"New Soul," the debut single from Yael Naim, has shot to the top of the download charts and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the last few weeks, all based on a 30-second snippet of her song in the Apple campaign for its groovy new superthin notebook.
[From Apple ad creates recognition for Yael Naim]
Admittedly, it's an arresting snippet.
"New Soul" sounds very much like its title: something freshly born. Given Naim's sprightly voice, and the airy instrumentation around it, the recording sounds carbonated. It's a fizzy splash of a thing.
Got this delivered today (actually for D, she's brushing up on her Herbrew), and like it. Infectious Hebrew pop, with some French, and some English. Having heard it close to 43,000 times as part of the Mac Book Air ad might have aided, but the album contains other as good or better songs. Check it out.
It's ironic that Naim has had success using a sound created without commercial expectations. In contrast, her more contrived earlier work bombed.
The 30-year-old got her break during a show in Paris in 2000, when producers saw her and signed her to EMI. But she felt the music she did there was compromised. In 2004, things began to turn around when Naim met Parisian percussionist David Donatien. She played her songs for him and he heard something in them: a rare innocence. "He was the first person to trust me," she says.
They spent the next two years honing their sound, cutting the album entirely on their own with no record company interference. Small wonder there's a playfulness to the arrangements, with lots of quirks. It's a clean, spare sound that almost aches with sincerity. A rare ironic moment finds the pair covering Britney Spears' "Toxic," but their version drains out all the production contrivance. In Naim's hands, "Toxic" becomes another yearning ballad. "It was the most extreme thing I could find in commercial music," says Naim. "It was a funny exercise."
