“We had raised the bar so high with Off the Record that we were working under the pressure of all that highly positive feedback”
It was the first question I asked DONI GROSS and BARUCH LEVINE ahead of the release of their sequel nostalgia album, OFF THE RECORD 2: Didn’t you use up all the good songs on the first album?
“Well,” they say, “when we worked on the first Off the Record, we didn’t know there would be another volume, so we really went all out with the best selections. But after seeing how well the album was received, we decided to do a sequel — and discovered that no, we hadn’t used up all the good ones. There were many more, just waiting in the wings.”
This time around, Doni and Baruch, assisted again by project curator Yaakov Brown, made the decision to select unreservedly again. “We tried to figure out whether it made sense to go all out again, with the best playlist we could compile, or save some material for a future album, third in the series. In the end, we decided to put everything we had (55 tracks) into Volume 2.”
They’ve chosen songs that might jog your memory, but that haven’t played for decades. Some are 1990s-era classics, like Avraham Fried’s “Don’t Hide from Me” and Miami’s “Shabbos Yerushalayim,” and other earlier songs nearly forgotten, such as Tzlil V’Zemer’s “Be a Friend” and “To Love a Fellow Jew,” and one of the greatest oldies, London Pirchei’s “Children of Silence.” Some of the songs fell out of circulation because the original recordings didn’t have the sound quality we’re used to today, or were originally set to simplified arrangements for children’s albums, like “We Can Do Teshuvah” from The Purim Story album.
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