October 9, 2025 • 27 mins
Interview with singer ASAF AVIDAN - On the phone with David Serero - The Culture News
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ladies and gentlemen, Good afternoon, welcome of the Culture News.
My name is David survi Raw and I have the
pleasure to have to DOELLN light Heart Radio on the
Culture News the one, the only, the great, the wonderful
singer Assaf Avidan Assaf. How are you today?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I'm good, David, thank you for having.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Me as it's really really an honor to have you.
Thank you so so, so so much. So. You know,
there's a question I love to ask, even to people
who are very well advanced in the career, I love
to ask them, who are you?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh my lord, that is a very deep question, very quick.
Who am I? I mean, I can tell you what
I'm not. I'm not a musician, I'm not a member
of a specific citizenship, I'm not all these things. All
these external labels seem restricting to me. So I don't
(01:00):
know that I am any one of these things. I'm
not my profession, and I'm not where I live, and
I'm not I try to be what I see as
a morally good and somehow humble person. That's what I
try to be. I don't know how close I get
(01:21):
or how eternally far I fall short, but that's what
I try to be. But I am. I do make
music in the last twenty years, so I would say
that I participate in the act of making music. I
would say that I was born in Israel, raised in Jamaica.
My parents were I mean they were originally from Israel,
(01:42):
but they lived for a brazilion years in New York.
So my musical influences are from whatever albums they brought
back from the seventies in the States. And now I
live in Europe for well over a decade. So I
lived in Italy for many years and now in France,
so I don't really know what I am or who
(02:05):
I am.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
That's beautiful. So now you live in France, how do
you like it? I'm sure you eat good food. You
didn't get any weight, So you have to tell me
your secret, because every time I go back home to Paris,
I eat. I come back to New York, I'm like
a big potato. So what is you going to like?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
The secret is that I am vegan, so I don't
enjoy ninety percent of the French petaste sries, and I
didn't enjoy the Italian cheeses and meats and stuff. So
I get away with it. But yeah, I live in France.
I enjoy it very much. I moved here to get
away from people. Actually I live in the middle of
(02:44):
the countryside. I have sixteen hectares. I don't know it's
I don't know how that translates to acres, but it's
a lot of land and it's very raw and natural.
And we have me and my partner here because both vegan.
We rescue animals from the different industries that they suffer
(03:07):
and so so that's what we do when I'm not
touring with my music. So we have like a small
rescue farm here and just stare at trees and rocks.
Mainly it's very quiet here, very very.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
You know, it's interesting when I ask who you are
because even your music is very hard to define it,
you know, especially the last new album, which I again
really love. I'm a huge fan of yours. So this
is your first album in five years. This is this
great new album called Unfurl and Furl, which is being
(03:46):
released on the October tenth. I've been waiting for that day.
Please October tenth arrive as soon as soon as possible.
So how would you describe your your music? Because you
go from from jazz to funk, to to to up
to electro to almost jungle music sometimes lounge al So,
(04:10):
what would you say, is your is your genre?
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I would say that, just like I told you in
the beginning about the constraints of labeling feel weird to me.
In my personal life, I wouldn't constrain myself musically. I
feel like I'm a college artist. I've always been. I
started off for I guess most American audiences would not
know who I am, but I started off more generic.
(04:37):
I would say folk rock, blues kind of thing, very
influenced by sixties blues rock. Then kind of went into
a bit more of a Dylan Leonard Cohen kind of
singer songwriter phase. And then I decided to move on
and I found more influences from every single thing I
(04:58):
could put my my hands on, So electronic music, rap music,
jazz music, film music, a lot a lot of film,
like the soundtrack influences. I don't know. So I if
I needed to describe myself, I would say that I'm
a collage artist, and that every theme of an album
(05:24):
demands different colors, a different palette, and so I just
use I kind of walk around, pick and choosing whatever
seems like the right brush and the right color in
order to portray a certain emotion.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Wow, I love how you said collage. You know, I've
never heard that before. I think this is absolutely brilliant
because what is also very unique with you and what
I was able to hear on the new album is
that you put collage even within the song. You know,
it's not just one song is a different color. Is
that you also start a song like this, you know
(06:02):
the move of your turn and you know it's like
a story. So that leads to also my question that
I have for you in terms of how you you
create your own music, Like how you you do it?
Do you say, oh, here there is a turning point,
like what's going on in your mind when you are
created a new song? This is af avidan?
Speaker 2 (06:23):
There is a there is a process in which it's
gonna sound a bit. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking it,
but the process is one that the artist is a shaman.
He walks between the world of the living and the
world of the dead, between the here and the eternal.
