The last man

The walls in Amir Lev's home are covered with photos. We see the children on the carpet, Lev and his wife embracing, friends; and there is another, on the side, of Leonard Cohen wearing his famous fedora, taken from a newspaper article entitled "Old People." There is something almost natural about the Cohen photo being there among the family pictures. Leonard Cohen is a big part of Amir Lev's life, even if not by choice. For the past 10 years or more, since the release of his album "Once in a Lifetime," almost every interview or review of his work has described him as "the Israeli Leonard Cohen."

The main reason for this is the similarity of their voices: raspy and deep. Musically and textually, though, they inhabit very different worlds. Cohen is a word artist of a different kind: sexual, philosophical, religious, universal. Amir Lev has both feet planted firmly on the ground. He is from the here-and-now. His songs can't work anywhere else. There is something very concrete, very physical about them. He is a sensitive documenter of pieces of reality of which he himself is a part.

I said to him if there is anyone closer to him in substance, it's Bruce Springsteen. His response was a contented smile. "I love Leonard," he said. "He writes amazing texts, there is no one else who even comes close, but Springsteen is a lot closer to me. He tells stories, captures an image."

Lev says he did not go to the Leonard Cohen concert in Israel last September. "I was afraid that I would lose him among the 50,000 people. Afterward I regretted it."

A people person

My day with Lev began with a trip from Tel Aviv to Nahariya, almost on the Lebanese border. The train was packed with soldiers, businesspeople, Arab women with small children, a mother and son talking about their dead husband and father and about the boy's new life in boarding school. Nahariya seemed to have been frozen somewhere in the 1970s, everything old, peeling, about to collapse. I asked taxi drivers how much it would cost to get to Klil. Two of them asked me where it is, the third asked: "What for?" Finally I called Lev, who suggested that I take a service taxi to the entrance of the village and wait for him there. Worst comes to worst, he said, hitch a ride in and when you see a sign that says "Goat cheese" you'll know you've reached us.

I got out of the taxi at the sign and walked to the house. It's lovely here. Early winter. Everything is green. A few houses are scattered on the hillsides. The dogs greeted me when I got to the house. I knocked on the door. Dana Lev ushered me into a small house with wooden walls. Like a B&B that no one prepared for guests. Wide curtainless windows bring the landscape inside.

We had something to drink, talked about life in the village, in Tel Aviv, she sliced a salad and then the dogs barked again. A car pulled up, a door opened and slammed shut and Amir entered. Cowboy boots, blue jeans, black shirt, facial stubble. He smiled at me, said hello, went over to give his wife a kiss and then came back to shake my hand. That's the order of things.

He had just come back from a day of teaching in Acre. Twice a week, every Monday and Wednesday, he teaches mathematics in a high school attended by at-risk children. He is not inclined to talk about it, just as he is not inclined to talk about anything relating to his private life.

"My wife and children are not to blame for the profession I chose," he said. "People who are close to me, people who work with me, friends - they know everything. Our home is always open. More than that, you don't need. I sometimes see people who have a CD to sell talking about their new partner and revealing all kinds of crises they went through. There's nothing wrong with that. It's part of the game and I make no pretense of being the minister of education. I just don't see myself doing those things. I'm not cut out for it."

So here's the info that can be told. He's 47, a singer, poet, math teacher. But above all a father and a husband. He and Dana have been together almost 20 years and are raising four children. Two of them have already left home. His career began in 1991, with the album "Let's See You Take My Place." The lyrics were totally trivial. He wrote most of them when he was 18. At some point during the work on the album, the producer, Louis Lahav, told him it would be crappy. He knew it, too, but it was too late, so he finished the recording and sat down to write the next album.

The next one was released in 1995 and is still considered one of the great albums of Israeli rock. Resonant with guitars and filled with small personal stories conveyed in broken, precise lines. "Once in a Lifetime," which appeared two years later, was a masterpiece. The subject matter had changed. Melancholy Tel Aviv, with its tales of lust, passion and confusion, was abandoned in favor of the search for home. It's an album of understated love songs, suffused with moments of grace. He recorded the album twice. The first time he felt that the songs weren't ready, and he threw them out. That's how he works. His pace of work is relatively slow. He lingers over every word, over every nuance in the story. Amir Lev is one of those people who grasp the whole, complex story through the small details. The hand on the back, a random glance on the street, a spilled ashtray on the living room table.

