What’s in a Naim?

THANKS FOR THE AD Yael Naim, with collaborator David Donatien, has quickly gained popularity thanks to the MacBook Air campaign.

Photograph: Laurent Seroussi

At the beginning of the year, Apple unveiled the MacBook Air, promoting it with a characteristically sleek commercial starring an unidentified man’s hand, the computer and a pop song. The song, “New Soul,” was written and performed by Yael Naim, a 30-year-old musician of Israeli and French origin. It’s easy to picture Apple’s advertising executives, upon first hearing “New Soul,” leaping out of their chairs with avaricious glee. The tune is fresh yet old-fashioned, featuring Naim wholesomely singing over cheerful piano and trombone. It strikes a tone similar to that of Feist’s “1234,” the dinner-party hit that last year sold untold iPod nanos. Most important, Naim’s song feels no heavier than a hummingbird—almost as light, in fact, as a certain new computer.

As with Feist’s iPod ode, listeners instantly embraced Naim’s MacBook jingle. (“Does anybody know what fuckin’ song that is?” wrote one YouTube commentator. “Oh, by the way, I really want a MacBook Air.”) Last month it became the top-selling track on iTunes. Naim’s self-titled album, which came out in France in October, had been scheduled for U.S. release this May but was quickly pushed up to Tuesday 18, days after she is to perform “New Soul” on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

For all of this cross-promotional bounty, the record—an assortment of Hebrew, French and English ballads, plus a poignant cover of Britney Spears’s “Toxic”—has markedly humble origins. Naim recorded the album in her Paris apartment, a relaxed collaboration with the producer and multi-instrumentalist David Donatien. Listen closely, Donatien claims, and you can hear him cracking eggs in the kitchen as Naim sings. Both musicians were disgruntled veterans of what Naim, speaking by phone from Paris, calls “the big system—big record company, big budget, big everything. And nothing good or creative came out of that. Suddenly, we found ourselves in the living room without labels or deadlines. It was paradise.”

Naim was born in Paris and moved close to Tel Aviv when she was four. Her performance career began during her mandatory Israeli military service, which Naim spent singing for troops. “When you’re 18 in Israel, it’s not easy to get concerts, so it was really nice,” she says. “I was a little naive—I wasn’t even that conscious that it was the army.”

Following her service, the musician moved to Paris, scoring a record contract for an Alanis Morissette–damaged debut album, 2001’s In a Man’s Womb. She also joined the cast of The Ten Commandments, a gaudy French musical in which she sang pop songs alongside men clad in white balloon pants and boasting waxed chests. (As biblical adaptations go, it was fairly loose.) Naim toured with the show for more than two years, portraying Miriam an estimated 400 times. “When I joined the cast, I had just come from Israel to a new city where I knew nobody,” she says. “It was interesting to participate in, but I felt frustrated not doing my own thing.”

Naim left the musical after she left her record company, and around the same time that her boyfriend left her. She began writing ballads in Hebrew, a language that she had previously avoided in song. “Israel’s a small country, and everyone talks only about the war,” Naim says. “Nobody really sings in Hebrew.” As she was stockpiling new compositions, the musician met Donatien, a veteran sideman. “I discovered how well she can play piano and sing,” he says. “Then I saw how she can compose, and I was really impressed.” Donatien encouraged the singer to record her Hebrew material—which she had considered too personal and unconventional—without slick studio frills. The pair decided to work in Naim’s apartment, taking two and a half years to augment the musician’s folk songs with tasteful, wispy arrangements.

The irony of scoring an international hit with a song she produced while hiding out in her living room has not been lost on Naim. But mostly, she’s just happy the computer behemoth paired it with an appropriate product. “Our label told us that Apple contacted them about the song,” she says. “We tried not to be too happy, because who knew what it was for? It could have been firewall cable!”

Yael Naim plays Bowery Ballroom Wed 19. Yael Naim comes out Tue 18 on Tôt ou Tard/Atlantic.