Rotem Sivan and His Heart Thieves

Interview, From the Magazine, Rotem Sivan

By Alexa Peters I Dec. 30, 2025

“We started seeing something that’s not completely right, he had a cold, he was crying more,” Sivan said of his baby son’s cancer.
(Photo: Shervin Lainez)

Heart Thieves, the new album from guitarist Rotem Sivan, is named well. This lush record, and the moving story behind it, will steal your heart. Written in 48 hours shortly after Sivan’s twins, Eden and Gigi, were born, Heart Thieves is a lyrical, hopeful and bittersweet exploration of the experience of new fatherhood. The record also has, at times, a startlingly prescient quality.

Just weeks after Heart Thieves was recorded, Sivan and his wife, Lore, were faced with the unthinkable: Their months-old son, Eden, was diagnosed with ATRT, a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer.

“Basically, from November, we started seeing something that’s not completely right, he had a cold, he was crying more,” Sivan said. “Eventually we’re like, ‘Hey, he’s not OK. They gave him antibiotics … and then two days after he stopped eating completely.”

For the first six months of 2025, Sivan and his wife slept on a mattress in their son’s hospital room as Eden recovered from a risky surgery to remove a golf ball-sized tumor from his brain and then underwent five rounds of in-patient chemotherapy. For much of that time, Sivan hardly touched his guitar, let alone played the music from this new record.

“These rounds of chemo, you basically almost die every time. It’s like he almost died five times. It’s really bad. So, playing his song feels kind of drastic,” Sivan said, referring to a track on the record called “Eden.”

Revisiting the music on Heart Thieves felt jarring, and painful, because this record is ultimately a love letter to his kids, a motion of hope for their future, and the musical realization of a dream he’s long held close: to have a family.

“I mean, musicians work really hard. Artists, it’s an unending grind on so many facets: emotionally, financially, time,” Sivan said. “I just thought it would be really nice, not to contrast it, but just [to also have] a different reality, this family cell that is existing outside of the world of success.”

Since he moved to New York from Israel in 2008 to attend The New School, Sivan has been no stranger to musical success. His 2013 debut record, Enchanted Sun, and 2014’s For Emotional Use Only garnered critical acclaim, and he has gone on to perform and tour widely. As he built his career, Sivan had moments where he didn’t think fatherhood would be possible.

“Playing $75 gigs and barely paying rent in New York, I was like, sounds cool, but I can barely feed myself. So I couldn’t see it, you know?” he said.

But then Sivan met and married Lore, a data scientist, in 2022. By late 2023, the couple was pregnant. On June 27, 2024, after a tough pregnancy that forced Lore to be on bedrest for four months, they welcomed fraternal twins Eden and Gigi.

Released on the label Sonder House Music, Heart Thieves is titled after the affectionate nickname he gave the twins who’ve become his world: “little thieves.” The music on the record was largely conceived during a single, productive weekend, and then shaped in the studio by producer Ben Wendel in collaboration with Sivan and his standing band with bassist Hamish Smith and drummer Miguel Russell.

Save for a couple striking covers — Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” and the Glenn Miller Orchestra hit “In The Mood” — the record is made up of tender and immediate originals. For Heart Thieves, Sivan’s compositional process often involved writing piano sketches and then “finding solutions” to them on the neck of the guitar, which is much less linear than a piano keyboard.

“I’m not a piano player. That’s why I like writing on piano, because I need to find it a little bit … I need to imagine it sounding in a more intuitive way,” said Sivan.

This piano-to-guitar process lends the songs on Heart Thieves a beautiful blend of qualities. The record possesses the expressive, singable melodies and harmonic richness typically associated with piano, as well as the dynamic tones and textures the guitar offers.

The combination is palpable from the first track, “The Path,” which oscillates between pleasing consonance and uneasy dissonance, nimbly conveyed through an acrobatic chord melody arrangement.

“For us, that was [about] when she was pregnant, the path to having a family. The path is not a straight line to say the least. In our case the path is still complicated,” Sivan said.

A similar complexity of emotion and direction is also present on “Eden.” Though the song was written before Eden fell ill, something prompted Sivan to go back and tweak the song for his “sweet boy.”

“I wrote the song ‘Eden,’ and then I added this intro when he was not feeling great, but we didn’t know exactly what was going on then,” Sivan said. “That darker intro for the song was added later because it was like, ‘Hmm, there is something there, you know?’”

At the same time, songs like “Lullabye” and “Will They Fly,” sweet, serene tunes Sivan wrote as he imagined his children’s future, shine with simplicity and love. “Lullabye,” which features saxophonist Oded Tzur, quietly ebbs like an ocean, while the gospel-tinged “Will They Fly,” ripe with blue notes and playful turns, resounds like a musical prayer.

Recently, it would seem that prayer was answered. In September, Eden had a pivotal MRI scan and the cancer appeared to be gone. That said, because Eden has the most aggressive subtype of ATRT, called MMIC, it’s essential that not even one cancer cell remains. So, Eden, now just over a year old, is about to start an immunotherapy trial in Boston.

“Our doctor and a lot of other doctors would recommend some sort of maintenance treatment because … it’s just very aggressive, so you don’t want it to come back,” Sivan said.

Still, Sivan says that lately, things are looking up.

“The album is out in the world,” Sivan said. “He’s feeling better. My wife is working. Gigi’s doing great. Everything is good.”

So good that Sivan was able to leave for a two-week European tour in promotion of Heart Thieves, which kicked off in early October. His tour performances will also include some visual components, including scenes from the documentary Heart Thieves, being made director Kevin Jardin, about Eden’s cancer battle.

“[Jardin], the guy that’s creating the documentary … is sending me a couple of bits. So, I’m going to project them during the shows, a few segments,” said Sivan.

Likewise, a MIDI-to-visual project that Sivan has been working on for three years with some programmers and artists in Europe will also make its debut during the tour. During his shows, a visual representation of the music will appear, triggered and manipulated by what Sivan plays on his guitar.

“It’s a little bit more than a gig for me,” he said. “There are a few things that are being connected here. It’s an exciting moment.”

After being unable to listen to his new record throughout his family’s ordeal, Eden’s positive MRI, the release of the album and the chance to tour again mark a welcome mindset shift for Sivan.

“I’m super excited to go and play,” he said. “But, first and foremost, I’m excited to have a healthy baby.” DB