For frontman Hillel Tigay, Palms Station represents everything that is home. The project’s name is an homage to his light rail stop in LA and a return to his purpose for moving to the City of Angels. The son of a prominent rabbinical scholar, Tigay spent his childhood between Israel and Philadelphia. After depthy studies in musicology at the University of Pennsylvania, he rocketed out to the West Coast to chase his alt-pop rockstar dreams. He soon signed to A&M Records under Beach Boys collaborator David Anderle, who saw shades of Brian Wilson in Tigay’s extreme attentiveness to sound craft. Though the record deal fell through, Tigay had found his true home in LA and its endless iterations of creativity. Over the years, he employed his creative hunger to genre hop from indie to world music, even rapping as Dr. Dreidel in the heeb-hop group M.O.T. for a stint.
Marking a return to his roots, he currently serves as the music director at IKAR, a high-profile synagogue attended by the likes of Natalie Portman and Stephen Spielberg. There, he has soaked in the influence of spiritual music-making from world cultures and transformed the congregation’s understanding of music as worship. And that brings us back to Palms Station: Tigay’s living, breathing laboratory, built from a life as a creative savant-adventurer. With the release of Stand Together. Fall Apart. in 2022, Tigay (re)introduced the world to his singular sound, which he continues to craft with an open ear to influence as he strolls the sunny sidewalks of his adopted home.
Palms Station’s moody, contemplative epic “I Don’t Know The Way To Your Heart” is the product of a striking development in Tigay’s songwriting process. For most of his career, the accomplished multi-instrumentalist genre-hopper was fueled and plagued by an insatiable craving for the mastery of sound. Now, he’s learned how to let the music play him. Meditating on a roof in Mexico, far from his family and spiritual community, Tigay says the song came to him near complete—a rushing wave of energy and melody. And it shows in the complex arrangement of trudging guitars and percussive jolts the song uses to express its sense of personal and spiritual longing. No more to say—dive in and make your own interpretation of the prophetic masterpiece.
The music video for “I Don’t Know The Way To Your Heart,” directed by Tigay himself, draws visual influence from the award-winning film Waltz With Bashir. The animation style offers a sense of detachment from the scenes of purple-hued cosmic contemplation in which Tigay wanders his way in parallel to a lost love. The video alternates between stylized scenes of the personal and the panoramic, from profiles to palisades, footsteps to stars. We eventually find Tigay prostrate on the beach, sending out messages in bottles to the universe, yearning to get to the heart of his hunger and awe.
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