Interview With Aaron Razel

all our stuff is available now on uh cd baby on amazon i'm on itunes all my cds i think uh about 10 i was counting and i'm going to start by talking to each one a little bit this is the album and whoever knows it's fine a little bit so the album cover was made by my friend mystical artist and kabbalist avraham loventhal and it represents the burning bush the burning bush of course is a symbol for amis for us that we are never consumed even though we're burning in fire and i took it to places that i once wasn't uh not exactly in it but i was near a pigua you know a bomb that went off in jerusalem and the bus was number 18 which is high and i saw like the you know the smoke and everything and it was terrible and devastating of course but suddenly i felt i was looking at the burning bush that came to me like this kind of revelation you know i'm looking at something like that's that's what we are we're going through stuff the galoot but still hashem promises us that we will never consume i was 22 years old and i wasn't fat and i came to that just to you know escape from jerusalem in my childhood in which is happy childhood but you know you have to get away sometimes to find yourself and to express yourself and and the way that's fine on the bus my first song was i was born which is a seminar so that was you leaving leaving your table right exactly and uh you know it's like a little bit naive aloe i think you know it was only like four musicians we record you know like all these stories of nostalgic we recorded like in you know two three days suddenly some kids came so i said you want to sing with me so they came out of the track it was very like spontaneous and fun i have great memories of recording it this is my guitar one of the songs i like on the album is moshe it's a very mystical midrash about where moshe was buried and how come we don't know where he was buried and i was still living in spa learning in yeshiva and most of the songs were like you know kind of very spotty very airy very simple and i mean the chords are not simple my my chords are always pretty jazzy but one of the songs i want to talk about in the album is the song it's based on a majority very mystical amazing midges that i was heard by breslav hassett and it blew my mind talking about a man who learned all his life from the talmud that's all he did he was liv living in a little room he was sitting and learning all his life when he died apparently to his funeral amongst all the rabbis who came was one young lady weeping sobbing so they didn't know how come she got here how did she get here what is she doing here how did she know this guy said they asked her what's your name and she said my name is and then they turned around and she disappeared and they knew that the massachusetts came down to cry on him that touched me so much that i made a kind of rap over the whole matrix which was very weird in those days i think a breakthrough kind of uh in the jewish music yeah i didn't think i for me was natural that's what i just like you know weird text and to make songs out of them where's the text found it's from a midwestern huma apparently it disappeared and that like the woman in the midration also disappeared it's not because you know there was a lot of different handwriting and but it was saved because which was also a mystical scholar in spot wrote a book called menorah oh and he quotes that midrash from huma and he that starts like this pretty obscure yeah amazing foreign next album so that was like uh probably my breakthrough because before that i was like just like this new weird artist who has saw like seminars and weird texts but like so then one morning i woke up in my house and spot and you know it's fun as a place where like hippies come and bali chuba young people so i woke up in my house i had a sunday so like a lot of people in my in my room i didn't know who they are like but like it's fine you don't say like what are you doing you just get up and make a coffee and sit next to them as if it's natural like 15 20 people came to your house visitors i don't know so then it came to me to write a song about the situation and the melody came i didn't have the words yet i didn't know what the words but if but wherever i played it people would start to sing with it they felt this like a very kind of catchy actually different words at the beginning the first words were because there were so many people in that room so i remember there's a phrase from puke one of the miracles in the basement was that there were millions of people nobody said hey nobody complained that like it's kwashi so they said that was a miracle so that was it started like this i'm just going to play it it's a scoop nobody ever heard it it's a real scoop like this nobody understands those words and then one time i was in rosh hashanah and maeron very shimmer i came across a mag and inside there's a very famous piyut song called like that and it fit me exactly to this word that's how the song was born and i really i i'm thankful to hashem that he gave me those that song because i became a big hit and you know i was playing it all over israel gilas is close and every time i play this song i really feel like it convinces me that it's true that's amazing a lot of times artists you know they hear their albums and they like it but they feel like that they're better on shows the live show is very special so i wanted to make a just uh album that um kind of conveys you know the spirit of all the all the songs that people are dancing and and the energy and the simha and the special thing that