| Efrat Gosh Finds Peace |
| Wednesday, 22 August 2007 | |
 Efrat Gosh recently released her second album, and the first single from it turned into an instant hit. Beside her new album, Efrat shares her difficult past and her new found peace in life.
Efrat Gosh says that she doesn’t like to explain the songs she writes: "It's like Picasso having to explain his paintings!!". Well Picasso is one thing, but her song A Boxing Fight is after all the first song she has ever written and composed by herself. Efrat: “The song is about things that I have experienced and things other women I know have experienced many times. As a woman I feel sometimes that there is something violent towards women, and inside me there is always the fear that something will happen to me”. Now to another interesting aspect in Efrat's life; Efrat will be 24 in November, she has a boyfriend who is 49 years old, the producer Haim Shamesh, and that after a long period of having a strictly professional relationship. Shamesh discovered her when he was one of the head managers of the third biggest record label in Israel NMC. He was the one that signed her and nourished her to become a singer. A year and a half ago they started living together and moved to the colony Even Yehuda, next to Tel-Aviv. Before this Efrat lived for years in the neighbourhood Florentine in Tel-Aviv. Efrat: “Haim is the musical producer of my new album, which will be my second album. It’s called The Forgiveness And Me. Haim is my right hand. After my first album came out we started becoming more than just friends. We use to meet and sit at cafes in Florentine and he would come to see how I’m doing and if I’m fine. It wasn’t an easy time for me, especially for a young girl at this age in Tel-Aviv and he was there for me”. The new couple got lots of interest from people in the field and from the media at the beginning. Haim had left NMC and built his own music consultant company. Efrat: “Everyone in the media partied on our expense, eventually they got used to it, and you know how it is, eventually there was new gossip, new stories for the media and they moved on and everyone accepted us. But I have to say that at the beginning people were mean. People went up to Haim and told him that they would give us a month together and that it wont last. I really cant believe how people allow themselves to enter matters that aren’t theirs”. The move to Even Yehuda, where she also works on her music with Haim, wasn’t easy for Efrat as she lived in big cities her entire life. On one hand its close enough to Tel-Aviv so they can go there whenever they want, on the other hand they don’t live in the middle of the mess anymore. They have their own space and their peaceful corner to relax and live quietly in. She was born and raised in Hertzeliya and later on moved to Tel-Aviv, from there she moved on to live in Amsterdam, Holland and returned back to Tel-Aviv. Efrat: “In Tel-Aviv there are many stimulations to do all kinds of things, but when I look at it backwards I took the correct decision, it gave me more peace and quiet, here at Even Yehuda. It’s just the two of us, Haim and me, I’m focused on my work and album here like never before at any place. I love going to Tel-Vviv but I’m even happier to return to my house, my sanctuary. This is the first time after many years that I feel that I have a home in the classical sense of the word. I know where I’m going to return to and where I want to return to every evening when we are out. This isn’t something obvious for me, as I lived at all kinds of places and sometimes felt like a traveller with a bag that moves from one place to another. The house we have in Even Yehuda has given me peace of mind, it has made me happy for the first time in my life”. Q: How do your parents react to the fact that your partner is more than double your age?  A: “I don’t choose with whom I fall in love and I don’t fall in love for the amount of money a person has, or which country of origin he came from, or the house he came from. I connect and fall in love from the deepest place there is in me, and I truly believe that love doesn’t have an age. My friends receive me just as I am as they always did, exactly the way I accept them, every person individually has their own characteristics, the things that happens to him/her in their life and the way they route their own life. Everyone really accepted Haim very well and now I have no doubt that everyone loves him and see how happy I am. I understand that if you are a parent you don’t want your daughter to go out with A man that is almost as their own age, and although there are countless couples like us I understand that it might seem weird. But I’m inside this relationship without having any problem with the age. Haim is a person that takes out all the good from me and I take out the good from him, our relationship is totally equal and the age isn’t felt at all in our lives. Haim also has his own life, he is a person that has his routine and order in his life. He knows what he wants from himself, he's not the kind of person that will go to search himself in long trips in India and all kinds of weird things like that, things that many people at my age do. I just can’t connect to or understand these people, this is one thing that really attracts me in Haim”. Q: Isn't it hard to work with someone who is also your partner in life? A: “For us it works really well! There is something really charming and complete in working and living with the same person. Our relationship actually started as a work relationship, we both have lots of passion for music and art, if anything the problem when we are together is to know when to stop working and put the work aside. Especially now that we are in a very intense period of