Voice Over

“To me, the singing is not just a piece in the puzzle, but the soul of the song. I start with it, and work around it to create the best possible setting,” Doni explains, noting how this takes full advantage of the flexibility of new technologies. “Now that every musician records his part separately in his own home or studio, no arrangement has to be set in stone.” Sometimes, after having recorded a version of the song, he’ll decide that the demo was actually more impactful than the new recording. Maybe the scale needs to be changed a little up or down? Modulated to sound more mellow? He’ll play with it again, not shying away from rerecording when necessary.

For Lev Chodosh, since Baruch is both the composer and the singer, even the songs themselves were subject to change. “The songs were composed from ten years to ten minutes before the album was recorded,” he says. For example, the refrain of “Zeh Hakatan” was improvised and added to the song right in the recording studio, and for “Yihiyu Leratzon,” Baruch had written the high part years ago, but the decision to add a touch of English to take it up a notch was a last-minute stroke of inspiration.

For this album, Doni and Baruch used a small group chat to run the songs and their various versions by others. Baruch stresses that the best listeners are not necessarily musical people, but just “regular” music fans who can pick out whether a song moves them or talks to them. “Once you put a song out there, it’s very hard to get honest feedback because people know you’ve invested and tell you they like it. But before a release, you can get the truth, and we were absolutely open to taking opinions into account.”

Doni says that his biggest challenge on this project was to give the album diversity, flavor, and depth. “When a singer selects songs from different composers, variety is a given. In this case, with Baruch as the composer of all his material, it was harder to achieve it. But he outdid himself creatively. We also gave each song color and diversity through collaborations with Shmueli Ungar, Eitan Katz, and the Shir V’Shevach Boys Choir. Yisroel Lamm wrote string arrangements and intros for two of the songs, and you can sense his expert touch. On “Zeh Hakatan,” you can hear that the arrangement has some of the energy of Shmueli’s own dance hits. “Moshcheini” was originally played faster, but when Eitan came in and sat down to play it on his guitar, he naturally slowed it down, and we went along with that.”