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| A vibrant new voice from Israel |
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| Monday, 21 July 2008 | |
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Yael Naim took time out
from the Printemps de
Bourges festival to talk to
Nick Rowswell about her
rapid rise to fame
and the US Top Ten.
How many former members of the
Israeli Air Force choir have
enjoyed successful international
musical careers? Well (though I stand to
be corrected on this), it appears that no
one who exercised their vocal talents in
the ranks of the Hel HaAvir choir had
ever actually made it into the charts.
Now, thanks to Yael Naim, this musical
injustice has been put right. The result is a remarkable collection of songs in English and Hebrew. Despite being recorded in Paris, there seems to be very little French influence. “The French influence in the music is really the life, perhaps Parisian life,” said Yael. “I live in Paris. It is an intimate city with great attention to detail. Life in Paris is all about details. For two years, we sat in a small apartment in Paris and life was full of details. The noise from the neighbours, the noise from the birds, even the architecture. I think the city got woven into the music.” A musical tapestry would be a fitting description of the album, Naim bringing together the loose threads of her life. She was born in Paris but the family moved to Israel when she was four. When did the music start? Yael takes up the story. “I remember, as a child, there was a little organ in the house, which I’d tap my fingers on all the time. My interest in the instrument was so obvious. One day I got home from school and there was a real piano in my bedroom.” Classical piano lessons started at the age of nine, but it was later that Yael really got the musical coup de foudre: “I first heard ‘Sergeant Pepper’ when I was 12. The Beatles were the ones who got me writing songs, but then I discovered soul music and jazz – Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday. Thanks to them I became aware of the voice as an instrument in its own right, and I started to work on my own voice. When I was 16 or 17, I discovered Joni Mitchell, Bjork, Nick Drake – all these artists who have their own specific musical universe, and that gave me a really strong feeling that I had to look for something more personal in my music.” So, how did ‘Icon’ come about? “For the album itself, the words had been written long before I met David but he helped give them a musical colour. As for the song ‘New Soul Icon’, I think the story starts a few years ago, before this album. I was quite pretentious; I considered that my soul had lived several musical lives. I was the reincarnation of old musical souls. I also felt that I’d learned all there was to learn in life and in music, there was nothing left. Then I started making this album and discovered that I still had everything to learn. I felt I was born again, a New Soul.” And what about the future? Will there be another album ? “Well, not for the moment, unless we suddenly get some divine inspiration. We’ll just live out the New Soul Era first and see what life holds in store.”
Yael Naim is in concert at just about
every major French festival in July:
2 Paris, 4 Saint-Malo-du-Bois, 5 Paris,
6 Montreux, 11 La Rochelle, 12 Aix-les-
Bains, 17 Carcassonne, 18 Carhaix,
24 Arles, 25 Nice, 26 Lyon, 27 Nyon.
Yael Naim was born in Paris in 1978 to French-Tunisian Jewish parents but brought up in Israel. Yael sang in the Israeli Air Force choir. Her singing career really began when she landed the role of Myriam in the French stage musical ‘The Ten Commandments’. In 2001, her first album ‘In a Man’s Womb’ was released. It did not receive the attention she would have liked, and for the next three years, she ‘survived’on a variety of singing jobs. In 2004, she met David Donatien, they worked on the second album and the rest is history. |
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