You know, he needs to or they need to go
(06:44):
through the passage in order to seek something that is
deep down and is more real than the reality that
we live in. So you can call it the subconscious,
you can call it the divine, you can call it
whatever you want to call it. But one must exercise
some power of deconstructing the self, letting go of all
(07:09):
the things that you think are you, in order to
dig deeper in this excavation, dig deeper and deeper until
you find something that you feel is a nugget of truth.
That's really what I feel. My job is to find
moments of honesty that I feel that if I am
(07:30):
brave enough to describe this honesty to myself, maybe others
can find themselves through that. That I think is the job.
And so the process is a very painful one because
every time you walk close to truth, there is a
river that sweeps you into a current of melancholy, into
(07:52):
I don't know, it's just And there's also this thing
that you start off with grand desires for your music,
for your song, for whatever it is that you're trying
to create, and then you imagine there's a whole ocean
in front of you, and you're like, okay, I want
to show people this ocean, and you grab with your feeble,
(08:13):
small hands as much of the ocean as you can,
and you start running and it drips and it drips
and it drips, and by the end of the day,
when you after your labor and you've been running all day,
all you have to show is one little drop in
your hands, and you say, oh, this is the ocean,
And you're trying to describe the ocean through that one
drop that you have left in your hands. That's how
(08:34):
it feels when I write. It feels that I'm always
light years away from what I set out to describe.
But once you let go of that megalomanic need to
describe it as precisely as you thought you needed to,
there's a freedom that says, Okay, I cannot show you
(08:56):
the entire ocean. I can show you one drop here,
and one little drop there, and one little drop there,
and maybe that will be enough to ignite an image
of an ocean in your own deep soul. So that's
how it feels like. It feels like a lot of
self pain and a lot of throwing myself against the
(09:21):
wall until there is a bloodstain beautiful enough that I
feel is sufficient.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
That's a beautiful way to say. Music. Do you regret
sometimes that you open yourself so much into a song.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Never. Never, that's the mission, the mission. There's moments of
grace where I feel I have been sufficiently open. Most
of the time, I feel that I've been cheating. You know, water,
if we're talking about water, when it flows, it finds
the easiest course to follow, and then slowly, you know,
once there's a little stream, then you know, more water
(09:59):
flows through it and it becomes a river, and then
it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's where
the water will go. That's how songwriting is. If you're
not careful, you're just going to be repeating yourself over
and over because it's the easiest. You have muscle memory
and you have the brain memory that you know how
to write a song by Now it's your eighth album,
and so I feel that's that's a very dangerous place
(10:22):
for the artist to be. So, if anything, what I
cry about is the moments that I haven't found enough
honesty and enough vulnerability within myself.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
I see, thank you so much for sharing that. So
that's your unfall, will be your hamminy album, your eight albums,
eight albums.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
You're counting also because I've worked as a stuff of
it Done, and I worked with as a staff of
it Done in the Mojo is a different band that
I had so count.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
So what was the reaction of the very very first album?
What do you recall of it when it came out?
Because I remember it came like a big sensation, like
you couldn't open I was in Paris at that time,
you couldn't bit of French magazine and people talking about
you and playing and this was and I remember all
the press that you know, it's very hard to have
(11:09):
them talk about music, even the fashion press like maybe
Vogue or magazines like that, they were talking about you.
What was the reaction for you at that moment?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
It all happened very fast, you know. I didn't start
up as a musician. I studied cinema and then I
studied animation and I was an animator for a long
time and that was kind of my profession until my
late twenties. And then I transitioned into music. And the
minute I picked up a guitar and started singing, everything
kind of avalanched very quickly, and so I found myself
(11:41):
in a reality that I found normal because I didn't
know anything else. I didn't know any other musician friends,
and I didn't see that they were struggling to get
to those places. And I thought, Okay, you release an album,
people write about it, people are interested, you perform. And
so I think only lately when I've transitioned into you know,
(12:07):
not just a linear graph going up and up and
up in a career, you reached some places, as you know,
even the greatest artists, even like people like Dylan, have
in years that they were you know, like they were
outside the eye of the public. So I think I've
reached a place in my career that I'm not sure
I'm going down, but I think I'm in some kind
(12:28):
of plateau. The audience that knows me knows me. I'm
appreciating in the circles, but I'm not like the big
new thing you know that everybody's talking about, which is
okay with me, But it is making me appreciate that
time of how quickly things happened and how how much
(12:51):
reaction was to something that I did, and as you heard,
what I do is very very personal. The idea that
people react to it so strongly is still magical to
me to this day. You know, like fifteen years later.
I mean it's still there is something very beautiful about it.