work, while we have to finish the album, work on the shows that will follow it, and Haim is involved in every aspect of our work, in my art. He is the first person I play a song too, the first person I talk to about it, for example the order of the songs I should perform while I am on stage. Beside telling me what to wear Haim is my first address, the first person I go to with everything. For us to work together and also be a couple in life is just perfect and I enjoy every moment of it”. Q: You're not afraid you'll get dependent on him, dependent because he discovered you and because of his age and experience? A: “There is always a matter and amount of dependence between couples, a matter of dependence that increases the longer the couple are together, no matter whom or where, and I'm not saying it because we also work together. With Haim it's totally the opposite. Till I met him, I was always with people that were all the time endlessly very obsessive and jealous about me: Where have you been? Whom did you talk too? What are you doing? Where are you going to? And worse, these things were just endless, back then it was a sign that all these men love me and I use to look for relationships like that. Now I'm in a relationship with someone that trusts me, Haim gives me all the freedom in the world, especially the freedom to choose him, I can come, I can go, and he is there for me, understands me and respects me. Efrat was said to be, with her skinny body, A-symetrical hair style, and deep blue eyes that are always busy checking out who she trusts and doesn't trust in this world, a good and interesting alternative to the "Buskilas", "Mesikas" and "Ninet's" that are currently occupying the female department of the Israeli music. Two years after she took out her debut album at the age of 21 and a half, an album that was said by the music critics to be good and with lots of talent, Efrat is returning and taking out her second album. The album will be released earlier because of the huge success the first single, called See The Light, from it had. It reached the first place on the important charts of "Reshet Gimel" and "Galgalatz". In her new album she has also written and composed songs for the first time, other contributors to the album are: Asaf Amdurski, Ofer Mairey, Yoni Bloch, Eric Berman and Barak Feldman, the musical production was made by Nir Aberbuch. Efrat was born and raised in a house in Hertzeliya. She was the middle child with a younger and an older brother. When she was young she heard in her house a lot of Jazz music and was influenced by Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker. Efrat: “Since I was a small kid I wanted to be Aasinger, even younger than the first grade. I didn’t tell it to anyone. Later on, when I grew up and my brothers wanted to tease me they would say yes yes, here comes the singer, you'll be a singer, a great singer”. The house in which Efrat grew up, wasn’t a happy, quiet or an ideal house. Efrat: “There was a very bad atmosphere in my house, my folks didn't get along, and as a child it hurt me a lot to hear my parents fighting, cursing and shouting all the time. I just didn’t want to be at home at all. They made each another and us the children really miserable. It was like a secret and we didn’t talk about it outside the house. Once the parents got divorced it got a bit better. I lived with my mom and inside I blamed her for letting it happen. My childhood and teenage period were really difficult for me because of it. Recently after many years of having a bad relationship with my parents, I'm trying to put back the pieces and going through a process of forgiving my parents. Here and there we meet for lunches or dinner but there is still a long way to go”. Efrat says about herself that she wanted to be a singer since the first grade where she learned to play the flute. Later on in the school of arts Gordon she was in the choir "Liron", a choir that was really demanding and appeared in many festivals and contests, that made her find a connection to music, not for the sake of becoming famous but for the sake of music itself. Q: You didn’t want to be famous? A: “Of course it's great to be famous! But that wasn’t what led me, I just have an impulse for music, it's what I like to do the most, it's a part of me”. Q: Till this album you never wrote songs for yourself why is that? A: “I like to criticize myself a lot, with the music itself it’s inside of me, I feel that there is lots of music just waiting to burst out of me. In high school she got along with most of the teachers but her grades were low and getting worse, she understood that it's not for her. She said to herself that a singer doesn’t need to learn Mathematics or Bible. So at the age of 17 she joined the school of arts Rimon but left after a year of failure. After leaving Rimon, she went with a friend to Amsterdam. It was suppose to be a small vacation but went on over half a year, she just didn’t feel the need to return back. In Holland she fell in love with a Dutch man and lived with him for half a year and got connected to the local scene and felt she can do everything. Q: You went to bars, took drugs etc? A: “Yes I did it all, everything together, my music was left behind, I sang there for some local people but it was really nothing, till I realized that I am just getting ruined with the way I’m living there and decided to return home” . Just like the women she idolized Piaf and Holiday, Efrat's life was also built around the men in her life. Efrat: “When I feel loved, it's the strongest feeling there is”. During her highschool years she was the girlfriend of the drummer Ariel Armoni, in Amsterdam she stayed because of a man she met, when returning after a while she fell in love with the contrabass