Original songs, instrumentals and other, hard to define pieces for piano and voice, in a style for which a definition may only be available in the 2015 edition of the Oxford dictionary.

12 MP3 Songs in this album (42:53) !
Related styles: FOLK: Free-folk, POP: Piano



Details:
Back in 2004 I started a journey; my debut solo album titled Beyond.
I didn't imagine it would take close to five years to be released, but I guess there is always a steep learning curve when doing something for the first time.

Beyond contains twelve tracks. Some are songs accompanied by a piano, some are piano instrumentals and for some I'm not even sure what to call. The earliest track in Beyond was written as early as 1988 while the most recent track was written in 2008.

All tracks with voice are in English with the exception of the last track "Oseh Shalom" that is sung in Hebrew. That's because Oseh Shalom is a prayer for peace taken from the Hebrew scriptures and which roughly translates to:
May He Who Makes Peace In His Celestial Heights, Make Peace On Us, And On All Israel, And Say Amen.

My daughter wrote the lyrics for track 11, "Loving" when she was only seven years old. It started by her getting homework to write a poem. After that she took off on her own. I told her that if she writes something that I like, I would write music for it. It was amusing to see the spark in her eyes at the exact moment of realization of the possibility.

Track 10, "Way of Sheep" is about people who cannot see a way on their own and must follow the herd.

Track 9, "Troubled", started out as a lullaby, but then turned into a dialog inside a person's head, between anxious, troubled thoughts, and soothing words.

Track 8, "Our Love Song" is one which I wrote to my wife.

Track 7, "In The Forest" and track 4 "Flying" are both piano instrumentals.

Track 6, "Oscar" is about a boy who's a misfit.

Track 5, "Those Happy People" is about people that many of us truly believe in their existence, but I personally don't.

The lyrics for track 3, "Song For Granny" were originally written in Hebrew by a good friend. The song was originally composed around 1990 for the Hebrew lyrics. When I wanted to include it in Beyond, I translated the lyrics to English. The music was left untouched.

I have no idea how to describe track 2, "The Art of Living".

I wrote "I Left New York City" in Track 1, shortly after leaving Brooklyn and moving to upstate NY. It was this song that marked the launch of Beyond.

The album is meant to be personal, from me to you. That's why there's just a piano and voice.
The music takes the space of a room, with me playing piano and singing, and you sitting next to me and listening. Sure, I could have used the studio to its full potential, and use effects, multitrack recording etc'. It would have been a much fuller sounding album then. Probably much more commercial too. But I felt that the personal aspect was the important thing here and I wasn't willing to compromise that.
I love playing the piano and although Beyond is all piano and nothing else, my music is not limited to piano alone. I have some ideas for the future where the piano is not included.

One thing that I hear from people who listened to Beyond, is that the album cannot be appreciated in first listening. I say this because I personally cannot have any objective opinion on my own music.