Yael Naïm and Bertrand Belin

When most musicians say that they had a musical childhood, what they normally mean is that they spent two weeks in the recorder club or had a couple of piano lessons if they’re really being honest. This is very much not the case for Yael Naïm, as a couple of years after moving with her family to Israel when she was four, she joined the Israel Defence Force as a soloist in the Israeli Air Force Orchestra. I’m sure you’ll agree that that’s some heavy stuff, but all the same singing shortly became her passion, and once she came of age she began her singing career in musical theatre. After spending a couple of months playing a role in the musical Les Dix Commandments, she signed a record deal with EMI and recorded her first album in Los Angeles. The record was released in 2001 but wasn’t an enormous success, so she was dropped from the label and in 2003, Naïm moved from Israel to her home city of Paris.

In 2005, she began a musical partnership with David Donatien, a Parisian percussionist, and over the next two years they worked on the songs that would become Naïm’s self-titled second album. The record was released in 2007 and became a huge hit in her home country, charting at number 11 on the French Album charts, but the best was yet to come for Naïm. Near the end of 2007, Steve Jobs hand-picked her song “New Soul” to feature in the adverts for Apple’s latest laptop, the MacBook Air. The commercial aired in January 2008, and a mere month after it debuted, the digital sales of the song alone saw it hurtle into the Billboard Hot 100 at number nine, before peaking at number seven a week later. Naïm’s career was well and truly made after that, and ever since then she’s remained a cult hero to many music fans all over the world, and a star in her native France. In all, she comes highly recommended.