YouTube creates another Israeli star

April 2, 2009 - 8:43 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Music, Pop Culture 

Oren Lavie

Oren Lavie

Sometimes, all it takes for an Israeli to become successful is… to leave Israel. Not that we’re recommending it, God forbid, but it seems to have worked for Oren Lavie.

The playwright turned singer/songwriter from Tel Aviv is enjoying a new-found noteriety in the US and around the world, appearing on The Jimmy Kimmel show, signing licensing deals with Chevrolet for his song to appear in an ad for the Chevy Malibu, and with the producers of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

And you may just be one of the four and a half million YouTube viewers who watched the video to his song “Her Morning Elegance” from his debut album The Opposite Side of the Sea.
The inventive stop motion-style video has become somewhat of a sensation, and propelled Lavie from anonymity into a kind of cyber celebrity anonymity.

A strong booster in influential indie-based Los Angeles radio station KCRW helped Lavie’s music get heard by the suits, resulting in the licensing deals which enabled him to launch his own label to release the album and produce the video.

The video – produced with Tel Aviv-based husband-and-wife team of Yuval and Merav Nathan – animates the fantastic dream of a sleeping woman without ever leaving her bedroom, using her mattress as the canvas of the dream and her bed frame as the dolly of her journey.

Last month, Lavie performed “Her Morning Elegance” on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, accompanied by a life-size, Muppet-like puppet nuzzling him throughout the song, a move that Lavie described as an attempt to break out of any pre-conceived mold that listeners might have that he was just another humorless singer-songwriter.

Despite living now in LA and not having had an address in Israel for a number of years, Lavie still considers Tel Aviv his home, returning regularly to visit family and friends. And here, he’s also still anonymous, able to walk down the streets without being recognized. But that might be for long.

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