(13:13):
You want to think that humans possess all humans. It
doesn't matter if we're in Africa, Asia, America, whatever, that
we have a universal core, that something in our soul
reverberates in the same way. It doesn't matter our age,
(13:35):
or our sexuality, or religion or our ethnicity. You want
to imagine that as a liberal person. And then when
you write something so personal about your own personal, shitty
experience in your own personal, shitty little world, and then
you find that people of different cultures and different ages,
(13:58):
and different sexes and different everything, and they relate to
it in the same way. It doesn't just flatter me
as a as a singer songwriter. It it redeems a
part of humans that that I'm searching for, you know,
Like it means that we all rhyme, we reverberate in
(14:20):
the same manner when our souls are touched. And that's
such a beautiful understanding in a world that is more
and more and more divisive, and more and more looking
for the differences between people. You know, as cliche as cliches,
it is as it sounds, you know, an artist needs
(14:43):
to be a bridge and not a wall, and and
and and and that that's the feeling when when people
react to your music, if it's if it's personal and
honest and still people are touched by it, you realize
that something within you is the same as with and
that's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Beautiful. So, last two questions before I'll let you enjoy
the nice weather and the nice bagette. You know, So,
what is the message that you want people to take
away from this new album, unfer and the new singles
compared to the previous albums.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
I'm not sure it's a message, but it's experience. The
experience that I felt. It's very philosophical. I was reading
Carl Jung and I was reading Joseph Campbell, and I
was thinking about the subconscious and the conscious, all these
things that we discussed. There is a meditative moment where
(15:44):
you finally are able to not just talk about the
infinite the divine, you really feel it. Some people need,
you know, drugs to get there. Some people need meditation
to get there. Some people just need to read poetry
or see a beautiful flower and they suddenly have a moment.
(16:04):
Some people need to feel love, whatever it is that
you do in order to get yourself there. That moment
of rapture between the self and the everything that's not
the self, that self and the other is such a
grand moment. That's the what I want people to feel,
the awe, the beauty of it, and also the fear
(16:25):
of it, because once you let go into the infinite,
you are letting go of yourself. So I want people
just to experience a complex set of emotions where beauty
and fear and suffering and hope are all intermixed together
(16:48):
and they are all equally justified.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
I love that. Thank you so much again. So last question,
can you I want to know more about your your voice?
You know so, being you know an oppress singer myself,
I'm always interested about the vocal training but also the
vocal function of a singer. So how do you think vocally?
(17:14):
What is your vocal approach and how did you train?
How do you practice? Tell us about all your vocal life.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
If I can say, I think, first of all, one
must have fathers and mothers. One has to look at
the previous people. And if I find Billie Holidays singing favorable,
if I find Nina Simon intriguing, if I find even
(17:43):
Bob Dylan, I look into what it is that I
love about other artists, and then there is a part
of imitation, but hopefully you get to a place where
you find your own voice to forkly and physically. I
think this. My secret is never to try to be beautiful.
(18:06):
That's not the key. The key is to be honest.
And the human voice has such a wide spectrum, has
such a wide variety. You can whisper, you can scream,
you can you can go high, you can go low,
you can bring them in and you can you can
you know, surprise them going towards them, all these things.
I mean, the human voice is in and of itself
(18:32):
an entire language to be, to be I don't know, explored.
And so that's how I feel with it. And so
I'm not afraid if I don't sound beautiful, or if
I'm not singing correctly, or if I think that's my
only two cents to to to give anybody that tries
(18:55):
to take like don't ever try to sound beautiful, and
don't ever try to sound too much like somebody else.
Try to find what it is that you produce that
makes you feel, Oh, that's the feeling I was trying
to portray there it is. You know, it sounds weird,
(19:17):
it sounds smaller than I thought it would be my
you know, it doesn't sound like the what I'm hearing
on the pop radio. But it is something that translates
my inner self into the outer world. It's just a tool,
and it's a very, very very varied tool. So just
(19:41):
explore it. And then there's technical things. Sleep well, drink
a lot of water. Everything else is bullshit. You know,
I've been touring for, as I said, fifteen years. There
were years where I did, you know, like one hundred
and fifty one hundred and eighty shows a year, and
the only thing that really works. I've tried everything, because
(20:03):
you know, at some point your voice gets tricky. It's
a very fragile, you know, musical instrument. And I've tried
everything from you know, like hardcore medicine to the Eastern
remedies to whatever. And the only thing that truly, truly,
truly works is really eight hours of sleep at night
(20:26):
and a lot of water during the day. Yeah, and
the rest just and then you can fuck up your
voice as much as you want.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Well, I hope you won't fuck up your voice me too,
we need it. And a lot of people started to
say about your voice, that he has this andro genous
sound that is with some people that is in man,
is it a woman? That there is this question? How
do you feel about that? Was it?
Speaker 2 (20:55):
What?
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Also? You wanted to create that little question mark about?