A few months after completing the album, he left Tel Aviv for good. He and Dana decided that Tel Aviv was finished for them. They looked for an adventure and somehow the Klil option came up. They decided they would give it a try. There was nothing ideological about it. He does not plow cotton fields and doesn't stop to smell trees and give them names. It's just a place to live. That's what they had in mind when they got there. They hoped it would be a temporary solution and that by the time they got used to it, enough time would have passed and they would stay. Which is how it worked out.

"I am not a nature person," Lev told me. "I am a people person. Personally, I think that until the occupation ends I don't see myself enjoying nature completely. I am not saying that I carry that thought with me at every moment, but when you stop to think about it, I don't understand how it's possible to pick an apple from a tree and admire the beauty of creation while knowing that a few kilometers away there is a whole nation that is being subjugated and discriminated against."

Red line

For lunch we sat at a massive wooden table. Homemade goat's cheese, eggs, vegetables picked from the garden, bread. A few days earlier, when we spoke on the phone, we arranged to meet in Klil, go together to a concert in Tel Aviv and talk. One day. One trip. A conversation between two people. At the improvised lunch, Lev, who is not played much on Israeli radio, where Mediterranean pop rules, declined to assume the Don Quixote role. "I don't understand the approach that says that if you're not played on the radio you have no right to exist. It's not so. I can't say that because they prefer to play a different kind of music, my path is blocked. It just means that I have to carve out my own path. Pluralism has to work both ways. If people would rather listen to Eyal Golan and not Amir Lev or Shlomi Shaban, it's their right."

Obviously it's their right, I said, but the question is whether they are given a different option. I feel that they're always looking for shortcuts here. No one is made to think, to make an effort.

"Sometimes," he said. "But that's our country. That's what people here want. After all, what's the alternative? 88 FM? Blues and jazz, like you hear there, is not part of our DNA. It's not us. It's not part of our mentality. Where's the arak? We are a country of arak."

I'm not sure you get to the arak crowd, I said; in the same way that Bob Dylan doesn't sing for the people, but for the Village intellectuals. "First of all, I love the arak," Lev replied. "I think it's a lot more important. I also do a lot of concerts. I get to places, to people, but if they don't call me, that's all right, too. It's their prerogative. I will not try to make anyone like me and I will not ask anyone to love me by force. What's the problem with the radio stations playing Eyal Golan? You know, that's not the real problem here. The problem is racism, and there is nothing that makes me madder than racism.

"You see it everywhere," he continued. "It's in the schools in Petah Tikva [where schools refused to admit Ethiopian children], it's the neighbors in Klil who are also guilty of it, it's Jews to Arabs, Ashkenazim to Mizrahim [Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent]. I don't like quarrels and I am by nature a forgiving person, but racism is my red line. The sneering look that someone who is supposedly enlightened gives someone who is of a different color - that is the place where I erase people completely. I just can't take it; I just can't understand it."

The pastoral quiet here doesn't last long. The dogs bark, the goats bleat. They have to be fed. The young children entered and Amir stopped the conversation to give them a hug and ask how things went in school. A couple arrived in a car to buy milk. Yuval Tubi, a bassist who lives in Klil, also showed up. He will be part of the band today. Lev collects people from all over. Friends. A few weeks ago, Barry Sakharoff played keyboard during an entire Lev concert. Yuval Banai, a good friend, will also go onstage if he's around. That's how it works. In the meantime, the production director has called to say that the balance setup will start at 6.

Lev went to shower and emerged in cowboy boots, jeans, black shirt and leather jacket, but shaven. We loaded guitars and amplifiers onto the vehicle and lit up a first cigarette. Rock-and-roll time. Just a minute, first a conversation. Someone asked Amir if he could buy two cubic meters of water from him. The new laws introduced by the government are forcing farmers to improvise. Amir apologized - he doesn't have the water - and sent the man to someone else. He broke off the conversation and took a long drag on the cigarette. Now it's rock-and-roll time.

