Global hit: Yoav

August 14, 2013

By Marco Werman

We end today’s program with music from Yoav. Yoav is not a place, it’s a person. He’s Yoav Sadan and goes simply by Yoav. And this is one of the ways he describes himself.

YOAV: ï¿½I’m a guitarist that doesn’t listen to other guitarists.ï¿½

Yoav is inspired instead by Bjork, Outkast and other non-traditional hip-hop, and global percussionists like Zakir Hussein. Musically, this is what all that means. That’s Yoav on guitar. It’s all guitar: the tight, steady rhythm and the light thumping on the face of the instrument.

Yoav’s songwriting used to be more melodic. A change came a few years ago when he was living in New York. Yoav was killing time noodling around on his guitar one afternoon on a bench in Central Park.

YOAV: ï¿½My fingers were flying and there was this field trip of school kids that were walking by and they started dancing around me and they started getting frantically into the beat. And I was feeding off their energy and vice versa and I felt what it felt like to be a DJ and to control people with the rhythm.ï¿½

YOAV: ï¿½It opened up a whole new idea about what I could do on the instrument. And then I started writing songs to beats and it was somewhat of an epiphany.ï¿½

Yoav’s lyrics tend to be on the dark side. He says they’re optimistically dark. Whatever spin the 30 year-old puts on the words he writes, they seem to come out of a space Yoav occupied when he was a boy. That space was all about shunning what he says is 3,000 year old religious dogma.

YOAV: ï¿½Being born in Israel, moving to South Africa I was actually the only Jewish kid in a religious Christian school and so I didn’t fit in with the other Jewish kids because I spent more time in chapel than in synagogue. And I didn’t fit in with the Christian kids. And so given that these things are two or three thousand years old, it just made sense to come up with my own philosophy.ï¿½

Yoav’s parents wanted him to be a classical musician. They’ve both accepted the music he ended up making. It doesn’t hurt either that Yoav’s been pretty successful doing what he wants.