How Do You Know if You're Listening to Furry Music?
Open your music library. Hit "shuffle" and close your eyes. Can you tell which of the songs are made by furries, and which ones aren't?
Open your music library. Hit "shuffle" and close your eyes. Can you tell which of the songs are made by furries, and which ones aren't?
Better yet, pick any song from your library and show it to a friend, would they be able to tell if it's furry music? Even without cover art or song titles? Can something sound furry?
I don't think so. But I think there's a myriad of ways to see a "furry sound" in music. Here's just a few.
Spoken or sung lyrics introduce a lot of thematic flexibility to a song. When it comes to furries, these lyrics could be about fictional characters, real lived experiences, introspection on being a furry, or really anything coming from a furry perspective.
To give some of my favourite examples of lyrics, songs like UNMARKETABLE have first person lyrics as their character of choice, with lines like "Chewing on a powerline, zaps running through me head to tail [...] to hell with all the execs though, I rather be a gecko" that wonderfully express the self in the space of cartoony exaggeration.
lizzy’s personal army
Other songs like Same Shapes convey the writer's emotions when creating their fursona for the first time. It's a song overcome with sincerity, caught in the transition from viewing the self as human to viewing the self as a creature.
Ember’s Furry Music Comp
And of course, you can write about yourself as a human, and not include any of this signposting to listeners. But I think the juiciest kind are ones with subtlety. The best example of this is from a song you've likely heard referenced before:
I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends. I never came out to my friends, we were all on Skype. And I laughed and changed the subject. She said "What's with this dog motif?" I said, "DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING AGAINST DOGS?"
Beach Life-in-Death (2011), by Car Seat Headrest
When I first heard this lyric in 2015, it was the most apt description I'd heard of being a closeted queer kid online. It's an anxious lyric that finds the courage to talk about its queerness just a little, and its furriness even less. It conveys shame in a way that I felt was so immediately "furry" that I felt seen through the song.
Not every song by a furry artist has to signpost its lyrics with furry indicators, it just helps other furries empathize with the music more quickly.
But what about instrumental music? Could a recording of someone playing the piano count as "furry music"?
I think music is inherently ambiguous, you couldn't tell who was playing without the context of seeing Bucktown Tiger's fursuit, or knowing this piece was performed at a furry convention, or perhaps hearing the audience of "awoos" in the background. But I feel like the more I look into furry music, the harder it is to ignore the role that presentation and context plays into why it feels meaningful. It's a lot easier to find music that's sincere to you when you share its niche. Community plays a big role in how we connect to art like this. We never needed lyrics to start dancing to furry DJs, after all.
But say you really wanted your instrumental music to feel furry, no sampling of Disney movies, no confusion for being just "music about animals". I think a curious case is Trio Menagerie who not only perform at conventions regularly, but they also cover songs from pop culture. They're very well-aware that many furries are also nerds!
And we can't forget about furry music made for other furry works. Artists like Anthemics have built a name for themselves by composing for dozens of furry visual novels and furry video games.
Before I conclude things, I want to mention something about the notion that music should even try to be outwardly "furry" at all. It's fair to assume that furry music should have lyrics about furries, or be in furry projects, or have your fursona on the cover art. Yes, these things help identify furry music at a glance, but if all furry music was like that, would there be room for more subtle furry ideas? Or should we only listen to music that tells us exactly who the music is for?
Let me repeat that, do we really want to listen to music that tells us in explicit, overt terms that a furry made it? And that we're furries for listening to it?
I don't see as much value in viewing "furry music" as a binary qualifier with lots of requirements to reach. You shouldn't need to be outspoken about your furry identity to be included in a broader furry community. Nor should you need to "tone down" your furry attitude if being proud about your fursona and your identity is an inherent part of the music you make.
There's no specific or "correct" image of being a furry, and that's part of why I love celebrating the vastness of furry music so much. The songs from furries just feel more authentic to me because I understand where they're coming from. DIY escapes the mass-appeal of the music machine and lends itself to so much more interesting artistry. For me, that's the biggest draw toward listening to and exploring the world of furry music.
Is there a furry sound? No. But you can try, and I think other people are receptive to when that kind of effort to connect with the listener is put in. Intentionally or not. Not to mention, there's a whole additional history of therian music to talk about, I just kept my focus to furries and hope it connected to whatever "being a furry" means to you. I hope that you can take this article with you in understanding why some songs feel extra special to you.