“It was like the tenth version of the song, but it was what I was looking for all along”

“You can only say so much in a single, but an entire album is sometimes overkill,” says singer/songwriter DOVID LOWY. His recent release is an EP (Extended Play), with more tracks than a single but fewer than a full album, which he feels enables the project to have an overall theme and message while not interspersed and distracted by fillers. This mini-album of Elul reflections is simply called DOVID LOWY EP.

Lowy actually composed the opening track, “Ani Ledodi,” a pasuk closely associated with Elul, on Pesach while reciting Shir Hashirim. Another song, “Yismach Yisrael,” is not directly related to the Yamim Noraim, yet alludes to the joy of Am Yisrael’s connection to the King.

Track number four, “Hu Yigal,” went through many stages. Lowy originally wrote it as a wordless niggun of dveykus, but he felt it was not “saying enough” to listeners. Realizing that it needed words, he tried to set different pesukim from Shacharis to the niggun, but somehow didn’t feel that he’d hit the jackpot — until Shabbos Mevorchim, when the kehillah recited the words, “Hu yigal osanu bekarov.” Those words just fit, and the lines of English were a last-minute inspiration. “It was like the tenth version of the song,” Lowy reflects, “but it was what I was looking for all along.”

The final track is a niggun that came to him one Friday afternoon, as he transitioned into the Erev Shabbos mode of wholeness and completion. “Chazal explain that one should feel that all his work is done,” he reflects. “That is the true peace of wholeness and Shabbos.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 927)