The roads. For the past few years, Amir Lev has been living on the roads. The song that opens his latest CD is called "Traveling and Returning." It's a song about the dialogue between life in Tel Aviv and the home, which is far from the city. I tried to read between the lines with him.

In the songs you used to write, I said, the heroes were faceless and nameless. But in recent years something has changed, there are people behind the songs. Maybe the place you're living in has influenced your writing after all.

"It's not the place as such, more its remoteness," he replied. "In the past few years I have been on the road a lot. I meet people on the train, while traveling. Your world changes. Expands. Still, a song like 'Balfour 7,' which I wrote about the prime minister, could have been written in any place I have been. That has to do with things you see that upset you. Only I should have been sharper and more mature in order to address them head-on."

Matured he has. The big change came in the 2004 album "Sometimes I'm Happy." His angle of vision broadened. No longer was the "I" at the center. No more gloomy Tel Aviv streets. There were songs about the October 2000 unrest among Israel's Arab population, about promises made to new immigrants from Russia and then reneged on, and the personal stories also assumed a different form. The family became more present. Fatherhood, too.

"It's All Here," released a year ago, represents the peak of this maturation process. There are songs about the prime minister's failure to show up for a memorial ceremony for fallen soldiers, about the children in Jenin and in Sderot, about the Russian security guard at a popular Tel Aviv restaurant whom everyone passes without noticing, about a prostitute in the Haifa suburbs. They and others are part of a fascinating human mosaic he succeeds in creating.

And there is the war, of course. The same war that was in the background of his well-known song "Black Clouds" becomes the center in a song like "It's All Here": "The war caught me unprepared / I faced the lean and spare / You got up early / I fell asleep late. You were hungry, had nothing to eat / Nearly everything's gone and you didn't see it / It's not there, you said /It's all here."

"I really was here," he said. "It was a funny time. At one stage, almost a hundred thousand people left the area and went to the center of the country. Our village emptied out, too. We were among the last to stay, but not because we were clinging to the land - it was out of some naive belief that it would end tomorrow. Only it didn't end. I remember one day a katyusha fell not far from here. We saw the smoke, we could smell it. The next day we left, but what happens doesn't leave you. It accumulated. The bag filled up. It's impossible to live like that, even though in Sderot they lived like that for many years. I would be ready to give up the songs if that would make this thing not happen. After all, does it make a difference whether it happens to me or to someone else? But it happens and it's terrible."

To me, Lev is the last man standing. In the past few years Israeli music has lost most of its important voices. Shlomo Artzi hasn't put out an album for the past 20 years. Shalom Hanoch is immersed in cliches. Ehud Banai and Micha Sheetrit are singing texts from the Jewish sources. No one is coping with life as it is here and now. Does Lev feel he has a role to play?

"I don't write in order to foment a revolution," he replied. "I write what I see and what I live. I am not taking any role upon myself. I am not Obama who says something and people listen. As far as I am concerned, anyone who hears me and is moved means I have done my thing. That's no cliche, it's the truth. And it's not self-evident, you know." He stops for a moment. Lights up a cigarette. "It's not just a matter of modesty. To be a public emissary at any level, be it at Caesarea [in the amphitheater] or in Levontin [a Tel Aviv club], is more than I can handle. I write who I am out of an uncontrollable urge to write music and songs. I don't try to use the songs to create a theory that tells people what to do, but if I have been able to make someone think about or reflect on something that's important to me, then I have done something in my corner of the world."

Some sort of order

Sunset on the coastal highway. We took his car, a Mazda that's seen better days. We were quiet for a time. There's a concert tonight, he has to watch his voice. But that lasted exactly 10 minutes. We smoked a cigarette. I asked him, almost randomly, whether he is a believing person.

