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Heartbreak and Healing: The Voice of @asafavidanmusic

To see more of Asaf’s photos, head over to @asafavidanmusic on Instagram. For more music stories, check out @music.

The first time singer Asaf Avidan (@asafavidanmusic) performed live was at a dingy venue in Jerusalem. He had only seven or eight tracks to his name at that point, and had to go to 15 bars around the city before finding one that would let him perform them. By the time he got on stage, the event had all the markings of a bad first date.

“I started strumming my guitar, and everybody, even friends, were just talking louder because they couldn’t hear themselves,” recalls Asaf. “I remember sitting there saying, ‘Oh my god, this is going to be hell.’ And then I started singing…”

If you were talking when the first lyrics came tumbling out of Asaf that night, you would have shut up too. Calling his voice “distinctive” doesn’t do it service. It’s high-pitched, ethereal, androgynous –– it creaks and crackles and wails –– and over the last decade, it has turned him into a star, both in his native Israel, and throughout Europe. Asaf still stays humble, though, by capturing the authentic bits and pieces you don’t always associate with rock stars, from sewing a shirt 10 minutes before a show to signing hundreds of CDs for a future giveaway.

“People have this vision or imagination of what rock stardom is,” he says. “I would find myself back in this little scene of loneliness waiting for time to pass or needing to iron my clothes because you crumple them up in your luggage and carry them all around and you have another show the next day and you aren’t going to have time to wash it. I find these little moments so ironically pathetic and beautiful because they are so real.”

The son of diplomat parents, Asaf didn’t start singing or playing music until he was 17. By then, he had moved back to Israel, after spending his childhood years in Jamaica. Even then, he was not interested in pursuing it, instead turning his attention to being an animator. But he would eventually convert to songwriting full time at 26 –– a late start, yes, but one Asaf, now 35, considers an advantage.

“It is a huge whirlwind –– it’s a huge gale trying to carry away particles of you,” he says of the pressures of being a professional musician. “And you have to stay complete and you have to stay whole and you have to understand what it is … I pity people who are not fully baked as mature when they start out.”

Immaturity would have crippled someone in Asaf’s position during the release and subsequent tour of his latest album, Gold Shadow. The record, his second as a solo artist (his previous efforts were with the folk-flecked group, Asaf Avidan and the Mojos), is about Asaf’s previous girlfriend, and their subsequent breakup. But there’s an added emotional twist: his former love is now part of the band, and has been playing the songs Asaf wrote about her on his current tour.

“It’s difficult,” he says. “I mean, it took us a while. There were a couple of months where we really had to separate physically from each other … She always said, ‘I am dreading the day you will write songs about me.’ It was always kind of a running joke. And it finally did happen.”

Knowing that the woman who inspired the album is now performing it herself gives lyrics like “Lately I’ve been picking at the fossil in my throat / it’s hard to stare into the ocean and to try to stay afloat,” an extra emotional punch. They are friends now, but Asaf admits it’s a complicated situation –– not just because she was the reason behind the record, but because she has been a part of his artistic career from the start –– first as a PR agent, then tour manager, then band member.

So far, the deeply personal Gold Shadow has been received warmly, from both critics and audiences alike. He ultimately sees the album as a diary –– a time capsule to a difficult moment in his life that has already passed. It’s certainly more intimate than his previous work. The constant is his voice, which is just as raw and inspiring as it’s always been.

“It is always surprising the more intimate and the more personal something that I do is, in some ironic way, the more accessible it is to others. It strikes some chord in them that I don’t really understand the mechanism of.”

––Instagram @music

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