your song “Freer”?
FURY: So I wrote this song in September of 2022. I had been asked by a museum to put together a presentation around the theme of tradition interrupted and what that meant to me. Our dad had recently died, and as a family we were going through a lot of stuff about who our father was. He was a guy who struggled with being himself a lot. So my draft for the presentation started out very personal, and as I was reading it back to myself it just felt too raw. Too much like stuff I was still processing.
It was too personal to be compelling. Sometimes you realize, this is something I have to work through before I can get other people to care about it.
Photo: Mickey Hoover
ROYAL: Yeah I think when you’re still in the epicenter of grief, you still need time before you can share that with others in a meaningful way.
FURY: Yeah, and I did include our dad in the [Tradition Interrupted] talk in a really cool way, talking about how he didn’t step on the glass, a Jewish custom, at our parent’s wedding, which was a tradition interrupted. But it really ended up with me talking about starting Die Jim Crow.
So, in the process of me doing all this self-discovery through the drafts, I ended up getting this array of angles of looking at my life. As I started getting more mystical and songwriterly about it, I began thinking of other lives, ones I hadn't led, or might have led. When I picked up a guitar and found the chord progression, the first words that literally came out of my mouth were “freer, happier, wiser.” I was really dialed in to that idea, like fuck, that is all i want from life is to be freer, happier and wiser.
ROYAL: How do you feel about the song now being out in the world?
FURY: I feel very grateful. I’ve been working on it for a really long time, it’s my most vulnerable song. it has this kind of War On Drugs sound, one of my favorite bands. You want to walk and run and drive to it. I want to make music that is action-packed and this feels like my first song like that.
ROYAL: Something you’ve talked about a lot in interviews is growing up with a parent who was living in a mental prison, and growing up with people who felt like they could not be themselves. Plus the correlation with working with folks who are locked away and physically stopped from living freer lives. I’d like to talk about that and the power of art to break through it all.
FURY: I think it’s as simple as this one song lyric, “from a place inside i cannot hide.” Our dad had a part of himself that was for the most part hidden, even though he kind of teased his sexuality in his artwork and was in some ways hiding in plain sight. He was open with his life partner, our mom, and he did have some open, though super problematic conversations with us over the years. But the thing is, any degree of hiding is harmful.
So - “from a place inside I cannot hide” - to me means every part of you. It means I am going to be freer in every aspect of my life, now matter how hard that is. Because I saw the damaging aspects of even when you’re kind of hiding, you’re half-in, half-out, it’s almost worse. Not being you is going to have damaging effects on others and maybe most of all, yourself.
ROYAL: As someone myself who is a non-binary person, I have personally experienced the weight of hiding myself for my whole life, and now the freedom not doing that. When you don’t hide, the thing you were ashamed of, conflicted about, willing to allow to devastate your self-perception, the people around you, all of it, truly becomes your power.
Once you give yourself permission to embrace that place inside you cannot hide, it’s like, oh shit this is my superpower. This is my magic, this is beautiful and to be celebrated. So I very much relate to claiming yourself openly, it’s very inspiring.
There’s a sense of community in the song too, once you claim that self-love, you become a light for other people, and you can help them operate from that same place.
FURY: Yeah and BL Shirelle helped with that a lot. As the song was getting closer to getting finished, I realized the hook wasn’t sitting right. I was really unsure about the new chorus, so I hit up BL because we have a good relationship where if one of us is overthinking something, we immediately tell the other one. So I went down to Philly, at her studio Restricted Movement, and she gave me a lot of confidence in the “help me ride” lyric. I’m glad it ended up in the song, because it’s like being freer is an individual thing, but also a collective thing.
ROYAL: When you put in a call to community, which also hearkens to your history with busking, Occupy Wall Street call and response, and local activism, that allows the listener to infuse themselves into the other lyrics.
So when you were talking about how personal grief is, you’re in the tornado of it, and you can’t translate it for others. It sounds like now you’re in a place where you can translate that grief for other people, and it is actually very rousing and inspiring.
FURY: Yeah, and acknowledging that evolution is never over. I like that there’s a humbleness to it. The lyrics say freer, happier, wiser, like the process is always ongoing. We’re all just trying to get a little bit more er.