Little girl blue

Singer Yael Naim traded old heartache for 'New Soul'

Israel singer Yael Naim wrote more than half the songs on her debut CD in Hebrew. (Julie Harnais)

Six months ago Yael Naim was a little-known singer-songwriter from Israel living quietly in France. She had spent two years recording songs with her musical partner, West Indian percussionist David Donatien, in her Paris apartment. The pair's pace was relaxed, to say the least.

If they wanted trombone on a song, they would invite a trombonist for dinner, ply him with food and drink, and then retire to the living room with a microphone. Ditto for cellists and violinists. More than half of the 13 songs on Naim's self-titled debut are downbeat ballads sung in Hebrew, so there's no reason to doubt the singer-songwriter when she says that she never, ever imagined that this album would be widely heard.

"My boyfriend had left me. I didn't find my way in Paris. I felt disconnected and found myself writing in Hebrew during a very melancholic period," says Naim. "We were a hundred percent sure we would never sell this anywhere but Israel."

And then in January, a few months after her album had been released overseas, the planet's only bona fide star-making machine blew fairy dust on Naim. Apple chose one of her songs, a quirky ditty called "New Soul," to launch the MacBook Air campaign.

And that was that. "New Soul" shortly became the most-downloaded song on iTunes - it's now closing in on a million downloads - and Naim's album was released in the United States in March. She and Donatien perform tomorrow at Berklee Performance Center.

Naim is quick to point out that without Donatien, "none of this would exist. Meeting and working with him changed my life. Before it was, how to say . . . the songs were the same but it's like I didn't find . . . the essential thing. You know how sometimes a woman puts on too much makeup? I felt that David took all the makeup off and said, 'You can do something simple. Something more pure.' "

Naim, now 30, was no stranger to makeup, literally and figuratively. Born to Tunisian parents and raised outside Tel Aviv before moving to Paris in 2000, she toured for 2 1/2 years as Miriam in a musical version of "The Ten Commandments," Naim's version of a day job. "You learn a lot being an instrument for somebody else's project," she muses, but in retrospect she mastered a tougher lesson while signed to EMI, for which she released one poor-selling, confidence-killing album in 2001.

"I was impressed by the big record company and big budgets and big studios and big producers, and then you discover that it puts a pressure on you," says Naim. "All this expectation puts things in your mind that disturb you, but I was young and impatient and wanted things to happen fast. I was disappointed. But I learned everything I didn't want to do."

A long period of disillusionment followed, along with another musical, "Gladiator," and some film soundtrack work. Then in 2004 Naim took a gig playing piano in a friend's band, which featured Donatien, a seasoned sideman, on percussion.

"We had a nice human feeling," Donatien recalls. "We did some improvisation together and I discovered, 'Oh, this woman can sing. She is a true musician.' And then two days after we met she sent me 200 songs. I was impressed and said to myself I want to help her to do her home project. We arrived really quickly at this mix of us. She comes from the calm music and a little pop. I come from jazz and soul. We were really inspired by each other."

The pair produced a charmed fusion of organic instruments and ambient flourishes, a lush yet uncluttered soundscape that supplies an ideal setting for Naim's warm, winsome voice. Indie-pop songbirds Feist and Regina Spektor are close counterparts. While the Hebrew-language tracks are lovely enough to transcend the language barrier, American fans will thrill to Naim's languid cover of Britney Spears's "Toxic."

And then there's the little Apple ad-turned-hit single. "New Soul" is the only song on the album written after Naim met Donatien. She had come out of her multiyear funk, had stumbled onto an entirely unexpected musical path, and was ripe for a major re-tweaking of her world view.

"The song came one afternoon after speaking with a friend who believes in reincarnation," says Naim. "I'd always thought I was an old soul, with my big ideas about what life is like and what love is like. But everything happening is the opposite of what I thought. Things I never thought I would do, making a homemade album in Hebrew, make me happy. I saw how pretentious I was, and I came to the conclusion that I'm not an old soul. I'm really a new soul."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, go to boston.com/ae /music/blog.