If You Think You’re An Island

A man is stranded on an island with a camel and a wheel of Brie.

Imagine what that man might write: An ode to the cheese praising its nourishing qualities; a letter to civilization begging for rescue. Perhaps a love song for camel á la Gene Wilder in Everything You Always Wanted to know about Sex * But were Afraid to Ask. Place that same man in the middle of Manhattan and he will produce something completely different—a cheese review for Saveur and a letter to animal control asking to have the camel removed from his brownstone walkup.

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Yair Yona is sitting in an airy, sparsely occupied hotel restaurant in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. There are waiters in red upholstery-looking vests carrying aluminum pots of coffee in their hands and towels over their forearms. There are floor to ceiling windows letting in plenty of light, and huge, forgettable pieces of artwork hanging on exposed brick walls. Yona is in a black WFMU T-shirt and dark-wash jeans. He has thick, curly, black hair and peers through dark rimmed glasses at his travel companion, Einat Shaul, the Director of Cultural Affairs at Consulate General of Israel, who sits across the table from him.

In between bites of a buffet breakfast, Yona speaks in quick but carefully selected English, and when he cannot think of a word, he fires it off to Einat in their native Hebrew and she throws back the same, but this time in English. They are talking about Tel Aviv, Israel—Yona’s home. This is his first time in the States, and they are discussing the differences between the two countries.

“Tel Aviv,” says Yona, squinting his eyes and pinching his thumb and forefinger together, “is like a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, version of Manhattan or Paris or—”

“No.” Einat gently interrupts. “Tel Aviv is its own place.”

“Yes,” he says after a pause, laughing a little, aware of his mistake. “It is its own place, but it is very concentrated.”

Tel Aviv is the setting for Yona’s most recent album, Remember, a record of diverse guitar instrumentals—many of which composed while watching a muted television. If you search Youtube, you will find a video of Yona playing slide guitar while perched on a barstool atop a roof in Tel Aviv, the city behind him a warm backdrop of sallow monochrome buildings. In a like video he is on the corner of Alenby Street at night, picking his guitar and watching pedestrians amble by. In another still he sits on a bench, perhaps in a park. A sprinkler system behind him wakes up and he jerks a bit as it sprays his back, but Yona keeps playing. This is how Yair Yona has chosen to translate Remember—a thread of images and sounds rooted in a city—to bring you, who may never step foot in Israel or even entertain its attitude, to a place that means so much to his nation.

“If I didn’t live in Tel Aviv, I wouldn’t be in an open mindset,” says Yona. “I have my influences and I have my own particular cultural world, but coming outside of your house and seeing that literal vibe of an open mindset—that makes you feel like a lot is possible for you, and allows you to break more restrictions and limits within yourself.”

Yair Yona likes to talk about his art, but he gives himself away more as an enthusiast than a braggart by the way he is embarrassed when I bring up his experience as not only in playing music, but also in recording, radio, music publishing, and writing. He blushes and defends himself with genuine modesty, diverting the subject to his affinity for Israeli free jazz. He throws some names around but I have no idea to whom he is referring. I check Einat to see if she does, but it looks like Yair is on his own.

Seven years ago, Yair Yona decided he wanted to be in a band called My Morning Jacket. Yona had dabbled in a few instruments before this, written some songs, and had played in a band or two, but had gone to London looking for something new. After seeing My Morning Jacket play at Glastonbury music festival in the early two thousands, he had signed himself as the proverbial singer/songwriter, introspectively keeping to himself in the corner of a seedy dive. The problem was that My Morning Jacket wasn’t looking for any new members (not that he asked, necessarily) and Yona isn’t exactly shy.

“I started singing in bars in London, but when I came back to Israel I realized that something was not right—I was not authentic to myself.”  In 2007, Yona picked up Glenn Jones’ first album, This is the Wind that Blows it Out, a record of instrumentals composed for six- and twelve-string guitars. “I realized that you can say so much with just a guitar, and that I didn’t have to fight my own limitations as a songwriter.”

Yona wrote a handful of tracks from Remember  in front of the TV. A muted one. He would sit in front of the television with his guitar and create songs for whatever was on the screen, filling in the holes with stories of sound. “Are You Smarter than a 35 Year Old Television Show Host,” is perhaps one of the more telling titles, but ones like “Russian Dance,” composed while watching a show on the Discovery Channel about Russian folklore (he had also been listening to Tom Watts’ Black Rider for a couple of weeks—an influence not to be ignored and certainly not unfound in the song) leave the audience with less directional governance.

