In his new book, “Almost All the Songs”, legendary Israeli musician, singer-songwriter, composer and producer Alon Oleartchik returns to 77 songs from his long musical road. But instead of summing up a career, he opens a notebook. One you can place on a music stand, play from, read through, and rediscover both the songs everyone knows and the ones that have been quietly waiting on the side.
There are books about music that try to close a circle. With Alon Oleartchik, it feels like the circle stays open. “Almost All the Songs” (Translated from Hebrew), his new book, brings together 77 songs from more than five decades of writing, 59 of them with sheet music, and offers something that sits somewhere between a songbook, a music book, a working notebook, and a small doorway into the mind of one of the most interesting figures in Israeli music.
“These are almost all my songs,” he writes. “I chose them because I found that they had ‘something’ in them, in the words, in the melody, or in both. And besides, I found quite a few songs that I think are ‘worthy’ and were played very little on the radio, and I thought this was a chance to give them a place. Maybe you will feel the same way about them.”
That sentence says a lot about the whole book. It has that familiar Oleartchik quality: direct, musical, a little smiling, slightly running away from big declarations, but still knowing exactly what it is looking for. He does not present the songs like statues in a museum, but as living material. Something you can open, play, take apart, put back together, and check again.
The design inspiration for the book also comes from the world of playing music. Oleartchik says he was influenced by the Real Book, the songbook known to many musicians, the kind that lays out melody and chords in a clear, raw, almost practical way, so you can start playing right away. It is a choice that places “Almost All the Songs” somewhere different from the usual celebratory career books. It is less interested in summing things up, and more interested in keeping them going.
And maybe that is the most beautiful thing about it. The book is made for musicians, of course, but also for anyone who wants to read Oleartchik through the words alone. When the songs sit side by side, away from the habit of the original recordings, you can see again the inner movement that keeps returning in his work. Place, wandering, childhood, city, home, distance, longing, humor, play. Sometimes it is all there in one small line. Sometimes in a chord. Sometimes in the passage between them.
Oleartchik, who was born in Poland and whose first language was not Hebrew, has written and composed over the years from a special position inside Israeli music. He is part of its center, but he always sounds a little as if he is also standing just outside it. A member of Kaveret, one of Israel’s most beloved bands, and later a solo artist, producer, composer and lyricist, he is a musician who lives inside the language but keeps testing it all the time.
Maybe that is why his songs can feel so local and so restless at the same time. “Almost All the Songs” lets you see that up close. Not only in the songs everyone knows, but also in the ones that drifted to the edges of the catalogue. The ones that receive here a new place, quieter and more precise. There is something right about a book like this being able to open in any direction, to be placed on a stand and played from. And in the end, the “almost” in the title is part of the point. Not everything is here, and not everything needs to be here.
“Almost All the Songs” sounds like the name of a book by someone who knows the weight of the road behind him, but still leaves some air in the room. Almost all the songs, almost the whole story, almost a summary. And above all, another chance to start playing.