Speaker 2 (20:58):
You know, I didn't try to create it, but I
have no problem with it. It's certainly you know, I'm
not offended by it, and I'm not complimented by it.
People's reactions are their own, and I do realize that
my voice, especially my singing voice, is very peculiar and ambivalent.
(21:22):
You know, people think, you know, I'm I'm I don't
know African American female singer from the sixties. You know,
I've heard that A bazilion times great. You know, I
don't know. I mean, my I can say that my
favorite vocalists are female vocalists. But you know there's been
(21:44):
so many, you know, when you listen to Robert Plant,
when you listen to even more modern stuff like Jack White,
Jack White sings very high and I would say androgynists,
you know, Freddie Mercury. You know, there's so many insanely
good singers that sing in a high range. I really
(22:08):
I never thought about it. I just sing. I had
a lot of especially in the beginning, I needed to
outlet a lot of internal struggles and pains, and it
just came out louder and higher and louder and higher,
almost like a screeching cat, you know, like and I'm
okay with that. It depicts what I needed to depict,
(22:33):
and that's what I needed to be. Then whatever people
want to call it afterwards is up to them.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
I thought you'd be listening to a lot of castrati,
you know, a lot of counter tenor in the bar rock.
Did you listen to these guys or it's actually not your.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
It's not really my forte, but I do listen. But
there's a lot of things that I listened to that
have these kinds of you know, if you listen to
I don't know, Mexican folk music, you know they have
these beautiful falsetto uh and and high timber kind of reach.
And and also Italian folk that I listened to when
(23:13):
I was in Italy. I think, you know, I think
it's it's very much this idea of masculinity through the voices.
I'm pretty sure it's exaggerated. I'm like, there's so many
male vocalists through as you say, classical music until present
(23:37):
day that that people use their wide range of voices,
and also, you know, and also the opposite, you know,
female vocalists that that that want to use a lower register.
I think it's all this restriction and all this labeling
doesn't really help the artistic endeavor of you know, opening
up to two more options.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Yeah, I agree with you, But you think in falsetto
and then you bring a little bit more body or
this is like your chest voice, or you think more yeah,
and then you push it to give it more color.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
I think it would have been way easier for me
if I were like a falsetto guy, you know, like
tom Yorke kind of thing where you use very little
power and you direct it, you know, and I can falsetto.
But falsetto is not what I'm going for. I want
to go high and make it hurt, you know. I
love the idea that I'm not sure if I can
(24:36):
reach that note. I love the idea that I need
to press more and give even more power in order
to reach that high. I love that my voice breaks
because it feels like I feel inside, you know, So
that's what I like. I sometimes, you know, if you hear,
(24:58):
I have eight albums, so if you hear, I'm sure
there's like two or three songs with falsettos, and I'm
sure there is, like I don't know, some songs that
I go in a lower register, and in this album
you can even hear me going through the different registers
even in one song. It's just right. And that's what
I'm trying to depict, both with the musical writing and
(25:20):
the way I sing it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
All right, Well, listen, I told you last two questions,
but I ask.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
You so.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
This is this is the Moroccan way, you know what
I mean. So I want to say how honored I
am to have you today on the show. You are
such a legend, such a wonderful artist, and you brought
something new. You know. You made the choice of being singular,
and we're so glad for that. And it's true, you know,
(25:49):
when you see today, everybody sound the same, you know,
but you made that choice and I want to applaud
you for that and you continue with that choice and
these album that I need everybody to go to check.
It's absolutely wonderful. It's called Unfurled. This is your first
album in five years, What You So Wrong, which is
(26:14):
being released October tenth. So on October tenth, I want
everybody to be in front of the computer, the phones,
whatever you want and listen to this album to purchase
it as self have done. He is such a wonderful audience.
He has this new track, Unfurling Dream. This is a
beautiful album was recorded in south of France. That you
(26:38):
will hear this beautiful orchestra forty piece live orchestra this
is and you hear it, you hear the sound. If
you purchase your album, I can assure you're worth every
penny of it because he really puts the effort and
definitely anything that he can forty piece live orchestra, you know,
(26:58):
with the rhythm section of jazz. This. This is a
beautiful album. This is a movie. You're listening. This is
such a beautiful thing. I hope you will do a
musical very soon. I hope you will do musical film
very soon because that's where also your music belongs. So
I want to say thank you. I want to say
thank you to our dear friend Brendan Borg and all
(27:23):
the best to you, Asa David.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
You've been too kind. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
It's an honor, ladies, a gentleman. My name is David,
so I had the pleasure to add today on the
Culture News on iHeart Radio, the one and only asaf
Avid Dani has released his new album called on Firl,
being released on October tenth. Stay tuned with us right
now you're listening his new singles. Stay tune with us.