"No," he replied, "definitely not. I don't believe in New Age or in becoming penitent. If there are people who feel good with that, I am happy for them. After all, they're all solutions found by people who feel bad and are looking for something different. I believe in inner observation; in trying to be a better person within yourself and toward others. In moving ahead step by step, accepting, understanding. I do not look down on faith, but who has a direct phone line to God? The Jews believe they have one, so do the Christians and the Muslims, but no one has.

"On the other hand, I believe in something, that there is a whole world of bad and good in which there is more meaning than in the here-and-now. Sometimes there is compensation that is not concrete and not understood and not conscious for certain kinds of behavior. There is some sort of order here."

When you say order, I told him, I think of you as a mathematics teacher. Once you said you hated it, but you're still doing it.

"The truth is that I don't like mathematics all that much, but the more successful I am with music the more I like being in school," he replied. "The moment you are not obligated to it, the moment it does not shackle you, the moment the world of music is established and my labors are rewarded, the more I like the teaching thing. First of all, the whole scene of getting up in the morning and working is not something I want to forget. Because by nature, a person, and certainly me, can easily forget that.

"I have no drive for material things," he went on. "I don't get excited by cars, houses, property. I very much like to enjoy life, to sit with the fishermen in Jaffa, to drink arak, to talk, to laugh. That is a perfect moment for me. The teaching thing provides me with a necessary framework so that I will not disappear into all the rest. There is something down to earth about it. I like working with those kids. I am 47 and at a point where I can see that a 17-year-old is the future. Until not long ago, I thought that maybe I was still the future. There is still something unresolved in them, which can be molded. Maybe they will reach places that I could not reach with music."

His days are full. School, the family, concerts, rehearsals. Every day he also finds time to closet himself in the small studio he built in a cabin next to the house and play. He is still in love with music. These days it comes to him even more easily. He writes constantly. He is currently working on a new album with Barry Sakharoff. He's writing lyrics. He is wild about Sakharoff. They have been consulting each other for years. Playing together.

This month, an album of an acoustic concert by Lev is being released, on which he plays together with Sakharoff and Geva Alon. That is one of the projects occupying him now. He also intends to produce an album for someone - it's still in the talking stage, but it's something he hasn't done before. He is looking for someone who will thrill him. Once he tried to teach children music, but that ended in failure.

"Yesterday I went all out only for the money / Teaching music to children like that who have it all," he wrote in "YMCA," a song on the last album.

I tried to put myself in Amir Lev's shoes. I wondered whether he feels lonely where he is, and yes, whether he is envious, too. After all, there's a whole world out there, a world of money, ratings, commercials, ringtones, mega-concerts. A world he's not part of. He has his audience - not large, but loyal. The question is whether that's enough. If his choice of the conciliatory approach isn't a form of defense mechanism. In interviews he gave over the years he claimed he is not a singer, that his melodies all sound the same. That is not lack of confidence. He believes in what he does. But when your only weapon is your sincerity, you are left very exposed, and then comes the stage of the defenses.

I asked him if he doesn't have an urge to reach new audiences. I suggested a theoretical deal with the devil: do an album for some mainstream artist who will want to use your name in order to get the credit. He didn't reject the idea out of hand. His opposition is never automatic.

"As a matter of fact, I would be interested in working with an artist of the middle," he replied. "To investigate a world I haven't been in, of which I am not a part. But I'm afraid I would not really be able to help. I do only what I know how to do. Besides, no one has asked." He stopped for a moment. "You know, sometimes I think about that, about what would happen if someone, for example, were to offer me a lot of money to use a song of mine in a commercial. The truth is I don't know what I would do. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Not with commercials and not with money from the cellular companies. It just seems weird to me that a song I wrote about life should suddenly be selling some car."

But that's the world, I said. Even Mozart and da Vinci received salaries from the king. Take the money, sit in your house and write. "I don't know if that's right for me," he replied. "Even though I would absolutely love to sit in the house for six months or so and write."

When he says write, he means songs. "The truth is that I once wrote a 200-page novel that moved with me from one home to the next and waited, but it was never good enough. I would very much like to write a book. That is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. But if I can't write a really good book, at the level of the great Russian writers I love, or like some kind of Yoram Kaniuk, what's the point? In music I feel that I have my place, a statement to make, that I know what I'm doing. It's not like that with literature. Maybe one day."

