Wearing a simple blue cotton dress, Yael Naim flits waiflike onto the stage at the Bowery Ballroom around 9:45pm, grabbing her acoustic guitar and nimbly hopping onto a stool where she sits bathed in a warm yellow spotlight that might as well be the adoration of her audience. To call them “fans” might be a tad premature at this stage, it being one of her first ever US shows, and her self-titled collaboration with David Donatien having been released only on Tuesday.
Indeed, waiting outside the Bowery before the show, I overhear more than one conversation that indicates many of these concertgoers came tonight because they heard that one song. One twenty-something student-type says he checked out a few of her songs on MySpace, while his companion appears to be here based on buzz alone. They agree that the song “from the Apple commercial” is “really great.”
Inside, the sold-out crowd is similarly young, mixed-race, and slightly female-heavy. I note a solid showing of Eastern Europeans, which might be the Regina Spektor factor. Yet to call these people merely curious scenesters would also be an understatement. They have been locked in place for a while, standing firm to make sure they don’t lose their precious sliver of unobstructed view. There is an unmitigated air of excitement when Yael does make her ethereal entrance. “Oh, she’s so cute!” a few people squawk; having never set eyes on her before, there is something gratifying about seeing the enchanting voice physically manifest.
At the opening chords of “Paris,” the first track on her album, there are some delighted gasps of recognition at the song, which is sung in two of Naim’s native tongues, French and Hebrew (the latter, endearingly, with a French accent). Then, half way through, as she is nearing the French part of the refrain, she leans away from the mic — boldly, I think, for someone who has never played this city before — and invites the audience to finish the verse. They do.
“Thank you so much for coming!” she gasps afterwards, explaining in her heavy French accent how especially glad she is to be here after spending so many months holed up in the living room of her tiny Paris apartment with Donatien working on these songs “for an album we didn’t even know if it was going to be released.” With that, she launches into “Far Far,” an autobiographical account of a girl with music inside her that’s bursting to get out:
“How can you stay inside? / There’s a beautiful mess inside.”
This beautiful mess is what she and Donatien made in that Paris apartment. After a personally disappointing stab at recording with 2001’s In a Man’s Womb, Naim retreated from music, disheartened. Meeting Donatien has been the inspiration she needed. Listed as “Artistic Director” on the album, the multi-instrumentalist took her exquisitely simple compositions and added strings, horns, choirs, effects, even encouraging her to sing in Hebrew for the first time. When they were finished, they put it all back together, and what they have is a complicated, beautiful mess that sounds effortless.
Donatien, for his part, remains an invisible force in the music even in a live setting. He stays far behind her on stage, easy to miss physically, but he is there with every swell, twist and turn of the music.
Naim is no fool; she knows what brought the crowd here in the first place, and she takes great pleasure in teasing us, seated at her piano now and playfully tapping out the first three (now almost universally recognizable) notes of “New Soul,” then stopping as cheers erupt. “What is that song?” she asks gleefully. “I used to think I was an old soul,” Naim explains, adding “which means you’re really smart. But then, real life begins…”
Real life for Naim has changed irrevocably these past months. With “New Soul” being featured in Apple’s MacBook Air ad campaign before her name had ever been whispered in the US, it became her first top 40 US hit long before the album was released. The song tiptoes into your head before breaking into a whimsical waltz that subsides but never leaves.
In observing Naim in the flesh, you get all the proof you need that she is more than just one song. For one thing, her album doesn’t illustrate quite how powerful her voice is. At times boasting a soaring aria and others a bluesy roar, I’m reminded of Alanis Morrissette in her role as God in the movie Ðogma, with her earth-shattering voice (minus the exploding human heads). Also in her favor for staying power, Naim is delectably funny — whether she’s doing her “Dance du Canard” (duck dance, literally) or rhyming “mon coeur” and “fleur” with “for sure” — and charismatic, as she manages to keep wholly engaged a crowd that until this instant undoubtedly have had no real connection with her beyond a commercial and the internet.
She ends the set in this way, connected, having her now adoring fans take the place of her missing cellist by becoming her choir. After teaching the females in the room the aria, she instructs the males to take a lower pitch and we gladly oblige as her string section while she stands in the center of the stage again, leading us like a tiny fairy-conductor. Afterwards, those more-than-just-curious-scenesters and not-quite-fans-yet float out, probably deeply in love.
–Julia Clarke
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We love Yael! She is amazing, and her songs are so loving and touching. Even her version of Toxic makes a not-so-great song great!
Comment by Chris 03.24.08 @ 1:39 pm