Vered and Peleg Turn a Family History into Pop on ‘Adorable You’

The most interesting collaboration on Vered Benhorin’s new album began before one of the collaborators could speak.

Nearly two decades ago, Vered noticed that singing changed the way she and her infant son Peleg interacted. He responded physically and vocally, and those exchanges helped push her toward making music for families. Peleg is now 17. On Adorable You, released today, he returns to the story as a producer, songwriter, singer, and arranger.

That alone gives the record an unusual emotional architecture. This is music aimed largely at families near the beginning of their lives together, made by a mother and son standing near the opposite edge of childhood. Peleg is preparing to leave for college. The songs are filled with babies.

Fortunately, Adorable You does not spend 12 tracks staring backward. Much of it is lively, funny, and firmly located in the present tense. “Buttons” has the comic snap of a parent who has accepted that a toddler can derail the plan within seconds. Movement songs invite physical participation. A morning song featuring Mega Ran turns waking up into a small celebration.

The title track carries a different emotional charge. It grapples with the almost impossible parental wish to preserve a child at one age while simultaneously loving the person emerging next. Vered understands that the sweetness of watching a child develop is inseparable from the fact that every new stage replaces something that will never return in quite the same form.

That tension gives Adorable You much of its emotional credibility. Vered never portrays parenting as a permanent state of wonder. Frustration and fatigue appear beside affection. A crying child is not treated as a failure requiring an immediate solution. Some days are simply harder than others.

“Mama Loves You” sits naturally inside that worldview. The song rejects the idea that a child should experience love as something calibrated to achievement. Its strongest quality is how uncomplicated the reassurance feels. In a record filled with activity, it functions almost like a fixed point.

Musically, Peleg’s presence helps Adorable You stretch beyond the familiar vocabulary of educational children’s records. His fondness for pop writing and stacked voices gives the album color and lift, while Vered’s own experience keeps the songs closely attached to their purpose. The two approaches meet in a place that feels polished without becoming fussy.

The pairing is particularly effective because Peleg is not presented as a symbolic guest. He has creative agency within the project. That distinction matters. The story would be touching if he had simply appeared for a harmony or two. His work behind the scenes makes Adorable You feel like an actual exchange between generations.

The album saves its clearest acknowledgment of that history for last. “The Day” looks back toward Peleg’s arrival and carries his voice inside the recording. A parent singing about bringing home a baby while that child, nearly grown, sings alongside her is almost unfairly affecting as a concept. The track has no need for embellishment.

Seen from that ending, the album’s earlier songs acquire an additional resonance. The diapers get changed. The crying eventually stops. The child learns to move, speak, argue, dress, sing, produce records, and leave home.

Vered has spent much of her professional life helping parents pay closer attention to the years when all of that change feels impossibly slow. Adorable You demonstrates why she keeps returning to the subject. The days may repeat themselves, but the stage itself is temporary.

That makes the album feel celebratory without pretending that parenting is easy. It is excited by childhood, amused by its absurdities, and acutely aware of how quickly the whole thing moves.

As a family record, Adorable You offers plenty to sing and move along with. As a document made by Vered and Peleg at this exact moment in their lives, it has something rarer: a built-in sense of time.

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