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“…There’s a picture of Faithless, Kate Nash and Radiohead in front of me. And there’s actually a picture of myself here. Weird! It’s pretty cool that they’ve printed one up! Not bad…”
Having your face appear alongside world favourites and national icons for someone who is still making a name for himself in the United Kingdom must be a good feeling, but one look into Yoav’s (full name Yoav Sadan) past, and it should be a walk in the park.
From singing Into Temptation in front of 15,000 people with Crowded House as a fifteen year old, winning over Tori Amos’s partisan fans in the U.S, to creating a dance/acoustic hybrid style of music that thrills as much as it entrances, the Israeli born, South African bred artist already has an impressive C.V – not to mention a press release that writes itself.
As he sits within his managements’ office in London with his face gazing in his direction, Yoav helps to piece together a life story that so far is almost beyond comprehension.
You spent the last three months of 2007 supporting Tori Amos on tour in the U.S – how did that come around?
“She invited me, she heard my record long before it was out and she invited me. I got to hang out (with Tori) every day a little bit, which was wicked. I was a big Tori Amos fan when I was growing up.
“The Tori one is particularly gratifying because she’s known for having partisan fanbase who are a rabidly pro-Tori, and it was great to be taken in and accepted by them. The audience’s response in general has been amazing, going through America and now coming back through the UK.”
When you were fifteen you were picked out of the crowd to sing on stage with Crowded House in South Africa. Was it like an epiphany?
“That was an amazing experience; there was no time to get nervous or anything. It was a wicked rush, I mean I had a smile pasted across my face for a few days after and that was the first time where I thought, ‘you know, maybe this is meant to happen’.
“A random appendix to that story is that the very first time I was properly discovered was a little bit after high school when some demos of mine got into the hands of some record executives in New York at Colombia Records. I flew up to play for the promotion and A&R staff, and on my way to the audition I was waiting for the lift to take me to the appropriate floor when the lift doors open and out walks (Crowded House frontman) Neil Finn! I seem to be surrounded by those moments, I quite enjoy that! [Laughs].
You found your dance/acoustic style when you were at a low ebb in New York during your early years as an artist. What was your music like before that moment?
“I was definitely pushing at some boundaries and figuring some things out musically, but for sure being too focussed on all of that other stuff; like, do I have a record deal? Am I paying my bills?
“When I look back, I think some of those pieces were starting to fall into place as far as playing a new way on guitar, but then - not like I’m saying that I’m the first person to bang on a guitar - but it just opened up a new level of possibilities and all of the music that I had been into just suddenly [pauses] I don’t know, like I could suddenly just play it on the guitar.
“I’m a guitarist that doesn’t really listen to other guitarists. I mean I’ve been listening to DJs for years, hip-hop artists, but certainly not traditional guitarists and least of all acoustic guitarists.”
Your childhood had modern music banned by your father. Has this left a detrimental mark on your impressions of classical music and opera?
“Yeah, there was a massive resistance. I still can’t really get into opera, but classical music; I had a big resistance for years and years from it and I rebelled heavily against it.
“But then the years just out of high school I was hanging out with friends, eating pop brownies and we put on Fantasia. Listening to that very much opened my head to it, and especially some of the Stravinsky, I was listening to it thinking ‘man, this is kind of like rock and roll with these power chords and sequences’.
“I can’t be closed minded to it anymore; I can’t get into all of it, but that’s how I am with most music.
With your diverse musical background and advantageous musical style, are there any artists that you would particularly like to collaborate with?
“I’d love to do something with Bjork, with Andre 3000 from Outkast, there are a number of people that I would be overjoyed to do something with. I mean the comparisons are weird because no one quite knows what to make of me!
“The only comparison that really irks me – and probably shouldn’t – is when they see me with an acoustic guitar and say something like John Meyer or someone like that, because I don’t listen to that sort of singer-songwriter music.
“There are a lot of great singer-songwriters out there but I myself don’t see myself in that vein at all. I’m coming from a lot more rhythmic place, club music textures, DJ music and my own songs layered on top with all of those textures.”
You’ve been receiving a lot of praise from countries dotted around the world – Club Thing went in at #18 in the Danish charts – how has it happened?
“I don’t know what, but maybe MySpace; someone lifted the song off of MySpace and started playing the song on Danish national radio.
“I think the same thing has happened in Holland with another song, it’s been happening in random places, Macedonia is another one. The record label are saying, ‘well this isn’t us, how is this happening?’ We’re getting all of these hits and coverage in the national press on the back of the song and word is spreading, which I guess is the exciting part of the music business at the moment.”
You’ve also become a hit in your native South Africa too.
“It was frustrating at the same time because I’ve always thought that people would love the music. I made a really lo-fi demo in my basement of one of the first songs when I was drumming on the guitar, and I put a white label record into the radio and didn’t think anything of it.
“It was climbing up the charts in Johannesburg (Yoav was raised in Cape Town) and became a big hit. I was competing against the Gwen Stefanis, Snoop Dogg’s and the Justin Timberlakes and the song just stayed there for a couple of months, so everyone in Johannesburg knows my song, even though I didn’t know anyone from there, and no-one knew who I was!”
How are you faring now in the notoriously ‘difficult’ areas, such as the US and UK? You’ve lived in both places at some point, so it must be an ambition to succeed.
“The US has now picked up massively because of the Tori Amos tour that was such a success, and so I have massive followings around the US. From selling E.P’s at the Tori shows I actually made it into the Billboard charts for a couple of weeks. There’s definitely this great little foundation.
“Now the UK is starting to kick in. I think if there were a computer game called Rockstar 101, London would be a level ten! I’ve always found it the hardest.
You’ve written poetry since a very young age. Have any of these words worked their way onto your album, or is it all recent material?
“I’ve always written - since I was a kid I’ve wanted to be a writer, but my first few song lyrics efforts were horrible lyrically! [Laughs]. Even now I feel like I’m learning at a rate of knots, and some of the songs on the record are older songs because it’s my debut record, and I feel that some of those songs are a bit naive and not my favourite.
“Songwriting for me personally seems to be a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, and each one is different. Some of the songs will come from a dream, and I’ll pick out different lines from the dream, or it’ll be from five pages of steam of consciousness that I’d have forgotten I had written and I’ll find it six months later and I’ll find a passage and go ‘oh, I can definitely make a song from that.’
“It’s something I’m definitely focussing on now, and I’m reading a lot of poetry, specifically a bit of song lyrics. It’s tough because although you can say anything in a pop song, I think there are also these restrictions on the words you can comfortably say in a pop song without sounding like a tool!
In other interviews, there’s been discussions about joining the Arizonian Hopi tribe if you weren’t doing music. Do you think your music style would fit in well with their spiritual life?
“I think there’s maybe a purity I’d like to find first, because I think I might have been a bit tainted from living in big cities and from operating within the music business, but I’d like to think that I’ve retained a lot of purity as well.
“I’m kinda torn between this ‘crazy rockstar’ lifestyle, the music business and the big city, as well as finding all of these pockets of truth that are out there; be it in the jungles of Peru or Shamen doing (hallucinogenic brew native to the Amazon Rainforest) Ayahuasca, I would like to explore all of that.”
Yoav’s Charmed and Strange LP is released in the UK on May 5, through Field Music/Island. |
