By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — A cousin, Liz Halpern, sent to us “Candles,” the first video made by musician Erez Cohen, and we’ve been playing it from the bottom of the San Diego Jewish World home page since the early days of Chanukah. You can also access by touching your cursor here.
With two nights of Chanukah still pending as I write this (Monday, Dec. 22) , some information about the Brooklyn-born Cohen may be of interest to readers. In an email exchange, I asked him about the circumstances behind the video. “I felt it was time to write a cool original Hannukah song,” he responded. “I love that Hannukah has become a time that people expect new fun music and I just wanted to try something new.”
The most salient lyrics, he said, are near the beginning of the song: “Never been much of a fighter, but times were tough and we needed men.” He particularly liked that opening because it “pulls you right into the song and puts you in the shoes of the Maccabees.”
“What I tried to convey in ‘Candles,'” he added “is that the Maccabees were real people with real feelings and real challenges. I wanted to tap into their humanity and make it relatable for us in modern times.”
Cohen, a guitarist who has been writing songs for a decade, has been perfecting his skills on piano since college, and last summer embarked upon drums. He explained that he always tries “to keep adding new skills to my repertoire.”
On the experience of making “Candles,” he said: “We had a whole video and story line planned but for some reason, everything went wrong. People’s schedules were changing, some got sick–one even had to go to the hospital! Within hours, I had a new idea and we pulled the whole video together in 3 days, including editing!”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. Your comments may be placed in the box below this article or may be sent directly to the author at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com