It's a beautiful day.
Ladies and gentlemen, Good afternoon, welcome of the Culture News.
My name is David survi Raw and I have the
pleasure to have to DOELLN light Heart Radio on the
Culture News the one, the only, the great, the wonderful
singer Assaf Avidan Assaf. How are you today?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I'm good, David, thank you for having.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Me as it's really really an honor to have you.
Thank you so so, so so much. So. You know,
there's a question I love to ask, even to people
who are very well advanced in the career, I love
to ask them, who are you?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh my lord, that is a very deep question, very quick.
Who am I? I mean, I can tell you what
I'm not. I'm not a musician, I'm not a member
of a specific citizenship, I'm not all these things. All
these external labels seem restricting to me. So I don't
(01:00):
know that I am any one of these things. I'm
not my profession, and I'm not where I live, and
I'm not I try to be what I see as
a morally good and somehow humble person. That's what I
try to be. I don't know how close I get
(01:21):
or how eternally far I fall short, but that's what
I try to be. But I am. I do make
music in the last twenty years, so I would say
that I participate in the act of making music. I
would say that I was born in Israel, raised in Jamaica.
My parents were I mean they were originally from Israel,
(01:42):
but they lived for a brazilion years in New York.
So my musical influences are from whatever albums they brought
back from the seventies in the States. And now I
live in Europe for well over a decade. So I
lived in Italy for many years and now in France,
so I don't really know what I am or who
(02:05):
I am.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
That's beautiful. So now you live in France, how do
you like it? I'm sure you eat good food. You
didn't get any weight, So you have to tell me
your secret, because every time I go back home to Paris,
I eat. I come back to New York, I'm like
a big potato. So what is you going to like?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
The secret is that I am vegan, so I don't
enjoy ninety percent of the French petaste sries, and I
didn't enjoy the Italian cheeses and meats and stuff. So
I get away with it. But yeah, I live in France.
I enjoy it very much. I moved here to get
away from people. Actually I live in the middle of
(02:44):
the countryside. I have sixteen hectares. I don't know it's
I don't know how that translates to acres, but it's
a lot of land and it's very raw and natural.
And we have me and my partner here because both vegan.
We rescue animals from the different industries that they suffer
(03:07):
and so so that's what we do when I'm not
touring with my music. So we have like a small
rescue farm here and just stare at trees and rocks.
Mainly it's very quiet here, very very.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
You know, it's interesting when I ask who you are
because even your music is very hard to define it,
you know, especially the last new album, which I again
really love. I'm a huge fan of yours. So this
is your first album in five years. This is this
great new album called Unfurl and Furl, which is being
(03:46):
released on the October tenth. I've been waiting for that day.
Please October tenth arrive as soon as soon as possible.
So how would you describe your your music? Because you
go from from jazz to funk, to to to up
to electro to almost jungle music sometimes lounge al So,
(04:10):
what would you say, is your is your genre?
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I would say that, just like I told you in
the beginning about the constraints of labeling feel weird to me.
In my personal life, I wouldn't constrain myself musically. I
feel like I'm a college artist. I've always been. I
started off for I guess most American audiences would not
know who I am, but I started off more generic.
(04:37):
I would say folk rock, blues kind of thing, very
influenced by sixties blues rock. Then kind of went into
a bit more of a Dylan Leonard Cohen kind of
singer songwriter phase. And then I decided to move on
and I found more influences from every single thing I
(04:58):
could put my my hands on, So electronic music, rap music,
jazz music, film music, a lot a lot of film,
like the soundtrack influences. I don't know. So I if
I needed to describe myself, I would say that I'm
a collage artist, and that every theme of an album
(05:24):
demands different colors, a different palette, and so I just
use I kind of walk around, pick and choosing whatever
seems like the right brush and the right color in
order to portray a certain emotion.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Wow, I love how you said collage. You know, I've
never heard that before. I think this is absolutely brilliant
because what is also very unique with you and what
I was able to hear on the new album is
that you put collage even within the song. You know,
it's not just one song is a different color. Is
that you also start a song like this, you know
(06:02):
the move of your turn and you know it's like
a story. So that leads to also my question that
I have for you in terms of how you you
create your own music, Like how you you do it?
Do you say, oh, here there is a turning point,
like what's going on in your mind when you are
created a new song? This is af avidan?
Speaker 2 (06:23):
There is a there is a process in which it's
gonna sound a bit. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking it,
but the process is one that the artist is a shaman.
He walks between the world of the living and the
world of the dead, between the here and the eternal.
