Liraz Charhi has been watching events in Iran with a mixture of hope and fear, as women demonstrate against the repressive regime by burning their headscarves. “I’ve always believed women can make the revolution in Iran — we have the force to create change!
Especially these days I’m very proud of my sisters and I support them and am with them in every breath,” says the Israeli-Iranian singer and actress.
Charhi grew up in a traditional Iranian home in Israel with Farsi-speaking, Persian-Jewish parents, yet as an Israeli she has never been allowed to visit the land of her heritage.
This makes the singer-songwriter and actor’s new album, Roya, all the more extraordinary, involving as it did a covert mission to meet Iranian musicians — women included — at a recording studio in Istanbul. So risky was the collaboration that she only told her family the day before she left, and not even her manager believed it would actually happen.
“Even he said, ‘Liraz, this is dangerous. Are you sure?’ I said, ‘It will happen,’” Charhi recalls over Zoom from Tel Aviv, just before the release of the exhilarating new album that blends modern and retro Middle Eastern electro-dance. The timing is made all the more poignant by the current demonstrations.
Charhi quietly bought the air tickets for her Israeli band, hiring a Turkish company to look after the unnamed Iranian musicians, who would be met by security at the airport and taken safely to the studio.
“I believed and I knew that they would come,” she says. “The fact that they are anonymous means they did not do it for money or publicity. They did it because we’re sharing the same dream and the same hope of meeting together and bringing our music and our love to the world.”
For all her conviction, until the minute the musicians landed in Istanbul and were united in the underground studio with her Israeli band of three women and three men, Charhi was frightened.
“I kind of fainted in the recording,” she says. “I felt that I could not sing.” Listen closely to the yearning strings-and-synth-fuelled Tunha (meaning “alone’’) recorded that day, and you might hear the fear in her voice.
This is not the first album that she has recorded in Farsi; 2018’s Naz, a collection of pop songs by her favourite female Persian singers, was followed by Zan (meaning “women”), in 2020, written and recorded secretly with the same musicians based in Tehran — a complex feat of encrypted files and furtive Zoom meetings where faces were concealed, and no names given. Yet Roya is still more special because they recorded the album together physically.
“It’s my even more secret and crazy one. My secret dream,” says Charhi, pointing out that her name means “secret” both in Hebrew and Farsi. “As much as I was happy, I was so frightened. I have no words to explain how happy I am that it’s going to be out so soon.”
After pondering over how to express her vision in a title, she arrived upon Roya, meaning “fantasy”. “I wanted that when people listen to the music, they will think, ‘has this really happened? Who’s playing now, the Israeli people or the Iranian people?’ I really wanted to mix it all together.”
One of the women musicians on the album had to cut contact on her return. “They were afraid,” says Charhi. “They got some messages. So, unfollow, we’re not in touch.” Every now and then a message will pop up from another member, just to check in.
"It was wonderful to meet them and work with them, it was crazy sad to say ‘goodbye, I don’t know when I will see you again’.We’ve been through such a dramatic and emotional journey together.”
With suitcases packed, awaitinged their departure from those 10 magical days of recording sessions, she asked the studio for just one more hour and gathered her female comrades to record a final, unplugged acoustic version of the title track. Slowed-down, mournful and passionate, it captures the depth of the emotions involved, not least the sob at the very end.
“It was too emotional for me,” she recalls. “The fourth take, which I knew was the end of this journey, we recorded and I started to cry like I never cried my whole life. All my pain was released. We started to hug and cry together, and then we started to dance,” she recalls. Back home, friends and family sensed her relief. “I was so afraid that this story would end on a tough note.”
There was a long road to this point. She grew up surrounded by Persian culture, and developed a conflicted identity: the “obedient, good Iranian girl” at home, and the “free, happy Israeli artist” when out.
“When I turned on the television, I saw what was happening in Iran since the [1979 Islamic] revolution, and it was literally the opposite of what my parents told me,” she recalls. “When I crossed the street from home to school, that was my time to change character. I felt that I lived in two worlds and I needed to change my skin from moment to moment, and it really confused me. So I chose to be the Israeli one, and I neglected my roots.”
She only started to question her identity when she was standing among other actresses auditioning for roles in Hollywood films in Los Angeles, where she spent three years as her acting career took off (starring in A Late Quartet alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman, and in Fair Game).
“I knew that I’m at this crossroads, trying to find my way as a woman in this world and it was boring to me wearing high heels and curling my hair. I did not want to spend my beautiful years going from audition to audition, looking for them to love me, when I was trying to love myself, to get to know who I am.”
With only her close-knit Persian family in Israel, she discovered the Iranian community of LA, which she affectionately calls “Tehrangeles”. Curiosity took her to their neighbourhoods, weddings and parties. “It was amazing to be with Iranian people for the first time.”
Suddenly, she was going to music shops, buying and exploring Iranian records, but not the traditional kind favoured by her parents: 70s psychedelic pop, Iranian singers with unfamiliar “sassiness and courage inside their voices. And when I dug in even more, I understood that they are muted, they are not allowed to sing.”
Charhi thought of her own grandmother, a great singer who wasn’t allowed to pursue her dream because she was a woman, and was married at 13.
“I took it really hard because I saw how much she wanted to go on stage at weddings and parties.”
Charhi realised how much she, too, had been muted. As a child she sneaked off to singing lessons on Saturdays because her father didn’t like her to sing on Shabbat. Later she felt silenced by her first husband.
“My first marriage was to a man who did not give me space to spread my wings and do whatever I wanted as an artist and as a woman. It was a tough time.”
When she left Los Angeles for Tel Aviv, laden with her collection of records, it was in search of a producer who could help her to explain, through music, her layers as both Israeli and Iranian, with “no shame of being both”.
She also announced her intentions to make music in Farsi, which her family and management thought ridiculous. “They looked at me like, ‘You are crazy, no-one will buy your records, you’re going to have empty concert shows, it’s a big mistake.’” But she was determined. “I want to do this for myself. If I have the chance to sing, when Iranian women are not able to sing. I want to sing because of them. I want to sing to them.”
Her first and second albums were met with a raft of love and support from Iran. Women sent videos of themselves dancing joyously inside their homes.
It’s hard not to draw a parallel with her role as Iranian-born Mossad agent Yael Kadosh in the award-winning Israeli spy thriller Tehran that premiered in 2020.
“It’s like we took more steps to our freedom. My singing and my music is really not about me. I feel I have a message to leave, and I’ve been picked to tell the story and to build this bridge.”
When she was pregnant with her second daughter, she contemplated how it’s “crazy to be a woman in this world”, even with the freedom to be whatever she wants. Always with Iranian women in mind, she wrote Zan Bejan, on her previous record, to ask them to “make their own revolution bit by bit, by dancing, by singing.
“Even though it’s not allowed, they should not give up their dream. And I understood that I need to be an example for my two girls… that we women can do whatever we want if we dream.”
And so, on her last tour, her husband, the actor Tom Avni, and daughters aged four and eight joined her, watching their mother live out her dreams, breaking down barriers and oppression.
“This is freedom for me — being a woman who’s able to go for her dreams, and my family’s there with me, and I see them while I’m accomplishing my dreams. It was extremely powerful.
"Even if my life was ending now, it was worth everything just for those moments of looking at them, and making them understand that they’re able to be free to do whatever they want in their life.”
‘Roya’ is out on October 7 on Glitterbeat
