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Yael Naim (Hebrew: יעל נעים) is a French-Israeli singer and songwriter who rose to fame in 2008, after her song "New Soul" was used by Apple in an advertising campaign for its MacBook Air. The success of this song made her the first Israeli solo artist to have a top ten hit in the United States. The song peaked at #7 on the Billboard Hot 100. “It’s a dream I almost gave up on along the way”, says Yael Naim about her first album released by Tôt ou Tard. Without meeting the multi-instrumentalist David Donatien, to whom she dedicated two years and who illuminated the artist with his talents as arranger and director, it’s true that this project would have been forgotten at the back of a cupboard. Blessed with an unsettlingly pure voice and an incredible agility at composition, the Israeli singer with her jet-black hair fumbled a long time before succeeding with this collection of ballads that meander through folk and pop, with an elegiac frugality and multi-coloured fantasy. If the creation of this record was long and painful, the birth of its author as an artistic personality seems even more miraculous today, in a domain where everything seems to have been already sung or played. To the point where with Yael Naim music that was once simply beautiful has now magically found a lost grace. Born in 1978 in Paris, Yael spent a large part of her childhood in Ramat Hacharon, a small town not far from Tel Aviv. Her Tunisian parents went to live there when she was four years old. “I remember there was a little organ 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.” Ten years of conservatory and classical piano lessons followed. “After I saw the film, Amadeus, there was only one thing I wanted to do and that was to write symphonies.” Her idyll with classical music quickly revealed another. “At home my father would play his Beatles records and that’s how I discovered Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road, aged 12. And also when I forgot my classical ambitions.” Yael began composing songs which helped get over her timidity… With adolescence she discovered a voice and leant towards a vocal clarity by listening to Aretha Franklin. Aged 18 having come across a Joni Mitchell record she dared to push herself even further with her own lyrics. Music never left her and her curiosity never waned. In a jazz club in Tel Aviv she met Wynton Marsalis’ musicians and performed some concerts with them. Even the two years of military service (which Israeli women are obliged to do) didn’t stop her musical journey and she managed to form a group called The Anti Collision who played in clubs around the country. “After all these years everything was a bit chaotic inside. My classical education, my love of pop, the jazz, the folk... I didn’t know how to bring it all together, but I knew I wanted to write songs.” It was an invitation to a charity concert that brought her to Paris in 2000 and saw things really start rolling. During the show, she was noticed by producers and four days later she had signed a contract with EMI and had an album on the boil. Her name really began to circulate after she was spotted by director Elie Chouraqui who asked her to play the role of Miriam (Moses’ sister) in the Ten Commandments and then she was approached to do the original sound track for the film, Harrison’s Flowers... “I hesitated but I don’t regret having accepted because it was an amazing thing to live through for two and a half years.” Her first album, In a Man’s Womb, recorded between Paris and Los Angeles was finally released in 2001. For her it was a failure, “A huge deception because I’d given everything up for it. I suddenly lost a lot of confidence in myself which really led me to question everything.” So the young woman with the golden voice was plunged into a period of disillusion concerning her record, the end of a relationship and a career ranging from jobs to survive (another musical, Gladiator) to edgier collaborations (the album Ready Made FC). Then there was the meeting in 2004 with David Donatien who was accompanying a friend on stage they had in common. A West Indian drummer, David had spent the last 15 years working with an extraordinary variety of people from Bernard Lavilliers to the electro musician Junior Jack, from Wassis Diop to Malia. As changeable with instruments as he is with genres, he moves from traditional drum kits to electronic tools. David has always made a point of not stopping at just the one vocation of rhythm, but throws himself into the role of arranger too. His skill and imagination has literally made Yael’s musical universe bloom by giving a direction to her music and an aesthetic to her songs. Equally it was David who encouraged Yael to sing in Hebrew, something she had strictly denied herself up until now. Their complicity and complementary styles are such that now they prefer to present themselves as a group. To begin with this album was meant to focus solely on guitar and vocals. But little by little Yael and David padded out the sonorous architecture and formed a team. Xavier Tribolet (drums), Laurent David (bass), Voed Nir (cello) and Julien Feltin (electric guitar) joined them as well as S.Husky Huskolds for the mix (Tom Waits, Fiona Apple, Me’Shell Ndegeocello). The instrumentation is pretty minimalist here yet incredibly colourful with the participation of the brass section, the