Track listing: Miss Lizz
There’s something deceptively simple about Aviram’s “Miss Lizz.” On the surface, it’s a song about love and the ways it can go spectacularly right or horribly wrong. But underneath that is a more complicated idea: sometimes the people who insist they don’t need love are actually the ones who feel it most deeply.
That feels like an especially interesting subject for Aviram at this point in his career. The Israeli singer-songwriter, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist has already released two full-length albums, toured internationally across Europe and the United States, and built a substantial global audience around his blend of classic songcraft and modern indie rock and acoustic pop. His songwriting has even earned recognition from Abbey Road Studios, which selected his single “You Are What You Do” as one of the top 10 songs mastered at the legendary studio in 2024.
Yet “Miss Lizz” isn't concerned with any of that. It's intimate, conflicted and emotionally vulnerable.
Aviram describes “Miss Lizz” as one of those songs where you can tell a story about something that happened to you, something you witnessed, or something you felt without necessarily admitting that it’s your story. “I’m asking for a friend,” as he puts it. That little bit of distance seems appropriate for a song about emotional self-protection. We can talk about vulnerability more easily when we pretend we’re talking about somebody else.
The emotional centerpiece arrives in the line, “Love makes you ruin everything / And still we choose love.” It’s a wonderfully conflicted sentiment, and Aviram doesn't try to resolve the contradiction. Love can lift us up and bring us crashing down. It can give new life while taking something away, build a future while destroying another one. And despite knowing all of that, we keep choosing it.
That’s what makes the song more interesting than a simple love song. Aviram isn't celebrating romance or condemning it. He’s fascinated by its power over us.
There’s a similar tension in the song’s visual presentation. Aviram says that when he first heard “Miss Lizz,” he pictured a girl applying makeup to her face, continuing to add more and more until she eventually looks like a clown. The makeup becomes a metaphor for the armor we construct when we’re afraid of getting hurt. What begins as protection can eventually become something that obscures the person underneath.
It’s a strong visual metaphor because the idea isn't particularly foreign to any of us. We learn to put on our own versions of makeup: indifference, sarcasm, confidence, distance, whatever helps convince the world — and perhaps ourselves — that we're not as vulnerable as we really are.
Musically, “Miss Lizz” reflects Aviram's interest in bringing different eras of music into the same space. His influences are deeply rooted in the classic songcraft of the ’60s and ’70s, particularly the songwriting tradition associated with The Beatles, while his own work incorporates modern indie rock and acoustic pop.
But Aviram isn't interested in simply recreating the music he loves.
“If there was anything I tried to achieve in this song or any other songs I wrote, it is definitely to find my own sound,” he says.
That search for identity seems to be an increasingly important part of Aviram's work. His first two albums dealt heavily with heartbreak and the process of figuring out who you are in the world. Now, with a third album nearing completion, he feels something has changed. He says he already knows his identity and feels more comfortable with who he is — and believes that confidence is beginning to affect the music itself.
If there was anything I tried to achieve in this song or any other songs I wrote, it is definitely to find my own sound.
That makes “Miss Lizz” feel like part of a larger transition. The song is about the armor people use to protect themselves, while Aviram himself seems increasingly interested in figuring out what remains when that armor comes off.
The recording process reflects that willingness to let a song evolve. “Miss Lizz” originally existed as a live song performed in an open tuning, with Aviram drawing inspiration from the intimate approaches of artists such as Nick Drake and Adrianne Lenker. For the studio version, however, the decision was made to let the energy of a band playing together shape the arrangement.
Aviram likes the idea that a song can have multiple versions, each one capable of fitting a different mood. That philosophy makes sense for a songwriter whose music is concerned so often with changing emotional states. A song doesn't necessarily have to remain frozen in the moment when it was first written.
And perhaps that's ultimately what makes “Miss Lizz” compelling. It isn't really about figuring out whether love is good or bad. There is no grand answer waiting at the end. We already know the answer, at least according to Aviram: love can make us feel everything from touching the sky to kissing the ground, and we choose it anyway.
That willingness to keep choosing something that can hurt us is both the weakness and the strength of being human.
For Aviram, music itself seems to occupy a similar place. He says music is the reason he's still doing what he's doing, and that if his songs can help someone the way music has helped him — even if they simply make someone smile or forget their problems for a moment — then he's accomplished what he set out to do.
There’s something fitting about that sentiment coming from an artist who has spent the last several years building an increasingly large audience while still searching for something deeply personal: his own voice.
“Miss Lizz” may be about the armor we build around ourselves, but music is one of the ways we sometimes manage to take it off.
And if Aviram is right that he's finally becoming more comfortable with his own artistic identity, there's every reason to be curious about what he sounds like with the armor off.