By Reuvain Borchardt

 

 

 

Bo’ee veshalom, ateret ba’alah …

 

The composer’s fingers move deftly across his studio keyboard, his face mired in intensity, but the ever-present smile is on his lips as he sings one of his favorite compositions.

 

Toch emunei, am segulah …

 

The chassid from Boro Park sings with the Sephardi havarah this song was sung in by Yaakov Shwekey, his most frequent collaborator.

 

Bo’ee bo’ee kallah.

 

He effortlessly belts out the high notes, extending the final kallaaaaah, winking as he adds a few oohs and aahs to the end.

 

“That song,” says Yitzy Waldner, “took me a year to write.”

 

Eishes chayil mi yimtza …

 

Waldner is back at his studio keyboard, singing what he unhesitatingly calls his favorite of the hundreds of songs he has composed. This time he uses the Ashkenaz havarah the song was sung in by Shwekey.

 

Isha, Isha yiras, yiras Hashem, hi tishallal.

 

He hits the high notes, adds a few woah woah woahs, leans back in his studio chair, and smiles.

 

“I wrote that song in a minute,” he says. “I was going from my second floor to my first floor; before I hit the landing, the song was done.”

 

Such is the life of the composer: Being a conduit for bringing the audial glory of Hashem’s world to the masses at precisely the time and pace that He dictates.

 

 

Before he was writing hit songs for Yaakov Shwekey and Avraham Fried, before he was producing some of the most popular albums of his era, before his compositions were getting millions of streaming hits, Yitzy Waldner was the boy at the microphone.

 

A child singing prodigy, Waldner was the star soloist for the Amudai Shaish choir, Camp Sdei Chemed International choir, and Shmuel Kunda’s The Longest Pesach and The Magic Yarmulke. (He sang I ran I ran, Kipah Kipah and Simcha Shtark.)

 

He was onstage at HASC 2, in a choir singing old Pirchei songs; he had the solo for the Ailecha bridge (“Shema Hashem, v’chaneini …). The choirmaster was a young man named Yochanan Briskman.

 

Yitzy’s head was entirely in music; learning had taken a backseat.

When he was a 15-year-old in Bobover yeshivah in 1990, he flunked a farher the rosh yeshivah, Dayan Chaim Yankel Tauber, had given the class.

 

The rosh yeshivah called Yitzy into his office and said, “You have to make a decision. Either you stick to the stage and you’re not going to learn, or you stick to learning.” He wasn’t threatening to expel him from yeshivah, he was just letting the young man know his future hung in the balance.

 

“It hurt for a minute,” Yitzy tells me. He’s seated in his studio chair; I’m sitting on the couch on which Shwekey had just finished a recording session. “But I knew that if I continued what I was doing, I’d be an am ha’aretz. So I stuck out my hand and shook his. I said, ‘I’m staying here; this is where I am.’ And he said, ‘I’m going to help you.’”

 

Within a few months, the newfound masmid went from complete ignorance to reciting dapim Gemara baal peh.

 

It wasn’t until 1997, two years after he was married, when he was learning in Bobover Kollel and needed to earn some money, that the 22-year-old Waldner decided that the time was right to return to the music industry.

 

But here he faced another big decision. And the choice was not difficult.

 

Despite having been a child singing star, and despite his great admiration for the likes of Fried and Dedi, Waldner preferred to be like Yossi Green—the one who composed songs like Fried’s Forever One (Waldner’s all-time favorite from another composer, whose chorus he breaks out singing at least once an hour) and then revolutionized Jewish music with a whole new sound for Dedi in the early 90s. Then Yitzy Bald composed the smash-hit debut albums of Yisroel Williger, Mendy Wald, and Shloime Dachs. (The title of Williger’s album perfectly captured the era: The Voice of a New Generation.) Bald’s bold new sounds with these singers crystallized for Waldner that his career would be in composing.

 

“I was like, if I can get up and create that and shake the hearts of thousands of people around the world, that would be incredible. It’s more important than being another singer.”

 

He’s quick to qualify—as he does several times throughout the interview—“Of course, as Koheles says, ‘There’s nothing new under the sun.’ I say ‘create,’ but Hashem is the only true Creator. But He does give people the inspiration to be the vehicle to bring one of His creations into the world.”

