Conditional Love by Liat Dagan: The Long Version, Shot on a Phone with Childhood Home Movies

An Israeli Singer’s 2021 Single, Arranged for Cello, Guitars and Drums and Cut for Radio

The hook of Conditional Love, the 2021 alternative rock single by Liat Dagan, is a question. In the chorus she asks why someone could not see that their conditional love was shutting her out. On Spotify the song is a radio edit of three minutes and 25 seconds. The official video runs to five minutes and 16. Behind the song stand a cellist, three guitarists, a bassist, a drummer and a producer.

Liat Dagan’s Conditional Love sits in the playlist below, and her full run of coverage is gathered on the Liat Dagan artist profile. Conditional Love came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Hear it out, then keep reading.

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So the long version starts with where the song was made. Liat Dagan is a singer and writer from Mitzpe Shalem, Israel. Conditional Love was written there and recorded in Tel Aviv. She makes indie rock about her own life. Her site, Liat Dagan Music, says the music starts from guilt, depression and fear. From there it moves towards the idea that every moment, we make our own path.

Her first singles came out in 2019, and Pale followed this one in March 2023. She also plays live across Israel, most recently a solo acoustic set at the Sheik Habreik festival in Kiryat Tiv’on in April 2025.

The video came out on 11 September 2021. She shot it on her phone in her home studio during the third quarantine of 2020. The clip also mixes in footage and sound from her own childhood home movies, and it has passed 100,000 views on YouTube.

A Stone, a River and a Slammed Door in the Lyric Liat Dagan Wrote for Conditional Love

Where the chorus asks, the verses work in pictures. The song opens on a river. Each time the ripples fade, the other person throws in another stone and stirs up their own fear again. She is out of breath and drifting, and no one reaches in to save her.

Then the second verse moves indoors. A door slams, and the torment, in her image, sharpens its thorns. Later she is groping through the shadows of the other person’s endless night, frightened by what she calls their darkest light.

The close, though, is plain. She repeats that the other person knows she is real and knows she feels. Each time, a line in brackets answers that no one else could heal them.

Dagan wrote the words and the music herself. She has described it as the song that carries her deepest story. In 2022 she told Brazil’s Roadie Music that in this song she is shouting about her problems, struggles and hurts. She hoped listeners would find themselves in the words.

So she sings it with full force, a big voice for a song about being shut out. Tape Ranger, a music blog, added the single to its Indie and Alternative Rock playlist in March 2022 and singled out the vocal work.

The Players and the Radio Edit That Shaped Liat Dagan’s Conditional Love

Ran Yerushalmi produced the song around that voice, adapted the music, recorded her vocals and handled the samples, MIDI and programming. The two go back to Safe Shores, a 2019 single they released together. Yerushalmi also edited the video.

Dagan arranged the song with Yerushalmi, Guy Koznik and Lahav Zitayat. Yoni Menner plays rhythm guitar and also mixed the track. Zitayat adds a second electric guitar, and Roman Grinblat plays acoustic. Koznik plays the cello, Stav Alfasi the bass and Daniel Goldreich the drums.

Sye Avshalom recorded the extra electric guitar and the cello, and Ermin Hamidovic of Systematic Productions mastered it. So that line-up explains the mix of styles. The acoustic guitar and the cello give the song its folk-rock side, while the electric guitars and drums carry the rock.

A Cello Beside the Guitars and an Edit Made for Radio, Two Choices With Famous Precedents

A cello inside a rock band has a famous precedent. When Nirvana recorded MTV Unplugged in New York in November 1993, the cellist Lori Goldston joined them. The cello gave loud songs a quieter, string-led frame. Koznik’s cello does a different job here, set against two electric guitars rather than in place of them.

Then there is the edit. Folk rock has argued about length since its first great single. Bob Dylan‘s Like a Rolling Stone ran past six minutes in 1965. Many radio stations at first refused to play something that long, but it still reached number two in the US. Dagan took the other route, making a shorter cut for radio and keeping the full length for the video.

From the MusicRoots.News curator team: “The video’s title runs the two words together as ConditionaLove, one L doing the work of two. For a song about love that comes with terms attached, it is a sharp bit of spelling.”

So the question in the chorus is still the place to start. Play the radio edit for the song, then the video for everything around it, home movies included.

Follow Liat Dagan on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.

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