Cover Me

I never thought I would perform cover songs.

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I was always against it.

 

After all, what for? The songs have already been written, and I won't ride on someone else's success. I don't believe in that approach. Besides, I was never interested in performing things that had already been written by another artist's hand.

 

But one morning I woke up with a song in my head. The song was called "Ha'Mlatzah Le Yomit" ("Daily Recommendation") by Shalom Hanoch, from his album "Erev Erev" ("Evening by Evening"), released somewhere in the late 1990s. I felt I needed to perform it, and I didn't understand why. I felt I had something to say about it, and that I had a different more intimate way to deliver this song. That, in fact, is how the album "Cover Me" was born. From that one song, a whole array of songs emerged - songs that had influenced me, that I loved and felt close to, out of a great love for both the artists themselves and the songs they created. I wanted to illuminate a side that had been hidden within them - a side that, for me, represents both simplicity and complexity, intimacy, all at once, without compromise.

 

It's interesting, because I didn't think I could be so wrong about other people's songs. Through this working process of roughly a year, I found that I was challenged no less than in writing and performing my own songs - and most importantly, I loved the direction this album was taking me.

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A little on the making of the album:

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The album itself was recorded entirely live - piano and vocals - with no edits, no corrections, and no AI. In one take. All in one piece. Afterwards, I wrote additional arrangements, with the emphasis on the cello arrangements recorded by the talented Yoed Nir. Additional musicians also participate in the album - amongst them Keren Taperberg, who guests on drums on the Beatles' "Something," and Ronen Roth, who contributed his engineering skills in that same session. The arrangement and mixing process took place afterward, over the course of nearly a year, with endless precision.

 

This is an album made out of a great love for songs that have accompanied me for decades - an album that forever changed the way I see the concept of "cover songs."