 

Money was tight for the young kollel couple; Yitzy would go to his mother’s house to use her keyboard. Eventually, his wife bought him his own. Three decades later, Waldner still gets emotional in describing how much his wife had to sacrifice for it and what it meant for his career.

 

 

 

At the time, the only way to get songs to singers was to mail them tapes or CDs. No one responded. But then he caught a break when a friend of his brother’s mentioned that his father was a singer who wanted to make an album and was looking for a composer.

 

The singer’s name was Moshe Ilowitz. (Yitzy’s daughter married his great-nephew years later.) The album was called V’yazor. The investor was Getzy Tischler, whose son Moshe would sing Yitzy’s compositions two decades later. “Getzy lost his pants on that album,” Yitzy laughs.

 

That album launched the career of the man who would soon become one of the most influential composers in the business.

 

Yitzy was thrilled when Shloime Dachs, one of the new kids on the block, then hit him up for songs for his second album, Acheinu. Waldner contributed what would become his first two big hits, Shibchu and Welcome Home.

 

The album was produced by Waldner’s old HASC choirmaster, now nicknamed Yochi.

 

Briskman began reaching out to Waldner for songs for other clients.

 

One day in 2001, Waldner was in his Boro Park apartment when he received a call from the producer. It’s a story Waldner is fond of telling.

 

I say “Hello,” and Yochi, who always gets straight to the point, says, “You home? Come downstairs.” He was waiting in the car outside.

 

I go into his beat-up Suburban. The tape deck was broken. He had a portable tape player in the car.

 

He puts on this tape and suddenly I hear this voice singing covers of MBD songs. I’m absolutely stunned. I ask who the singer is. Yochi says, “His name is Shwekey.” At that point, there were no Sephardi singers on the market.

 

Yochi says, “He’s been singing at weddings. He’s getting married soon, and he doesn’t want to do any albums until he gets married.”

 

“Did you sign him?”

 

“Not yet, but we’re close.”

 

“This is something I’ve never heard before. This guy is going to be a superstar.”

 

The album was called Shamati. Waldner provided three songs: Habet, Baruch Hagever, and Meheirah.

 

More than two decades and many hits later, it’s with just a tad of benevolent resentment that Waldner recalls how, “They thought Habet was going to be the big song of the album—they put it on the third track—but it was completely overshadowed by Rachem.”

 

But Waldner had a hit of his own. Yet he was the only one unaware of it. It’s another of his favorite stories.

 

Seven months after the album came out, I’m at a cousin’s wedding in Cleveland. I go over to the band leader, Simcha Mann. I say, “Hi, my name is Yitzy Waldner, and my cousin asked me to sing a song.”

“Yitzy Waldner? Did you have anything to do with the Shwekey album?”

“Yes, I composed a few songs.”

“You composed Meheirah? We play it every night!”

I walked out of the hall and called Yochi, who was in the middle of setting up a wedding back in New York.

“They told me they play Meheirah every night. Is that true?”

“Are you living under a rock? It’s the biggest wedding song all around the world!”

 

And while Yitzy says he was never interested in celebrity or honor, “everyone needs chizuk. You have to know your material is landing somewhere.”

 

He had already had some success. He knew the album overall had been a hit. But that night in Cleveland, the yungerman from Boro Park realized he could really make it in this industry.

 

And, he notes good-naturedly, Meheirah outlasted Rachem (a smash hit so overplayed that it spawned a parody album called I’m So Sick of Rachem.)

 

“Meheirah was a trendsetter in the industry—a feel-good song in a major scale that could be used for chuppahs,” he says. Another stroke of good fortune is that while for decades until the mid-90s, the same classic songs had been played at chuppahs, now people were requesting contemporary music for that solemn occasion.

 

And while even the biggest hit songs typically have a shelf life of only a year or two, it thrills Waldner to see that “kallahs in 2025 are still walking down to Meheirah, a song that came out before they were born.”

 

The success of Meheirah led to euphoria—followed by the inevitable self-doubt that at some point afflicts every great artist.

 

“I started getting the jitters,” he recalls, “wondering if I’d be able to match it.”

 

But match it he did.

 

For Shwekey 2, Waldner provided three mega-hits: Al Naharos Bavel, Hinei Mah Tov, and another wedding favorite in Mi Adir.