You know, he needs to or they need to go
(06:44):
through the passage in order to seek something that is
deep down and is more real than the reality that
we live in. So you can call it the subconscious,
you can call it the divine, you can call it
whatever you want to call it. But one must exercise
some power of deconstructing the self, letting go of all
(07:09):
the things that you think are you, in order to
dig deeper in this excavation, dig deeper and deeper until
you find something that you feel is a nugget of truth.
That's really what I feel. My job is to find
moments of honesty that I feel that if I am
(07:30):
brave enough to describe this honesty to myself, maybe others
can find themselves through that. That I think is the job.
And so the process is a very painful one because
every time you walk close to truth, there is a
river that sweeps you into a current of melancholy, into
(07:52):
I don't know, it's just And there's also this thing
that you start off with grand desires for your music,
for your song, for whatever it is that you're trying
to create, and then you imagine there's a whole ocean
in front of you, and you're like, okay, I want
to show people this ocean, and you grab with your feeble,
(08:13):
small hands as much of the ocean as you can,
and you start running and it drips and it drips
and it drips, and by the end of the day,
when you after your labor and you've been running all day,
all you have to show is one little drop in
your hands, and you say, oh, this is the ocean,
And you're trying to describe the ocean through that one
drop that you have left in your hands. That's how
(08:34):
it feels when I write. It feels that I'm always
light years away from what I set out to describe.
But once you let go of that megalomanic need to
describe it as precisely as you thought you needed to,
there's a freedom that says, Okay, I cannot show you
(08:56):
the entire ocean. I can show you one drop here,
and one little drop there, and one little drop there,
and maybe that will be enough to ignite an image
of an ocean in your own deep soul. So that's
how it feels like. It feels like a lot of
self pain and a lot of throwing myself against the
(09:21):
wall until there is a bloodstain beautiful enough that I
feel is sufficient.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
That's a beautiful way to say. Music. Do you regret
sometimes that you open yourself so much into a song.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Never. Never, that's the mission, the mission. There's moments of
grace where I feel I have been sufficiently open. Most
of the time, I feel that I've been cheating. You know, water,
if we're talking about water, when it flows, it finds
the easiest course to follow, and then slowly, you know,
once there's a little stream, then you know, more water
(09:59):
flows through it and it becomes a river, and then
it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's where
the water will go. That's how songwriting is. If you're
not careful, you're just going to be repeating yourself over
and over because it's the easiest. You have muscle memory
and you have the brain memory that you know how
to write a song by Now it's your eighth album,
and so I feel that's that's a very dangerous place
(10:22):
for the artist to be. So, if anything, what I
cry about is the moments that I haven't found enough
honesty and enough vulnerability within myself.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
I see, thank you so much for sharing that. So
that's your unfall, will be your hamminy album, your eight albums,
eight albums.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
You're counting also because I've worked as a stuff of
it Done, and I worked with as a staff of
it Done in the Mojo is a different band that
I had so count.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
So what was the reaction of the very very first album?
What do you recall of it when it came out?
Because I remember it came like a big sensation, like
you couldn't open I was in Paris at that time,
you couldn't bit of French magazine and people talking about
you and playing and this was and I remember all
the press that you know, it's very hard to have
(11:09):
them talk about music, even the fashion press like maybe
Vogue or magazines like that, they were talking about you.
What was the reaction for you at that moment?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
It all happened very fast, you know. I didn't start
up as a musician. I studied cinema and then I
studied animation and I was an animator for a long
time and that was kind of my profession until my
late twenties. And then I transitioned into music. And the
minute I picked up a guitar and started singing, everything
kind of avalanched very quickly, and so I found myself
(11:41):
in a reality that I found normal because I didn't
know anything else. I didn't know any other musician friends,
and I didn't see that they were struggling to get
to those places. And I thought, Okay, you release an album,
people write about it, people are interested, you perform. And
so I think only lately when I've transitioned into you know,
(12:07):
not just a linear graph going up and up and
up in a career, you reached some places, as you know,
even the greatest artists, even like people like Dylan, have
in years that they were you know, like they were
outside the eye of the public. So I think I've
reached a place in my career that I'm not sure
I'm going down, but I think I'm in some kind
(12:28):
of plateau. The audience that knows me knows me. I'm
appreciating in the circles, but I'm not like the big
new thing you know that everybody's talking about, which is
okay with me, But it is making me appreciate that
time of how quickly things happened and how how much
(12:51):
reaction was to something that I did, and as you heard,
what I do is very very personal. The idea that
people react to it so strongly is still magical to
me to this day. You know, like fifteen years later.
I mean it's still there is something very beautiful about it.
