Nighttime music to face the unknown
IN 2008, Yael Naim was catapulted from little-known singer-songwriter to the charts around the world. Apple had selected her song New Soul — a lively piano-led pop number — to soundtrack the TV advertisement launching their new MacBook Air. “It was really surreal,” she recalls. “We’d just finished recording with nothing, and suddenly we were virtually No 1 all over.” That song has now racked up more than 86 million streams on Spotify.
Naim, whose parents moved the family from Paris to Ramat HaSharon in Israel when she was four, started playing piano aged ten and never stopped. “I was in love with this instrument,” she recalls with a smile. “I just wanted to play all the time.”
Inspired by the film Amadeus about Mozart’s life, she began to compose classical music and performed as a soloist in the Israeli Air Force Orchestra. But it was at 12, when she discovered her parents’ videos of The Beatles and Elvis Presley at that she started writing songs and singing. She returned to Paris aged 20 for a concert and decided to stay.
Homesick and reeling from a breakup, she wrote ballads in Hebrew and as she set out to record an album, she met Grammy-winning musician and producer David Donatien, who she married and has collaborated with ever since.
Her new album, NightSongs, however, was written, arranged and produced entirely alone — a first for Naim. That it doesn’t share the upbeat pop vibe of her breakthrough single is partly because it was recorded in the twilight hours; there’s a crepuscular feel to the absorbing album’s delicately wrought, intimate songs.
The new way of writing was born out of a period of self discovery, following two major events and the need to reset. The birth of her second child was followed, five months later, by the death of her father Daniel, to whom the album’s tender opening song is dedicated. Also, Naim was edging towards 40, and felt plagued by the overwhelming sense that life wasn’t quite as she wanted it.
“It was about ‘what do I want to accomplish in my life?’, and that if there’s something
I want to do I need to do it and stop saying that I will do it later,” she says. She cites Joni Mitchell and Sufjan
Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell album as her most frequently played.
The latter she calls
“the most true, fragile and immersive project, something that you dive into”.
It was that “deep-diving” that she wanted from her new album. “I think for NightSongs, I just wanted to go completely out of the game — to do something that is immersive, connected to something really deep inside. It was to create a pause and stop the running… to stop being Superwoman. I wanted out of it.” So it made sense to record at night, when the world around is suspended. “It’s a stolen space that’s completely yours. It’s like this project was born from the night, from the reflection from the time alone, from the hidden part.” Having built success in France (her last album, 2015’s Older, went to No.12 in the French charts), Naim was understandably fearful about the change in direction. “There was the question about losing everything I built for 15/20 years; everything was about to stop and to change. And then, too many things changed at once like birth, death, the professional change, turning 40…” Her record label were, at first, dubious about her new sound. But while there was for some time no outlet for the songs, Naim found herself unable to write anything else. “I tried but I was just waking up and composing for this record every day.” And one day, as the album progressed, she talked to her label once again. “And then it worked.”
It’s impossible not to equate the sense of solitude and self-reflection of NightSongs with the current situation as the coronavirus forces the world into isolation. We spoke as Pesach approached and she lamented that she wouldn’t be able to keep her annual tradition of visiting her mother in Israel for the seder.
“Suddenly everybody is forced to stop and to face the unknown. Actually it’s always the unknown, it’s just we invented things that give the illusion that we can control things — we buy things and we plan. We forget the real nature of things. But we are able to create a life where we consume less, and help each other more. No matter how many houses and things we have, we enjoy simple things like sitting in the sun, the feeling of love, tasting something nice.”
It’s not the ideal time to be releasing an album, when artists aren’t able to go on tour to promote it; Naim’s shows have been postponed to autumn. But the philosophical Naim considers it fitting for her musings on the futility of planning, and the importance of making the best of what you have.
“Maybe it’s the destiny of this project,” she says. “The music will find its way.”
I hope it does.
NightSongs is out now