Songfacts®:

• Asaf Avidan writes very personal songs and tends to splay his heart all over the lyrics. Much of his early work was inspired by a painful breakup with a girl he had been dating for six years. In "Reckoning Song," he ruminates on what their lives would have been like had they stayed together. "Think of all the stories that we could have told," he sings.
• This song was first issued in 2008 on the album The Reckoning by Avidan's group, Asaf Avidan & The Mojos, but it's the techno remix by the German DJ/producer Wankelmut that most are familiar with. After a friend introduced him to the song, Wankelmut made the remix in 2011 by sampling the original and renamed it "One Day / Reckoning Song." He posted it on Soundcloud that year and got a tremendous response. In 2012, he posted it on YouTube, and it went crazy. Just one problem: He did it without permission and Avidan was not pleased. His record company, Sony, got involved and worked out a deal to have the song officially released. This version became a huge hit, going to #1 in many European countries, including Italy and Germany.
• The original version is just Asaf Avidan's voice and guitar, which made it easy to remix with a beat and additional elements. His voice is also very distinctive and cuts through the production.
• By the time the remix took off in 2012, Asaf Avidan had released two more albums and built a substantial following, especially in his native Israel. He put the song back in his setlist.
• This song has a specific meaning to Avidan, but he feels the artistry is in the listener interpretation. "Artists and art are tools," he said on the Songfacts Podcast. "I don't think that art is created when I create a song, it is created when you as the audience translate it through your own prism, that's the art. What I'm afraid of is that I need to be a tool for the audience, an instrument you can look through and find what you need to find. So it's a bit dangerous to give too much away of who I am and what I am."