Anagnorisis

Album: Anagnorisis (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • Anagnorisis is when a character in a story discovers their true self in a moment of revelation. For Asaf Avidan, this came in the form of a mid-life crisis as he approached his 40th birthday. "I was reading this book by Aristotle and I stumbled upon that term and it was like a eureka moment," Avidan explained when he was a guest on the Songfacts Podcast. "It was a revelation, because I was trying to progress and understand myself because I was turning 40 and going through this process and thinking, Who am I? What am I, as we do in our mid-life crises. And the deeper I dived, the blurrier it became. There was a formlessness and an abstractness. I kept hating myself and feeling small and unworthy of my profession, because if I can't even depict my own self to myself, how am I going to communicate these themes to others?

    But the blurriness was not the problem, it was just the essence. We are an abstract nebula of selves, and every time we try to impose a structure on it, we are inherently lying."
  • This is the title track to Asaf Avidan's seventh album. He's always put much of himself in his songs, but considers this album his most personal. It was inspired in part by a near-death experience when his wolf-dog hybrid attacked him. Avidan was lucky to survive it, and got even luckier when there was no lasting damage to his chewed-up arm, meaning he could still play his instruments.
  • The video was directed by Wim Wenders, whose films include Buena Vista Social Club and Paris, Texas. It stars the dancer Bobbi Jene Smith, who also appears in Avidan's video for "Lost Horse."

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