This method of composition, borrowed from Israeli musician Rami Fortis on his 1988 release, Tales From the Box, might be a few yards away from Yona’s earlier years of the singer/songwriter shtick in London, but it’s not necessarily a more flexible one. “The writing comes from a different place—when you are in a mindset of writing song with lyrics and when you’re in a mindset of writing instrumental, for me at least. It comes from different places in my heart,” says Yona. “Soul first, technique later,” he says, quoting Robbie Basho. “I don’t want to be titled as a guitarist who composes, I want to be a composer who happens to hold a guitar now, but next year it might be different.”

The first night of Hopscotch music festival is only Yona’s second Stateside show. Five Star, a maroon-lit bar and restaurant on the rim of downtown Raleigh, is one of the festival’s tamer venues—more conducive to brandy swilling and quiet conversations than raucous moshing (kids!). Yona plays first in a set of four or five acoustic acts. William Tyler is there, so is Frank Fairfield, and also the Black Twig Pickers. A crowd of thirty or forty sits at wiggy-woggy tables or on the wooden floor; a handful of girls are draped across a reddish sofa in the corner. Yona sits alone on the shallow stage, modestly lit with a few, soft track lights. The songs he plays are sincere and convicting in the sense that few people there anticipate their own reactions to his instrumental music. “Remember” is surprisingly moving in its honesty; others are funny or even sarcastic.

“Do you guys remember the show Mad About You?” he asks the audience as he tunes. “Do you remember how it starts?” He thumps out on his guitar the flat percussive sound from the show’s opening then plucks into his own tongue-in-cheek instrumental commentary on love. Black and white images of Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt reflect in the glasses of one of the girls on the sofa, but if you watch her you can tell that she eventually starts to think about someone more specifically. She sees me looking at her and tries to put it away. She takes a pull from her beer and whispers something to the girl next to her. Yona adds banter in between songs and does just fine, but asks me after his set if he embarrassed himself—he gets nervous when he has to fill in the silences with English, if it were Hebrew it wouldn’t be so bad.

His set finished, Yair, Einat, and I sit in mix-matched chairs in a balcony above the bar. Einat has brought over handfuls of sandwich for both of us from a talent courtesy table. She has kicked off her shoes somewhere; clearly it’s been a long day, but she hasn’t lost her excitement. Her bare feet swing between the legs of the stool she’s sitting on, and occasionally her pink heel will bonk one of the poles. Yair is lower, in a modern-looking armchair, resting himself from having bounced between press representatives all day. I’m ready to ask him more questions about his album and his performance and his future plans, but Yair insists on asking about me and now I’m a little embarrassed.

It’s an hour later and I’ve forgotten about whatever business I set out to do. We’ve talked about bum jobs and schooling and whether or not Americans like President Obama, how sparse salads are in American cities and how piss-poor television is these days. Einat pulls out a Polaroid camera and Yair tells me to “look deep” as he mimes a pensive expression. Einat clicks the machine and giggles. She hands me a black and white business card-sized tag.

“But don’t shake it,” she says. “You don’t shake the new ones.”

It’s getting late and Yair and Einat have a 5:30 a.m. flight back to Atlanta where he will play one last show at a university before returning to Tel Aviv. I need to be at Lincoln Theater in a few minutes to photograph The Black Lips, and I’m beginning to wonder if I should excuse myself from the two of them. I try to find a lull in the conversation but the two of them entertain such a wonder about everything new and creative and original that it’s difficult to sit there and not catch it too. Einat says something funny and Yair laughs, mumbling something in Hebrew between chuckles.

“You know, I should be worrying about the fact that I have a flight at five thirty in the morning and that I will have to play a show tomorrow,” Yair says, “but there is nothing more important than having this conversation right here with you. We forget that sometimes—to just be.”

“I guess none of us will remember how tired we are or what else we missed at this time next week, yeah?” I ask, embarrassed that my thoughts must have been scroll ticking across my forehead. I settle back into my seat. I already forgot about The Black Lips.

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The man who is stranded on an island—he’s not concerned about his grammar in the letter he stuffs into the bottle, and his only requirement for his penmanship is that it is clear. He just needs someone to get the message that he needs him. When he writes the ode to the wheel of cheese, it’s only between him and the cheese. If someone else were to pick it up, they might feel as an intruder, but they also might feel how much that man loves Brie. When he gets home to Manhattan, his review for Saveur will be the most sincere ode to the flavors of Brie that was ever written, and his letter to animal control will be so persuasive they will forget to ask how the camel got into his apartment to begin with.

It is place, it is story, it is language, that shapes us and how we operate, absorb, and exchange. It is our streets and habitats that shape the ways in which we understand the world around us, and even the world not so immediate. It is our divorce from language or our marriage to it that determines our modi operandi, and the times that we tell exhaustion to be damned that we have a late-night conversation about man stranded on an island who finally finds his way home.