Two weeks ago the song “Mother” was released to the radio stations and immediately became the most played. And so the wound of Static’s life, the adoption, became the song that leads his new album, called “Raise”.
“Where do you find the strength to live / After you’ve thrown away a child / Give it up for adoption, lock it from the outside and there are no keys to the door / Childhood is at risk and that’s already a given / Lucky it’s a child prodigy / Life is a puzzle, Mila / Mother, the queen of motherhood / Wipe, wipe my tears / And light up Shabbat candles / It’s dark for me and you haven’t come yet”
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“It’s really sad, yes – being an adopted child is almost like a disability,” Static declares after we listen to the song together in the car. “It starts with some kind of hole in life – ‘What, I was a bad boy, as if that’s why?’ I was only four months old, yes?”
At what age did they tell you?
“two and a half years”.
So they told you?!
“Yes, they hid it in a bedtime story about a prince who lives in a kingdom he wasn’t born in but the king and queen love him very much. Over time I realized that I was the prince.”
“It hurts the way you see love”
Although the prince grew up and became one of the most successful stars in Israel, the hole is not filled: “So it’s something that I have a lot of, I think to myself that maybe I’m not good enough. I have the feeling that if I’m not good enough then no one will stay with me, you Do you understand? I don’t enjoy hearing this song, I just don’t enjoy it and I say ‘come on, this song has ruined my day.’
I also saw now that you suddenly become really sad.
“Because it sucks, because it’s the truth and my truth is sad – I feel like I have a beautiful life story that grows out of a sad place. When your mother leaves you, it’s like it’s the most trivial love and you’ve lost it. It hurts the way you see love from your partner and friends and even your love for yourself, there Do you have a problem with loving, what is it to be loved and what is it to love? And I think it solves a lot of things for me.”
“On the one hand, I am very angry with my mother, on the other hand, the song ends with me saying: ‘Even though you hurt me terribly, thank you for everything.’ Regardless of how I feel about her, I still appreciate the greatest gift of all that she gave me.”
Static in a concert for soldiers Photo: The 12 News
“Until the age of 25 I was anonymous”
When we started accompanying Static in August, it was another journey in Israel. He just celebrated the victory, after launching his solo career. “There is such an impression that I have been here for a long time because so much has happened – with me, with Static and Ben-El, with me in my personal life – so much has happened that people forget that at the end of it all it was seven years. I am 32 years old, until the age of 25 I was an anonymous person , it’s still the absolute majority of my life.”
Another change happened in his life not long ago: “During the war it happened to me that I just gained weight – you sit in front of the news and grind and grind and don’t move, and that’s what makes you fat, the equation is very simple. When I typed on the keyboard, my finger moved from ‘stat’ to ‘batt’. I said ok, I’m going to start training, also to be healthy. I want to get out of this thing… At some point when you realize how terrible what happened to you and us, you say ‘I’m coming out of this a winner, I don’t care’.”
“By the way, the whole nation now has this feeling – you see, for example, artists who appear in a menorah, now they fill a menorah easily too, much more easily than before. Why? Because the people want to come out winners, we understood what happened to us and we want to be happy and win.”
“The guy from the Shin Bet just stopped the call”
Statik himself recently returned to the big shows, but he can’t forget the smallest show he did, for children who returned from captivity in Gaza. Static was actually the first singer that the abducted kids back in the deal asked to meet, only no one prepared him for such a fan meeting. “It was Eitan Yalami who asked me to come, the very day after he returned. You get there and you find out that they are all in a kind of department together,” he recalls. “I’m sitting with him and you don’t know how cynical you can be with a kid like that, what exactly has he been through, but the mother had just dyed our hands’ hair when I met him so I said, ‘Okay, it’s pretty casual.'”
Static with Or Vigil Yaakov who returned from captivity Photo: News 12
“Then when I went out I saw the other kids and we immediately started talking and somehow by ‘mistake’ a kind of support circle was formed, they started telling stories to the point where at the end the guy there from the Shin Bet simply stopped it, saying they were talking too much. Yes, I saw that they had such a singular pride of the abductees – that is, they were not all together, but they were talking about this and that Mahmoud, and you sit there and say ‘what am I hearing’? You hear the stories only in their difficult part and at the same time you sing rondels to them. And it’s really heartbreaking, there’s no better word for it. When you see this gap, you say wow.”
Like most of us, Static’s routine alternates between the war and personal life: reserves, volunteer performances and meetings with orphaned children. “What I went through is nothing – I have the hole, of the lack, perhaps, of some particular parental figure, but I have no loss,” he explains in one of the meetings. “Your stories are really very, very difficult and the fathers of all of you were heroes. I think that you can be proud of this for the rest of your life. How strange it is to be me – when I hear your stories, and it’s true, I didn’t go through what you went through but it’s very, very hard to hear Children cry and hurt like that, and a second after that I have to put on the static mask and take a picture: you don’t know what an extreme thing it is to go through inside the body, yet I’m here.”
