Israeli Singer Noga Erez Makes US TV Debut Performing on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’
by Shiryn Ghermezian
Noga Erez on the cover of her new album “Kids.” Photo: City Slang.
Israeli singer-songwriter Noga Erez made her debut on American network television Monday night with a performance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
From a remote location, Erez and her band performed “Views,” her collaboration with Reo Cragun and her creative and life partner Ori Rousso. A critique of the digital era and people buying fake “views” on social media, the song’s lyrics include: “People buy views, I know it’s old news/ But I got bad news for everybody/ Holy water is no juice, but I know us Jews/ We don’t like to lose to anybody.” The track is off Erez’s new album “Kids,” which was released in March.
Earlier on Monday, Israeli actress and “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot posted a video on Instagram of herself and one of her daughters dancing to Erez’s song “End of the Road,” which is also from “Kids.”
Erez finished “Kids” — her second album, after 2017’s “Off the Radar” — during the coronavirus pandemic.
“It was so different,” she told Paper magazine about working on the new album. “I feel like when you release your first album, you release everything you’ve worked on your entire life until that point. But then the second album, we started writing it with the understanding that there are people expecting it. There will be someone listening to it. You don’t know these things when you make your music before you’re somebody. It just changes your whole perspective.”
“Some days knowing that would make things very stressful for me because I wanted the album to be better than the previous one,” she explained. “And some days that was fully the motivation, knowing that I’m just doing something that is based on the success of what I was doing previously… It’s just playing between the confidence that you have because [of] experience and the extreme insecurity that can be present when you know that someone is listening.”