Traveling and returning

Tel Aviv. Evening. We're caught in a traffic jam near the boardwalk. The production manager says the balance setup has been postponed for half an hour. There's time for another cigarette. I asked him if he still gets excited by concerts. "Yes," he replied quickly, "otherwise I would stay home. It doesn't happen immediately, but there's always a moment in a concert when everything comes together. When I suddenly understand what I'm singing about. It's an amazing moment. Did you see the show at the Piano Festival?"

A few weeks ago, Lev went onstage in a Tel Aviv festival, said he thought the city still remembered him and performed "Black Clouds."

That was a good performance, I replied, different, only I'm not sure it's the right setting for you.

"I felt something was stuck during the whole performance," he said. "Something was missing there. I think it was too cultured for me. Bourgeois. The only moment I really felt was in the first song, 'Highway No. 1.' Something happened to me, suddenly amid that quiet, amid that backdrop, I understood what I was singing about. I almost cried at that moment."

"Highway No. 1" is about Vicki Knafo, who in July 2003 walked from Mitzpeh Ramon in the Negev to the Finance Ministry in Jerusalem to protest the policy of the finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in regard to single mothers. It's one of those songs that only Amir Lev can write, because he doesn't close his eyes. He wrote about Knafo after the cameras had gone and the Sisyphean reality returned to the life of a woman who tried to foment a revolution and failed.

As always with Lev, the power lies in the nuances. In the ability to find a vantage point that tells a whole story through the small details: the clothes she buys in the Ramle-Lod market, the sore back, the monotonous activity of washing floors, alone at home, at night, waiting for a son who will not return.

Oddly, this is perhaps his most personal song. It's also one of the songs on which he worked the hardest. "I finished two notepads with this song before I was happy with the words. I sent her the recording and we had the opportunity to talk about it a few times. She is a very smart woman. Very verbal. She liked the song. She said I had managed to write it accurately, that it's the real thing."

And if she hadn't been happy, would you have taken the song off the album?

"Of course. I wouldn't have thought twice."

But it's your art, and you have the right.

"Art schmart. I am not the issue here. The issue is people."

We arrived at Levontin. A small club. There were a few times in the past few months when the feeling was that Amir Lev had passed the stage of small clubs. He filled Zappa and Tzavta. His show at the Piano Festival was sold out. But he feels there is now something of a decline. It's hard to say whether it concerns him, but it's no simple matter. Long trips, a band that relies on him, and then to come to a small club that's half empty. In the concert he gives his all and only toward the end does he share his feelings with the audience.

"Someone in the industry told me a while back that there was going to be a recession and that I should get ready," he said onstage. "We did a show last week in Be'er Sheva and there were 35 people. In a show up north a few days later there were maybe 60. After that concert I spoke with Jonny Greenwood, the guitarist of Radiohead, and he told me that when he released a solo album recently he felt the same thing. That reassured me."

The audience applauded. As though to say, we're here, you stay, too. In fact, there is a certain feeling of solidarity in his audience. The faces are by now familiar. People have their own favorite songs and aren't ashamed to shout out titles for him to sing. He will listen to every request. Sometimes he will do the song, other times he will only smile and say, "Another time, bro." He is always direct, unmediated, accessible to everyone.

After the concert he stands to the side, smoking a cigarette, and people come up to say thank you and give him a pat on the shoulder. That's the feeling he leaves behind. That he's a friend, with you on the path. That is exactly the place he wants to be.

"I am not rock-and-roll," he said to me at some point during the drive. "You won't see me in sunglasses. In fact, there is no rock-and-roll here. It's all manipulations. Hummus, french fries, falafel, kings are crowned and deposed. I do my thing. I write songs."

We were supposed to meet after the concert and round off some final details. In the end we decided to pass that up. It was late already, and he had a long drive home. A few days later, I called him.

There is one question I always wanted to ask you but forgot. You already wrote it, I will only reformulate it: Do you already know what you will want if you meet a magician who can do anything?