The meeting with the children who returned from captivity, which was interrupted by a member of the Shin Bet | Photo: News 12
“There’s the falling in love and the sexuality”
While the first album dealt mainly with the dramatic separation from Ben-El and the rumored divorce from his wife Sarit Polak, the second album deals with his experiences as a newly single man and his relationship with Rona-Lee Shimon that was forged while working on the album: “It’s not all love songs, but there is the falling in love there And there’s the sexuality. It’s really my life story, in my eyes it’s as transparent as it can be. Everyone will take it in a different direction.”
Amit Mordechai, one of the producers of the song “Fire and Water” who is in a relationship with Rona-Lee, says: “We sat here and started writing the song and I see Liraz express words with emotion that I have never seen before – such a child in love that he writes a song and is enthusiastic about every line, and that is something It’s exciting to see him work from there.” Ido Netzer, who also co-created the song, recalls: “From the words, we understood on our own what you were talking about, while writing. We didn’t agree to make a song about it.” And Static explains: “As if something very intimate is happening here, people who sit with you in these things are really going through your life with you.”
So if the album was written during the period of falling in love with Rona-Lee, it comes out when the gossip sections are reporting a crisis in the relationship. Static already knows that when you manage a high-profile relationship, every fight or crisis becomes a headline. In any case, Rona-Lee flew out last week for three months, to shoot a series – so she is static in some kind of time-out anyway.
Static Verona-Lee Shimon behind the scenes, archive | Photo: Private
“The complete disconnection from Ben El is disgusting in my eyes”
And there is another ex, who cannot be ignored.
When I say the name Ben-El, what emotion does it evoke in you?
“A little love for Adam, a little sadness maybe”.
But precisely as a human being he was very complex in the relationship between you.
“So what? I remember some very fun things we went through. And in the end we somehow share a destiny, yes? At least for some period of life. And there is a little sadness, because it feels disgusting as if – I want one day to just sit down, talk about everything like this. The complete disconnection This is disgusting to me.”
Is it in annoyance?
“I’m not at all, from the first moment I wasn’t upset. And he, I give him his time. There were several times I sent him messages, on a birthday like this. In the meantime if he doesn’t answer, then I feel that maybe he feels it’s not for him yet. I respect him Because I’m out of touch with him, I don’t really know how he got through the whole situation, and I don’t know what state he’s in today either.
Maybe in a few years there will suddenly be such a “unification show”…
“There is a situation, I’m telling you the truth. Will I be back in a duo, in the definition of the thing? Probably not. So as soon as I lost him, the initial fear is if I alone am capable. That’s the initial fear. And then the victory is: ‘I’m capable, come on’ Nah. I lost that, but it’s all good.”
Does not rule out a reunion show with Ben El in the future, despite the disconnect | Photo: From “A good evening with Guy Pines”, courtesy of Sport 1
“Want a boy without a bag”
Static, you already understood, sings his life. And if the first album dealt with a breakup, the second album with renewed love. Naturally, next in line, he might deal with fatherhood – a sensitive subject that is very preoccupying to the 32-year-old Statik. “I wanted to say that we would do it if he was a dancer like me and a singer like her, but the truth is that she sings beautifully,” he jokes.
“It scares me to say ‘this is the right moment’, it scares me to say ‘this is the right woman, it won’t fall apart, it will be fine’. I want to come prepared for something that cannot be prepared for.”
Is there that place where it’s hard for you to decide you want to be a father because you were an adopted child? This place of being a father in your opinion is more significant?
“I’m sure it is. What I really want to achieve is a child who doesn’t have what I have, my pain is there, you understand? It’s not just called an “adoption case”, it’s one case. So without a case, so that he doesn’t have a difficult story So from the beginning.”
Did you think, say, what would happen if your parents heard the song?
“I told them, I didn’t listen to them, but I told them – I said ‘Listen, mother, I wrote a song about the biological mother’. That’s it. She told me ‘Yes, whatever you want, do whatever you want.'”
“I don’t think the song will hurt her.” Nitsa Russo, Liraz’s mother Photo: News 12
Were you afraid it would hurt her?
“I don’t think it will hurt her. There is a very strong sentence in there that I say: ‘And no matter how much you give birth to me, you will never be my mother.’ It means – as much as someone else didn’t give birth to me, she is not my mother, she is my mother.”
“I think that lately because of all these crazy upheavals, and even October 7th also ‘helped’ me in this case to understand that you are never ready for anything in life. This is the essence of why today I dare to say in my album ‘I want a child’, to come to terms with the fact that you Not ready, is to be ready – because you won’t be ready. Life is worth everything, everything that is thrown at us is worth it in the end, if you live, it’s worth it.”
Research: Noi Bracha.
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