 

Waldner was soon providing popular songs for many of the great stars he had idolized in his youth, including Dedi and Fried.

 

Asked to name something about himself that nobody would ever guess, Yitzy replies: “I hate kumzitzes.”

 

“A kumzitz is crying over guitars and being sad. I hate the depressive vibe. My songs tend to lend themselves to more of a simchah feel.”

 

While he has certainly composed sad songs, like Al Naharos Bavel and Shema Yisrael, he says they all have “an undertone of hope and simchah rather than just farkvetschkeit.”

 

“I can’t compose when I’m depressed,” he says. “Some people are most creative when they’re depressed. But I can’t write a single note.”

 

As the hits kept coming, the composer who was inspired by the trendsetters who came before him kept trying to reinvent and push the boundaries. But always within limits.

 

He was mindful of the Gemara in Sanhedrin (101a) that says, “One who reads a pasuk from Shir Hashirim and renders it a form of song…brings misfortune to the world.” The reference to Shir Hashirim is to emphasize that this applies even to that sefer, which has “song” in its name; the admonition, in fact, applies to all pesukim in the Torah. It’s permitted to make a pasuk into a song—as many gedolim have done—but only for the purpose of inspiration, of bringing out the meaning of the words, and not just as a source of free lyrics.

 

“I’ve written some very edgy songs—meaning, we try to set trends,” Waldner says. “But my geder is that there has to be a melody—not just looping, which sounds like a DJ in a club and does nothing for my neshamah—and the melody has to convey the meaning of the words.”

 

As each new trend is mimicked, Waldner continually tries to stay ahead with fresh ideas.

 

When he began his adult music career, Sephardi and Israeli singers and songs had not infiltrated the Ashkenazi American music scene. Today, people across the States and around the world are listening to Israeli music. From his second album onward, Shwekey (of mixed Sephardi/Ashkenazi extraction) always sang some songs with the Sephardi havarah, but Waldner traces “the real switch to Israeli” to Shwekey’s Libi Bamizrach album in 2010 (to which Waldner contributed the title track, Habibi, Ten Lo, Bo’ee Veshalom, and the low part to Hakadosh Baruch Hu); as well as Benny Friedman’s 2012 mega-hit Yesh Tikvah (composed by Ari Goldwag, with lyrics by Goldwag and Miriam Israeli).

 

“I think the regular music was getting stale,” he says. “People needed something different.”

 

Waldner enjoyed the variation and composing in a different style; he says the change wasn’t difficult, and he soon found himself working with Israeli singers like Ohad and Itzik Dadya.

 

He also enjoyed writing the melody to Benny Friedman’s hit Charosho—this one was meant to sound like it was written for a Russian tavern.

 

“I loved doing that song because it’s just different. You’re not stuck in the same corner and just trying to regurgitate. I like to open it up.”

 

 

Waldner is quite pleased with what he says is one revolution of his that heavily influenced Jewish music: writing songs in the major scale, which, he says with an eyeroll, “some people consider to be goyish.”

 

Waldner describes the difference between the major and the minor. “It has to with the third note in a scale, but the famous way of saying it is that minor is more hartz, sadder, you’re crying more; major is happier. Minor is when you get your mortgage bill. Major is after you pay it.”

 

Asked to name some examples of famous songs in minor, he lists (of course), Rachem (“I don’t hate the song,” he says. “I hate what it does to people. It’s a kumzitz song.”) and Carlebach’s Shifchi.

 

He contrasts that with some of his own major work, like Eishes Chayil and Bo’ee Veshalom for Shwekey, K’shoshana for Fried, and Hashamayim and Hands in the Air for Shloime Gertner. And of course, Meheirah, the polar opposite of Rachem. He starts singing Meheirah’s chorus. “Kol Sasson, v’kol simchah… What does that do to you? It makes you feel happy.”

 

Being a revolutionary means sometimes having to push even your most frequent collaborators to accept your groundbreaking work.

 

For Shwekey’s Leshem Shamayim album in 2007, the singer happily took Waldner’s compositions Yizkerem, Hen Am (co-written with Shwekey’s brother), and Eishes Chayil.

 

But a fourth song took some serious convincing.

 

Yaakov didn’t know how to handle a song with a chorus that starts, “Ma Ma Ma.”