(13:13):
You want to think that humans possess all humans. It
doesn't matter if we're in Africa, Asia, America, whatever, that
we have a universal core, that something in our soul
reverberates in the same way. It doesn't matter our age,
(13:35):
or our sexuality, or religion or our ethnicity. You want
to imagine that as a liberal person. And then when
you write something so personal about your own personal, shitty
experience in your own personal, shitty little world, and then
you find that people of different cultures and different ages,
(13:58):
and different sexes and different everything, and they relate to
it in the same way. It doesn't just flatter me
as a as a singer songwriter. It it redeems a
part of humans that that I'm searching for, you know,
Like it means that we all rhyme, we reverberate in
(14:20):
the same manner when our souls are touched. And that's
such a beautiful understanding in a world that is more
and more and more divisive, and more and more looking
for the differences between people. You know, as cliche as cliches,
it is as it sounds, you know, an artist needs
(14:43):
to be a bridge and not a wall, and and
and and and that that's the feeling when when people
react to your music, if it's if it's personal and
honest and still people are touched by it, you realize
that something within you is the same as with and
that's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Beautiful. So, last two questions before I'll let you enjoy
the nice weather and the nice bagette. You know, So,
what is the message that you want people to take
away from this new album, unfer and the new singles
compared to the previous albums.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
I'm not sure it's a message, but it's experience. The
experience that I felt. It's very philosophical. I was reading
Carl Jung and I was reading Joseph Campbell, and I
was thinking about the subconscious and the conscious, all these
things that we discussed. There is a meditative moment where
(15:44):
you finally are able to not just talk about the
infinite the divine, you really feel it. Some people need,
you know, drugs to get there. Some people need meditation
to get there. Some people just need to read poetry
or see a beautiful flower and they suddenly have a moment.
(16:04):
Some people need to feel love, whatever it is that
you do in order to get yourself there. That moment
of rapture between the self and the everything that's not
the self, that self and the other is such a
grand moment. That's the what I want people to feel,
the awe, the beauty of it, and also the fear
(16:25):
of it, because once you let go into the infinite,
you are letting go of yourself. So I want people
just to experience a complex set of emotions where beauty
and fear and suffering and hope are all intermixed together
(16:48):
and they are all equally justified.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
I love that. Thank you so much again. So last question,
can you I want to know more about your your voice?
You know so, being you know an oppress singer myself,
I'm always interested about the vocal training but also the
vocal function of a singer. So how do you think vocally?
(17:14):
What is your vocal approach and how did you train?
How do you practice? Tell us about all your vocal life.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
If I can say, I think, first of all, one
must have fathers and mothers. One has to look at
the previous people. And if I find Billie Holidays singing favorable,
if I find Nina Simon intriguing, if I find even
(17:43):
Bob Dylan, I look into what it is that I
love about other artists, and then there is a part
of imitation, but hopefully you get to a place where
you find your own voice to forkly and physically. I
think this. My secret is never to try to be beautiful.
(18:06):
That's not the key. The key is to be honest.
And the human voice has such a wide spectrum, has
such a wide variety. You can whisper, you can scream,
you can you can go high, you can go low,
you can bring them in and you can you can
you know, surprise them going towards them, all these things.
I mean, the human voice is in and of itself
(18:32):
an entire language to be, to be I don't know, explored.
And so that's how I feel with it. And so
I'm not afraid if I don't sound beautiful, or if
I'm not singing correctly, or if I think that's my
only two cents to to to give anybody that tries
(18:55):
to take like don't ever try to sound beautiful, and
don't ever try to sound too much like somebody else.
Try to find what it is that you produce that
makes you feel, Oh, that's the feeling I was trying
to portray there it is. You know, it sounds weird,
(19:17):
it sounds smaller than I thought it would be my
you know, it doesn't sound like the what I'm hearing
on the pop radio. But it is something that translates
my inner self into the outer world. It's just a tool,
and it's a very, very very varied tool. So just
(19:41):
explore it. And then there's technical things. Sleep well, drink
a lot of water. Everything else is bullshit. You know,
I've been touring for, as I said, fifteen years. There
were years where I did, you know, like one hundred
and fifty one hundred and eighty shows a year, and
the only thing that really works. I've tried everything, because
(20:03):
you know, at some point your voice gets tricky. It's
a very fragile, you know, musical instrument. And I've tried
everything from you know, like hardcore medicine to the Eastern
remedies to whatever. And the only thing that truly, truly,
truly works is really eight hours of sleep at night
(20:26):
and a lot of water during the day. Yeah, and
the rest just and then you can fuck up your
voice as much as you want.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Well, I hope you won't fuck up your voice me too,
we need it. And a lot of people started to
say about your voice, that he has this andro genous
sound that is with some people that is in man,
is it a woman? That there is this question? How
do you feel about that? Was it?
Speaker 2 (20:55):
What?
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Also? You wanted to create that little question mark about?
