YUVI GERSTEIN

Q Your album Cells feels deeply interconnected, almost like one long reflection. When you were writing the lyrics, did you think of them as fragments of one larger story, or did they come individually and later align?

I agree they feel interconnected in retrospect. I started writing the songs quite a few years ago around 2013 when I had to leave London and return home to be with my mom, who was in the last year of her life. Some of the songs were written about that experience. Other songs joined later and were refined up until the album was almost ready in 2025. I kept these lyrics in my digital drawers for too long, as I wasn’t sure that they’re good enough. However, now that the complete piece has been released, I feel they do reflect my personality, thoughts, fears and hopes in a coherent way, and are deeply connected one to the other.

Q Many of your songs, like Stray Dogs, use animals or external imagery to reflect human experience. How do you decide when to express something personal through metaphor and when to keep it direct?

It may be tangible like actual stray dogs I saw around Sofia, Bulgaria, when travelling the country, or it could stem from a feeling, which isn’t as concrete, but it’s a moment in time. Those ‘incidents’ stick with me and become songs. I keep it as close as I can to the feeling or the idea which originated the song.

Q Feel Lighter is such a tender way of letting someone go. Was it important for you to write about relationships without bitterness?

This song actually mixes two ideas, a longing to feel lighter after loss and trying to emerge from deep grief. This was influenced by my mom’s passing away in 2013. A pretty difficult relationship with someone who was so troubled, the song is a way of letting her go, talking to her and understanding her as she just wants to feel lighter and let go of the heavy burdens in her own life. So I guess the first one is talking to myself and the second is to an ex-girlfriend, who needs encouragement and some legitimacy to feel lighter.

Q Don’t Ask Much touches on intimacy through technology. Do you feel the screen makes connection more fragile, or does it offer its own kind of beauty?

This song came from a very concrete experience of a video chat I had with someone from a different country.  

It was kind of depressing to communicate like that, and yet exciting and full of hope for something magical to happen in real life. I wrote part of this song on a break from one of those chats and then sent it to her as a video. Whenever I hear it I can remember the feelings I had quite vividly. So yeah, I think the excitement of a digital romance has its beauty. Maybe it’s because you build a story in your head of how it’s actually going to be..you fantasize. That’s the exciting part. The rest of it is the coldness and loneliness that is the reality.

Q In Lines repeats the plea “Can’t you see me in the darkness.” What role does vulnerability play in your songwriting process?

Being in a long term relationship is vulnerable by definition. In this case, the song deals with infidelity in a relationship, and how one person is so hurt and yearns to be seen by the other in this dark place. Seen and understood..but it usually doesn’t work out. I think the essence of this vulnerability is being so “good” and “nice” and it doesn’t lead to anything positive. There’s a line in this song “Waiting to be lied to”. When you’re so kind to someone and from being too kind you’re waiting to hear lies, so you’d feel better, but it’s still lies.

Q Thinking Makes You Anxious almost reads like self-soothing instructions. Do you write lyrics as a way to calm yourself, or more as an observation of states of mind?

A: This was written more as a cynical observation about how corporations, in this case a medical device, an oxygen machine, is trying to get the patient to cooperate, to embrace the machine and feel at ease. It conflicts directly with the fear of death and the inevitable results of serious illness like cancer. This idea reminded me of the scene from the movie “Fight club”, in which Tyler talks about how the oxygen masks on airplanes are actually meant to ease you into compliance when you’re about to crash and die. When you look at the safety pamphlet, everyone looks calm and relaxed. That’s the tension this song was talking about. I wrote more about the story behind this song on my blog (https://www.yuvigerstein.com/blogs/news/thinking-makes-you-anxious-yuvi-gerstein-story-behind-the-song) .

It came from a very tangible experience of my mom using an oxygen machine and me sampling its raspy sounds. Those sounds are actually part of the song’s track.

Q Across the album there’s a strong theme of endurance, emotional, physical, and relational. Do you see survival as a central thread in your work?

I think it’s a reflection of how I experienced things, sometimes difficult things and dealt with situations in my life.

I was strong enough to deal with them and not fall apart, but they stuck with me and that’s what I’m expressing in the songs. it’s all reflections on my past, so, surviving the themes of the song made me better.

Q Stray Dogs contrasts the survival strategies of dogs and cats, gentleness versus toughness. Did you write that with people in mind, or did it emerge naturally from observation?

I read the book Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, in which he talks about how animals were domesticated, and how the wild animals didn’t survive, since if they were too violent, their owners would kill them. So, through time, only the gentle and pleasing ones remained domesticated and survived. That gave me the main theme for the song. On the other hand, cats are much wilder, tougher, and they survive on their own mostly. So that contrast was also interesting to me.  