player Gilad Avro, with whom she lived in Kfar Saba, and continued performing at small places and working at all kinds of part time jobs. Q: How did you think you'll have a breakthrough into the music scene? A: “I'm an optimistic person in my nature, I believe that if you believe in something totally and tell your self that it has to happen, eventually it will happen. I imagined how I will be discovered and it happened”. It started when some musical friend asked Efart if she could make a demo recording for a song, from the anonymous singer at the time Yoni Bloch whom had written it for another female singer. She agreed and after a week she was asked to become a background singer in Bloch’s shows. That show turned out to be an important one, as Bloch and Gosh looked to the audience and saw one of the managers of NMC at the time, Haim Shamesh, who came to watch Yoni Bloch. Shamesh has a history of discovering and nourishing talented stars. He was the one that discovered Aviv Geffen, Eifo HaYeled, HaKhaverim Shel Natasha, HaYehudim, Eviyatar Banai, and many more artists. At the end of the show Shamesh was so impressed by the background vocalist Gosh that he went to her backstage and asked her to sign a contract. Efrat: “I was scared, it seemed to good to be true, I was asking myself maybe he wants something from me? Why would anyone want to do such a good thing for me? I decided not to sign on a contract as I wanted to be a Jazz singer and I felt that Israel isn’t a good ground to become a jazz singer. I wanted to go to New York for it, so I didn’t answer his phonecalls. Eventually Shamesh spoke to Bloch who spoke again to Efrat. Around that time Efrat had ended another relationship, which had the same problems like her previous ones and moved back from Kfar Saba to Tel-Aviv to the Florentine neighbourhood. Efrat: “I remember it was my 20th birthday and it was a sad one. I was lonely and alone in a big city. I was working as a background vocalist in the evenings and working sometimes at a Juice stand during the day. My house was neglected but the good part was that I was about to sign a contract with NMC. Eventually many of my friends moved to the area and with Bloch and others we use to spend lots of time together. Eventually Bloch and Barak Feldman wrote for her the song Reconstruction which became a huge hit, especially online and then they started working on her debut album. She also fell in love with the hairdresser Vitorio, whom is one of the most popular people in Florentine and one of the symbols of that neighbourhood. He is also the person behind her dramatic hair style. She moved in with him and they were together for a year. She also went to study Kabala with him. On her first album there is a dedication she wrote to him, although they had already broken up. Her debut album included lyrics by Feldman and music was composed by Bloch, it got very good critics and had success with sales. Efrat: “I wasn’t surprised as I was in the music field for many years and I was waiting for it to happen, I knew it would eventually after so many years”. A year and a half ago she moved away from Florentine which she didn’t like anymore, to Even Yehuda with her biggest love Haim Shamesh. Q: Can you say that your happy now in your career and in your personal life? A: “Happiness doesn’t have anything to do with material, it doesn’t matter if also 100,000 people buy the new album if I feel that the album is a fake. Happiness is to be complete with myself and accept myself also if I don’t sell even one album, but yes I can tell you that in my life I’m happier than I ever was. At the release of her second album Efrat is saying that she loves performing: “It's really a natural thing for me to be at the front of the stage, at the concerts you get an immediate feedback and that’s addicting and a lie”. Q: A lie? A: “Yes, because after the concert I have to live my life and if I tell myself that the audience loves me and I can stop the hard work, I might get an attitude, stop working and take things for granted”. Comments (10)
 amazing voice
written by anoniboy, March 12, 2008
hi! i made an article on the english wikipedia about her and gleaned some info from the above article, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efrat_Gosh
thx for this story 2
written by bibi, February 24, 2008
efrat is really a great singer, story about her is very interesting, especially bcoz u can almost never find article on israeli singers on the internet.
thx again loved it  open the window 2009
written by rami kleinstein 2008, February 01, 2008  r chaime flescher jorde n23 j9okanm israel cool
written by nicole rosenbaum, November 20, 2007
hiii to everyone
 this story is a bit of a wow no? she's really cool with all she has done so far, im glad for her she found a man that she loves and loves her so much. thanks for the article kikar  i see her in summer 2007
written by miki, November 05, 2007
i see her in israel in the summer, she has a good voice and i wish her and her man good luck
maybe geting maried
written by julie, October 31, 2007
i hear efrat is geting maried to her boyfriend from this story in 2008, if right wish her luck.
please kikar-israel put more videos from her album  thanks for details
written by dana m., October 29, 2007
she has some nice songs, did not know she has such life
great singer
written by gever, September 11, 2007
she is great singer please put video of her if you can so
Efrat Gosh written by Udi, September 09, 2007
I went to See Efrat Gosh in Tel Aviv. she is amazing, In the big world I think she has the possiblity to sing Jazz and cabaret. but her Israeli music is the best one I heard in a long time. her 2nd CD album still being played often in my stereo.
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