Gideon Unna is an Israeli singer-songwriter whose catalog keeps circling the same handful of questions, how spirituality, love, and the connections between people all fit together. He works independently, and his songs tend to start small, usually just a guitar and something he’s been chewing on, before growing outward from there. “Heaven Is Here” arrives as he’s putting together a new record, following last year’s “What Is Love,” a collaboration with Kayley Halperin.
Heaven Is Here
The song started at his home on acoustic guitar, and the premise is right there in the title. Heaven isn’t a destination you eventually reach, it’s already underway around you if you’re paying enough attention to notice. There’s a pointed bit of dialogue happening here with John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a song that pictured a world with no heaven at all as a kind of liberation. Unna takes the opposite route, arguing that people haven’t lost heaven by believing in it too much, they’ve lost it by getting too distracted to notice it’s already sitting right in front of them.
From that stripped-down beginning, longtime collaborator Lior Medan handled the arrangement, folding traditional instrumentation together with more modern production methods, including some AI assistance on the technical end, though you’d never guess it from the finished track. It was recorded at Yoav Asif’s home studio in Moshav Tzrufa, and that setting does a lot of work here, the whole thing has an unhurried, room-recorded quality that suits a song about slowing down enough to notice where you already are. Asif reportedly couldn’t stop replaying it afterward, which tracks.
Musically it’s built on light drum taps, a walking bassline that keeps things moving without pushing, and bright guitar figures adding color around the edges. Naomi Shapira’s vocal is the emotional center, delicate but not fragile, carrying melodies that stick around after the song ends. At just under three minutes, it doesn’t outstay its welcome or oversell its point.
Final Thoughts
“Heaven Is Here” manages something genuinely difficult, offering real encouragement without tipping into sentimentality, and Unna and Shapira make it sound effortless. Stay tuned to MusicOnTheRox.com for all your music news and reviews.
