The Kibbitz
And yet, so much of the music you write has a lot of secular influences: there’s baseball, Americana, coun- try music. How do you deal with that tension? It’s not a contradiction. Our music is certainly more American than Euro- pean or North African. We are what we hear. Even the rebbes who wrote nigunim , you might say they didn’t lis- ten to secular music. But they walked down the street and heard the Pol- ish marching band from around the corner. Today, you sit in the dentist’s chair. Don’t tell me you’re not listen- ing to secular music. Whatever comes in is what comes out. I grew up, thankfully, in an envi- ronment where being an American [Abie moved to Toronto in the 1980s] and adapting American values and traditions was not a contradiction to Yiddishkeit. My parents celebrated Thanksgiving in my house. They would buy a turkey. But we still went to shul, they still wanted me to go to yeshivah. It was not a contradiction. Unfortunately, there are people today who feel those things are not com- patible, but I disagree. I think they’re absolutely, totally compatible. Your novel, The Season of Pepsi Meyers , is clearly a love letter to baseball as much as it is about Judaism. I grew up with baseball in the same way. What do you think it is about baseball that engenders so much Jewish love? I have a theory about that. I think it’s because baseball is really unique. All the other sports — basketball, foot- ball, hockey — their structure is sim- ple. I’m going in one direction; you’re going the other way. It’s all very lin- ear. Baseball has no time limit and nothing to do with pushing this way or that way. It’s filled with so many possibilities. It’s just perfect for the
children. Is there anything you learned from writing for kids that shows up in your adult work? It’s not easy to write for kids. It may even be harder to write for children than for adults. The melody can be simple, the arrangement can be sim- ple. You don’t have to have a bridge and a sophisticated chord structure. But to write the right words, to say the right thing in a way that won’t of- fend this person or that person — it’s not easy to write for kids in a mean- ingful way. I noticed there’s a very large gap between the most recent Journeys album and the previous one. I think every artist has his decade,
maybe two decades if you’re lucky, where he’s really creative. The mind gets slower as time passes. I am also very selective about what I want to write about. If the song’s not going to have meaning, or some pos- itive message… It doesn’t have to be deep meaning, but it has to have some kind of meaning. Even a song like “Yeshivishe Reid,” it may be whim- sical, but there are some lessons in there. In Yiddishkeit , there are only so many themes. There are only so many things you can talk about. How many songs about faith are you going to write? You write a lot about the triumph of Jewish identity over assimilation.
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