Speaker 2 (20:58):
You know, I didn't try to create it, but I
have no problem with it. It's certainly you know, I'm
not offended by it, and I'm not complimented by it.
People's reactions are their own, and I do realize that
my voice, especially my singing voice, is very peculiar and ambivalent.
(21:22):
You know, people think, you know, I'm I'm I don't
know African American female singer from the sixties. You know,
I've heard that A bazilion times great. You know, I
don't know. I mean, my I can say that my
favorite vocalists are female vocalists. But you know there's been
(21:44):
so many, you know, when you listen to Robert Plant,
when you listen to even more modern stuff like Jack White,
Jack White sings very high and I would say androgynists,
you know, Freddie Mercury. You know, there's so many insanely
good singers that sing in a high range. I really
(22:08):
I never thought about it. I just sing. I had
a lot of especially in the beginning, I needed to
outlet a lot of internal struggles and pains, and it
just came out louder and higher and louder and higher,
almost like a screeching cat, you know, like and I'm
okay with that. It depicts what I needed to depict,
(22:33):
and that's what I needed to be. Then whatever people
want to call it afterwards is up to them.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
I thought you'd be listening to a lot of castrati,
you know, a lot of counter tenor in the bar rock.
Did you listen to these guys or it's actually not your.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
It's not really my forte, but I do listen. But
there's a lot of things that I listened to that
have these kinds of you know, if you listen to
I don't know, Mexican folk music, you know they have
these beautiful falsetto uh and and high timber kind of reach.
And and also Italian folk that I listened to when
(23:13):
I was in Italy. I think, you know, I think
it's it's very much this idea of masculinity through the voices.
I'm pretty sure it's exaggerated. I'm like, there's so many
male vocalists through as you say, classical music until present
(23:37):
day that that people use their wide range of voices,
and also, you know, and also the opposite, you know,
female vocalists that that that want to use a lower register.
I think it's all this restriction and all this labeling
doesn't really help the artistic endeavor of you know, opening
up to two more options.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Yeah, I agree with you, But you think in falsetto
and then you bring a little bit more body or
this is like your chest voice, or you think more yeah,
and then you push it to give it more color.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
I think it would have been way easier for me
if I were like a falsetto guy, you know, like
tom Yorke kind of thing where you use very little
power and you direct it, you know, and I can falsetto.
But falsetto is not what I'm going for. I want
to go high and make it hurt, you know. I
love the idea that I'm not sure if I can
(24:36):
reach that note. I love the idea that I need
to press more and give even more power in order
to reach that high. I love that my voice breaks
because it feels like I feel inside, you know, So
that's what I like. I sometimes, you know, if you hear,
(24:58):
I have eight albums, so if you hear, I'm sure
there's like two or three songs with falsettos, and I'm
sure there is, like I don't know, some songs that
I go in a lower register, and in this album
you can even hear me going through the different registers
even in one song. It's just right. And that's what
I'm trying to depict, both with the musical writing and
(25:20):
the way I sing it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
All right, Well, listen, I told you last two questions,
but I ask.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
You so.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
This is this is the Moroccan way, you know what
I mean. So I want to say how honored I
am to have you today on the show. You are
such a legend, such a wonderful artist, and you brought
something new. You know. You made the choice of being singular,
and we're so glad for that. And it's true, you know,
(25:49):
when you see today, everybody sound the same, you know,
but you made that choice and I want to applaud
you for that and you continue with that choice and
these album that I need everybody to go to check.
It's absolutely wonderful. It's called Unfurled. This is your first
album in five years, What You So Wrong, which is
(26:14):
being released October tenth. So on October tenth, I want
everybody to be in front of the computer, the phones,
whatever you want and listen to this album to purchase
it as self have done. He is such a wonderful audience.
He has this new track, Unfurling Dream. This is a
beautiful album was recorded in south of France. That you
(26:38):
will hear this beautiful orchestra forty piece live orchestra this
is and you hear it, you hear the sound. If
you purchase your album, I can assure you're worth every
penny of it because he really puts the effort and
definitely anything that he can forty piece live orchestra, you know,
(26:58):
with the rhythm section of jazz. This. This is a
beautiful album. This is a movie. You're listening. This is
such a beautiful thing. I hope you will do a
musical very soon. I hope you will do musical film
very soon because that's where also your music belongs. So
I want to say thank you. I want to say
thank you to our dear friend Brendan Borg and all
(27:23):
the best to you, Asa David.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
You've been too kind. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
It's an honor, ladies, a gentleman. My name is David,
so I had the pleasure to add today on the
Culture News on iHeart Radio, the one and only asaf
Avid Dani has released his new album called on Firl,
being released on October tenth. Stay tuned with us right
now you're listening his new singles. Stay tune with us.
It's a beautiful day.
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