Exclusive: Marking 30th Anniversary Music Superstar Avraham Fried Speaks To VIN [series 1]

02 May, 2010 by yossi

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New York – Today Lag B’omer marks the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Avraham Fried’s debut album, No Jew Will Be Left Behind. To celebrate this milestone, Yossi Zweig  spoke with the Jewish music superstar, who spoke candidly about his career, his music and his plans for the future. Vos Iz Neias is proud to present an exclusive three part video interview, providing a glimpse into the world of one of Jewish music’s most successful singers.

In the first of this three part series, Avremel reminisces how his first instructions from the Lubavitcher Rebbe about his singing career were to include the words “Please do not play on Shabbos or Yom Tov” on both the album cover and the album itself. The title track of his debut album, No Jew Will Be Left Behind, is the first of many Moshiach themed songs that appear on Fried’s albums. Indeed, thirty years later, some of these songs are still popular and Fried points out that the hallmark of a hit song isn’t the song’s popularity when it is released, but that years later, people are still singing that song.

While he has certainly kept up with the trend in Jewish music to incorporate elaborate orchestration into every album, Fried confesses that he would love to see music downsized with a return to simpler days when an eight piece orchestra was more than enough. Fried discusses his early days, working with Sheya Mendlowitz and his long standing relationship with multi talented arranger Moshe Laufer who has been arranging his albums since 1983.

While Avremel has been delighting us with his albums since 1980, his singing career actually goes back much further. Both his Hupp Cossak and Goodbye Golus albums feature recordings of him singing as child.

Part 1 of the exclusive interview