 

I was begging him. I said, “You’re out of your mind. Every kid is gonna sing this.”

 

He agreed to take it, but he wasn’t too enthusiastic about it.

 

On the day the album came out, Yaakov handed me a pack of CDs. He knew I was expecting Ma Ma Ma to be at the top of the track list, and that I was disappointed it was tenth. But I’ll never forget what he said, “It doesn’t matter where on the album the song is; if it’s a hit, it’ll go.”

 

Indeed, it was a major hit, showing up on the setlist of every wedding’s second dance.

 

When I ask if he ever told Shwekey, “I told you so,” Waldner laughs. “I didn’t have to.”

 

Waldner immediately started getting requests for more songs in a similar vein.

 

And on Shwekey’s next album, the singer put Waldner’s Areivim—which became another wedding dance favorite—in the leadoff spot.

 

 

Anytime you interview a composer, you’re obligated to ask the question, “What comes first—the lyrics or the melody?”

 

Waldner prefers to always have the lyrics first.

 

“I don’t try to shoehorn lyrics into a song,” he says. “The words drive the melody, both with pesukim and with words by English lyricists. When Yaakov sent me an email that had the lyrics of Ma’amin Benisim, I wrote the song in one minute.”

 

Once he wrote a melody before he had lyrics. He decided to just keep it as a niggun. It became a big hit for Benny Friedman, titled No Lyrics.

 

These days, rather than composing songs and shopping them to singers, Waldner prefers to sit with a singer and ask if there is a concept or pasuk that inspires him, then create a melody around that.

 

“It was a very scary shift to do that,” he says, “because now I have to compose right in front of him.”

 

Some of his favorite songs were composed in a minute or less, including the melodies to Shwekey’s I Can Be and Fried’s Retzoneinu.

 

And of course, his very favorite of the 450 songs he has composed for dozens of singers, Shwekey’s Eishes Chayil.

 

“The melody is so married to the words,” Waldner says, before laughing at his unintended pun. “It’s painting a picture of what the words do to you when you hear this song.”

 

He starts singing, “Sheker hachein, v’hevel hayofi,” gets a dreamy look and says, “I feel like I have eagle’s wings, and I’m just going…”

 

In 2003, Waldner moved from Boro Park to Lakewood. Those were the early days of the great migration from South Brooklyn to Central Jersey, and he was fortunate enough to find a nice, detached home at a price that could not fetch a cup of coffee in this town today.

 

He soon got into producing albums as well and built a studio in his basement.

 

Waldner returned to the stage for HASC 30, singing a medley of his compositions in a duet with Shwekey. “Not just a composer, a great singer, Yitzy,” Shwekey exclaimed in middle of their performance. It proved so popular, they reprised it for HASC 36.

 

Three decades after he decided to make his career in composition, he’s getting back into singing now with the release of several singles.

 

And on the advice of his current spiritual guide the Loitzker Rebbe (and with the blessing of his wife), Waldner is looking to add another title to his repertoire: a singer at chuppahs and other events.

 

Though singing is more lucrative than composing, Waldner says he has no regrets about the choices he’s made until now.

 

“When you make a decision, that’s the decision you made with hashra’ah from Hashem. How do you know something is bashert? Because it happened. If it happened, the Ribono Shel Olam wanted it that way.”

 

 

There’s a knock on the studio door.

 

It’s Moshe Kahan, a singer here to record songs for his debut album.

 

Kahan, who looks even more youthful than his 23 years, sits on the couch vacated earlier that day by Shwekey.

 

Waldner takes out his keyboard and starts playing.

 

It’s a slow intro — in major scale, of course.

 

Kahan begins singing.

 

V’hayu limshisa shosayich, v’hayu limshisa shosayich, verachaku kol mevalayich, ooh ooh ooh, verachaku kol mevalayich …

 

The voice is golden.

 

Waldner is smiling. He looks as though the eagle’s wings are on again. The song is heartfelt and emotional, but joyful. He keeps a watchful eye on his protégé and nods to the beat as he moves his fingers across the keyboard, tapping out the chords that will create the sound of the next generation of Jewish music.

 ***

Many thanks to musicologist Yaakov Brown for his assistance. His encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish music history is matched only by his generosity.