you could uh get on a from um from a live show so i took my band and uh with help of my good friends around hovitz and ariel pelly we organized a show on the elf submarine and uh recorded and the song even uh there was a young artist then that came just to israel that time daniel zamir who today of course is uh one of the world leading jazz saxophone players he plays around this album too and i'll just play the beginning of [ __ ] do she album i got a big thanks to the community of h kodesh in woodmere new york which i started to be connected to the rabbi there around moshe weinberger and i did a few concerts there and then um kai david for me where he was performing there and we decided to make an album thanks to [ __ ] katz the holy rabbi [ __ ] katsu collected so many of unrecorded shlomondi gulen the songs there are really so beautiful i remember sitting in the house of [ __ ] canton he's playing me some you know unknown i was feeling like he's revealing me secrets of the torah like he's i'm silly he's like hey this is another yari born curry born of [ __ ] that nobody ever heard goes like this starts from of course it's an aramaic hello album just started as you know everybody's connected to purim we get crazy and poor and we you know it's a time that we kind of know that everything we do is for the good that's that's poor's about right that there's no good or bad all is one everything is one so you get a little crazy and i always write like a song around purim time so it started like one year i decided to just just to give a make a poem song on the radio and the idea was like you know how they say like this there comes a time there will be a hunger or not for bread or water but for spirituality so the to see this song is like like i'm sending a song to my friends a poem song so that became a tradition every year almost every year i wrote a song for poor and uh released it and then i made the album it has ten songs even the last song is a really funny song it's my brother jonathan brazile is on it and one of them i recorded in rocky rocky studio and basically it's like really happy crazy you know it's good to put on in your perm suit or something like that about after gush katif and i changed a little bit in my writing there's two songs here that i dedicated i wrote about the music one of them is it's called when they'll come and to evacuate my house i wanted actually on the day before um corbin i was on the beach there and i wrote it and it's like how like you know if things could like this could happen so just gives me shizuka amuna because i know that and only vado hashem is one and also um funny songs like the krembo song that became like a crazy song it's actually i have this kind of funny thing to to write you know the weirdest text i could find i'm making two songs and this was a shiloh that i actually saw in one of those shabbos newspapers and which somebody asked the question you know cremo is a very israeli thing that has like a cream on top and a biscuit on the bottom so he said what if you don't like the biscuit is it boiling it's like is it astr to take it off on shabbos actually the whole song is a metaphor it's a kabbalistic metaphor for good and bad in life and and i don't want to get into here because you know it's very deep kabbalah and everybody sees these things on the internet i don't want to get to the wrong places you know so uh there's only one on one i could talk about this stuff but anyway and there's also a song called shabbat shabbat coming to shabbat there's a beautiful uh video with the broad family on it like this a foreign speaking of shabbos speaking about shabbos how can i not forget one of my great moments in life making an album with rocky ziegler while the shabbos which is you know if we would have done a free pie of pizza with the album it would have been the bigger hit in telepathy no so last album i'm going to jump into is my outlandish album so that's represented my litfish dry boring serious heavy side just joking but you know lately i started a little more in the cold i started to buy my clothes and bazaar straws instead of like going to all kind of hippie indian clothing wearing that you you know i start to dress like a cola guy and then get more serious my kids go to hater i can't go in with all kind of for your next album are you going to shave your beard and i say what's on the windows shades window shades window shades yes i used to buy my clothes like window shade stores and like like pants out of them and what kind of tunicas and adelaide citizens but now i'm more serious so this is called i'm staying based in midrish and it's like a story about this guy it's actually me you know they tell him do all kinds of stuff he will play any good name but he all i want to do is sit with mcmahon with my thoughts with my stender my friends with my jabuta's steigen try translating part of it in english go like this they told me go to alaska do some cubes spread out the light hashem got so much knockouts when his lost sons returned to its right he said go dance in the streets and those stickers books and all kinds of from spiritual stuff when you light up a jewish soul you can't get enough you told me bring your guitar with some candles play some hasidic including it's the call of our time the need of our generation spirituality and inspiration i said to them i'm sure it's really nice talking to you guys i want to wish you a great day great time with learning some torah down into hashem connecting yourself to allah hashem as soon as i played in this album uh live in jerusalem just don't deal with the coffee