Q A lot of your lines are very plainspoken, almost diary-like. Do you consciously avoid dense imagery to keep the emotions more immediate?

Since my writing is quite personal, and usually based on real life experiences, I tell it like it is, or at least try to convey a real feeling I had when the events happened. Diary writing, sometimes talking about someone other than myself, but still quite direct. I do try to keep it vague and use metaphors when it suits the feeling of the song.

Q The album doesn’t resolve its grief or heartbreak neatly, but instead circles back through repetition. Was it important for you to capture that cyclical nature of emotion rather than a clear resolution?

Oh yeah, there’s no one “happy ending” to all of it. It’s always a journey, a struggle, with ups and downs. I feel that’s more loyal to real life, rather than a direct resolution. I think asking questions and surfacing dilemmas is more interesting than resolving them. Who knows, maybe the next album would bring more resolutions.

Q Cells addresses illness and mortality directly, without romanticizing it. How did you approach writing about something so personal and painful with such restraint?

Well, since I experienced it first hand, with my mom being ill for the better part of nine years, I wanted to express what it’s like in real life, not as a romantic idea, but as an experience. How she dealt with it and how the family around her dealt with it as well. It was painful and didn’t have a happy ending, so there’s no way around it really. If I managed to express this journey a little bit, then that’s what I set out to do.

Q All Day All Night feels meditative compared to the heavier tracks. Was that meant as a breath of simplicity, or does it hold its own weight of meaning?

This was actually a magical moment captured on Christmas eve 2012, in an empty field in the UK. I was visiting a friend for Christmas with her family, and we went for a walk at night. It was in the countryside, so we could see loads of stars and then she started singing in that open field. I started recording it on my iPhone and then the moment was gone and I forgot about it. It took years and years until the song took shape. However, it captured that moment in such a precise way and at the end of the song there’s me saying “Special”, because it was just so special. I’m thankful to Priscilla for sharing that Christmas with me and I absolutely love the result.

Q Darkness comes up in In Lines as both a literal and emotional space. Do you see darkness as threatening, or more as a place where recognition and intimacy can happen?

I’m actually quite an optimistic person. My wife keeps asking me “what are you so happy about?”. My life view is quite optimistic and I wouldn’t say it’s dark. However, the darkness in my songs stem from dark places I’ve been to or seen others in. I think it’s embedded in my music and in my lyrical themes as well. I see those times and I try to express them as faithfully as possible. It’s all part of it and I don’t allow myself to avoid those dark places.

Q You’ve included both English and Hebrew in your lyrics. How does moving between languages shape the way you express emotion?

I speak Hebrew, it’s my mother tongue, but feel equally comfortable expressing myself in English, as I spent years in the UK and US.

It’s a challenge to move between those languages in music, since they’re so different from each other. I used Hebrew in one specific spot in the album – a conversation I had with my mom, in which she says everything is OK, trying to ease my mind, even though I knew she was in pain and her health was deteriorating. I think it’s a strong statement and for that particular part works well (Thinking makes you anxious).

Q Cells reflects the loss of your mother. Did writing the song help transform grief, or did it simply capture it as it was?

It aims to capture how my mom dealt with it, as slowly ‘cells of trouble’ (cancer) multiplied and took their toll on her. She was such a brave person, but she never saw herself as such. She said, I’m not a hero, I’m just doing what the doctors tell me to. But to me, she was. She was strong and optimistic and loving throughout. She understood the situation and was dealing with it in her own way. The song talks about that and tries to be true to her, as in the background things are not getting much better. That’s the tension in that song. It helped me process grief and I still feel emotional whenever I play or hear it.

Q Looking back at the album now, do you see it more as a document of endurance, or as an ongoing conversation with yourself and your memories?

This album took me years to release. Some songs were written over a decade ago. It’s an ongoing conversation with myself, my flaws, my procrastination until I finally decided enough is enough, it has to come out. It’s easy to postpone your own creations when you work as a music producer, giving service to others most of the time. It takes a back seat, sometimes for a long while. I see it as closing a circle with myself, clearing the table for new music and songs to come. It is an album I 100% stand behind, and feel it could resonate with others as well. From the reactions I got so far, it definitely seems like it does. I’ve explored a wide range of genres — from studying jazz formally to playing in a hip hop band for a decade — and that versatility shapes how I look back on this work. So, looking back, this is a moment, or many moments in time and here’s to the next one. I promised myself the next one won’t take as long to release.