She’s been coming to Down Home for years, both as a solo act and with her band, disappear fear, but never has Sonia Rutstein come in with such a project to show off.
The new disappear fear album, “tango,” was released in the fall and it is Rutstein’s most ambitious work yet. It is a multilingual CD featuring songs performed in English, Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic, and all 12 tracks are translated into those four languages in the 24-page booklet that accompanies the album.
The subject matter is not unusual for sonia — love and romance, but also equality, harmony and peace among different people and cultures. Her perspective for the album was influenced by a trip she took to the Middle East a year and a half ago, when she visited the West Bank and Palestine during the Israel-Lebanon War as bombs dropped on a daily basis and fear for one’s life was a reality.
“The sirens would go off and you’d have 10 minutes to get into a bomb shelter or secure room,” she said. “There was usually one in each house. Then you just stay there for 20 or 30 minutes and you can go back out. A lot of times we’d hear something or the ground would shake. I think the closest bomb was maybe half a mile away, but you don’t know what’s going to happen.
“I remember at one point looking into a brilliant, blue blue sky, and then looking into the eyes of a woman I’d met and thinking ‘You may be the last person I see on Earth,’ and then I heard the sirens and went inside and bombs fell.”
The war did not prevent her from fulfilling her mission.
“It didn’t stop me from going, from making music, from doing my art, and it’s not going to,” she said.
Rutstein and disappear fear will take the Down Home stage tonight at 9. Admission is $14.
They’ll cover most of the material from the album, she said. It includes seven songs performed in Spanish, three in English, two in Hebrew and one in Arabic (with shared languages in a few songs.) One number, “Big Giant Planes,” is included twice, sung once in Hebrew, then at the end of the album in English so listeners can make the comparison.
The music has a Middle Eastern feel to it due to the rhythms and instrumentation, some of it contributed by Laura Cerulli on drums and percussion.
Translating the songs made for a unique challenge. Some were written in Spanish then translated, others in English — those are her two strongest languages — and one was written in Hebrew. Making sure the meaning remained the same as it went through written translation was important, and literal translations sometimes changed the song.
“For instance, in Hebrew there is no word for ‘to be.’ Then in one of the songs it goes ‘And if I look up straight ahead, I will see you, And you will see me.’ But in Hebrew when you say ‘I look up,’ it means ‘I look up to God.’ So you have to use a lot more words to keep the meaning straight. It’s a delicate process.”
Rutstein has been making bilingual music for years so this is not completely new ground, but she has never taken it this far. It required the help of friends who spoke the native languages.
The album’s artwork is all original by Rutstein, who also works as a commissioned painter and muralist. “The colors,” she said, “are an extension of the songs.”
All this begs the biggest question — why do an album like this, requiring so much work beyond simple songwriting, and putting herself in danger?
“I think this moves from an entertainment level to a deeper level with more meaning, a more spiritual level,” she said. “And that’s sort of where we all meet. It’s important to me that, if we’re going to survive together on this earth, we need to get along, and we all have something to contribute. Music speaks to people’s hearts. If we share good music, food, dancing, appreciate others’ sports, we have a passageway to their lives.
“My feelings are that getting to know more about others and about how to communicate better with them, it enriches our life experiences.”
For more on Rutstein and the band, visit www.disappearfear.com.