Mellotron, the cello and some programming. Recorded in the young woman’s flat in Paris the 13 songs contain a part of Yael happy (Endless Song of Happiness) and melancholic (Paris, Lonely) existence. Some of them, like Yashanti or Lachlom dive into dreams, others like Baboker bathe in the serenity found at the break of day. Shelcha looks at a love with no future. The most outrageous is of course the cover of Britney Spears’ Toxic. Listening to these little marvels could possibly remind us of old friends like Tori Amos or Fiona Apple. Yet the ensemble isn’t witness to excessive borrowing or exaggerated sonorous marking, but quite the contrary revealing a sincerity and absolute musical clarity. In fact it is quite astonishing how something that sounds so familiar could seduce our ears with such a nude and original beauty. Perhaps it is due to the dominance of Hebrew, a language so rarely sung in this context, that comes across as universal as Cesaria Evora’s Portuguese Creole? Or is it the simply the very freshness exhaled by the personality of this young woman who discovers in New Soul - sung in English with a contagious optimism – that she is “a new soul, in this foreign world, hoping to learn a little”? “It was when I was really young that I sincerely believed to be an old soul reincarnated and I could even say it gave me a sense of superiority over others. But then as I subsequently did everything the wrong way round I concluded that it was actually my first time on earth and that I should learn to be a more humble.” On Far Far, she herself delivers this other perspective, that of a little girl who chases her dreams but who can only achieve them by accepting the “beautiful mess inside”. In short both her own personal history and that of this simply magical record. Yael Naïm was born in Paris in 1979 to Tunisian, Sephardi-Jewish parents. At the age of four, she moved with her family to Ramat HaSharon, Israel, where she would spend her childhood. She served in the Israel Defence Force as a soloist in the Israel Air Force Orchestra. She began her singing career with a part in the musical Les Dix Commandements and her first solo album, In a Man's Womb (recorded in Los Angeles, CA, with Kamil Rustam), was released in 2001. She also sang the song "You Disappear" by Bruno Coulais for the film Harrison's Flowers. In her early work she was credited simply as Yaël. She also performed a duet with Din Din Aviv titled "Mashmauyot". The latest Apple commercial features an ultra-thin laptop and a fresh hit song, "New Soul." Steve Jobs hand-picked the song for the launch of the new MacBook. "New Soul" is from Israeli singer/songwriter Yael Naim's just-released self-titled album, and the song has jumped to the top of the Billboard charts, making Naim the first Israeli solo artist to have a Top 10 hit in the U.S. Naim says that she was surprised to see how the song was used in the ad, but thought it was fitting for it to be used in a computer commercial: "Today, computers help us making the music," she says. "It's really a tool." "New Soul" is about self-reflection. She says she was inspired to write it after a conversation with a friend about reincarnation. "I thought I was an old soul, and that I knew life, but then starting the real life I figured I am completely new," Naim says. "I mean, everything was a mess and I did a lot of mistakes. So it was just looking back and say, 'Okay, let's start again, it's okay.'" "Paris" is the first song Naim ever wrote in Hebrew. She wrote it after she'd moved to the French capital. Even though she was at a high point in her career, she felt that she had left her home in Israel too soon. Naim spent two years in Paris working with percussionist David Donatien to craft the rest of her album, which is written in English, French, and Hebrew. When asked which language feels most comfortable for her, she says one isn't better than the others; they're just different. "English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination," she says. "And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words. Hebrew is my first language, so it's really the most personal and the most simple. When I write in Hebrew, I don't look for sophistication in music; it's just pure emotion that comes out." Naïm joined forces with percussionist David Donatien, and over a period of two years they arranged and recorded thirteen of Naïm's songs in a studio in Naïm's apartment in Paris, and these were released as her second album, Yael Naïm, on October 22, 2007, on the Tôt ou tard label. The songs are in French, English, and Hebrew and received critical acclaim, and the album entered the French album chart at #11 the week after its release. The style has been described as having a touch of folk and a touch of jazz, with mysterious and evocative words sung with a delicate and intentionally slightly husky voice. In January 2008, Apple featured her song "New Soul" in its debut commercial for the MacBook Air laptop. Steve Jobs himself picked the song "New Soul" for the launch of the MacBook Air. Owing to high U.S. digital sales, the song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 for the chart week of February 16, 2008, at #9, becoming Naïm's first U.S. top ten single, and making her the first Israeli solo artist to ever have a top ten hit in the United States. New Soul would go up to #7 in the next week. |
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