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" Judaism is my life. Everything I do is through the lens of Torah. "
Matisyahu
Life
Lens
Everything
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" I don't really know if I would consider myself anything in particular. I would say I'm inspired in a Hasidic way, but I certainly don't keep all the customs and rules I once did. "
Matisyahu
Way
Inspired
Know
" When people feel a certain religion claims to have all the answers, that's what turns them off. "
Matisyahu
Religion
Answers
Feel
" With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music. "
Matisyahu
Light
Music
Musicians
" I started out in the Chabad movement, and I started pretty closed up, with the idea of there being that 'this is it.' I bought into that fully. I really explored in depth the Chabad ideology. "
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Up
Movement
Pretty
" I would say that as I've gotten older, I trust my intuition more; I allow myself more freedom both musically, creatively and my own life existentially. "
Matisyahu
Life
Freedom
Trust
" At a certain point, I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity... to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. I felt that in order to become a good person, I needed rules - lots of them - or else I would somehow fall apart. I am reclaiming myself. Trusting my goodness and my divine mission. "
Matisyahu
Rules
Fall
Good
" I feel there's a lot of anti-Israel sentiment in the world and a lot of ignorance about what Israel is and does. But it's not for me to speak on Israel's behalf. "
Matisyahu
Feel
Ignorance
World
" Songs that aren't even remotely connected to Christmas are now officially canonized Christmas tunes. 'Frosty the Snowman,' 'Jingle Bells' and 'Winter Wonderland' never mention anything religious but are still notches in Christmas' belt of musical dominance. "
Matisyahu
Now
Never
Connected
" When I first started reading about the kabbalists, I would hear about them being seen in strange places. It would turn out that they were doing some kind of spiritual work to elevate the sparks. In my life and career, I've had the opportunity to find myself where I could make some spiritual moves, to do some work that is spiritually important. "
Matisyahu
Life
Myself
Reading
" When I became religious, it was full-force for me. And, through the lifestyle of being out on the road with non-Jewish musicians, in non-Jewish nightclubs and going all over the world - getting out of the shtetl - opened me up to having experiences that other religious men might not have to think or worry about. "
Matisyahu
Think
Me
Men
" I enjoyed coming home to Crown Heights. There was a certain order to life there. You know, Shabbos, spending time with your family, eating and being in 'shul.' Prayers at nighttime, prayers in the morning. Everyone knows everybody; you walk your kids everywhere. "
Matisyahu
Morning
Time
Home
" When I'm onstage, I'm not thinking about ideas. I'm not in my head at all. It's a more physical experience. "
Matisyahu
More
Thinking
Ideas
" Change is an internal thing. Different things happen or transform, and music and art is a documentation of that. "
Matisyahu
Music
Things Happen
Art
" I always had a love of music, from the time I was a little kid, dressing up and singing along with Michael Jackson songs. "
Matisyahu
Kid
Singing
Time
" Some artists are bound to an image: Bob Marley has dreadlocks, Matisyahu has a beard. But that's a reminder that the whole thing is not about style. It's about music. "
Matisyahu
Bound
Image
Music
" What is it to keep kosher? Is it eating kosher potato chips? Kosher is a bigger idea. I think it's about being healthy. But according to some people, it's about not eating this food because it's forbidden by the Jewish law. My view of the halachah changed a little bit. The laws are there hopefully to be a tool. "
Matisyahu
Think
Law
Healthy
" I think there is a tendency for people to get rigid and caught up in their beliefs of what is right and wrong, and they lose sight of humanity. Being human has to come first before right or wrong. "
Matisyahu
Humanity
People
Lose
" I started at home as a kid putting on shows and lip-syncing Michael Jackson for the grown-ups. Then, in musicals and plays in school. At 17, I was performing in coffee shops and in parking lots at Phish shows. At 18, I had a band that played local shows in the Northwest. "
Matisyahu
Kid
School
Coffee
" Most of my life wasn't about knowledge from books, but experiential knowledge. "
Matisyahu
Most
My Life
Books
" Is it possible Hanukkah doesn't inspire folksy songs? Plot lines may be a part. The Christmas story has a lot of material to work with. There's Jesus and his birth, the wise men, their gifts and tons of frankincense. "
Matisyahu
Birth
Wise
Story
" Growing up, the way that I looked was very important to me. I was always trying to impress people, and when I grew my beard there was a certain freedom, a separation, getting past this the way I looked, identify myself as a spiritual seeker. "
Matisyahu
Past
Myself
Freedom
" When there's light shining on a tree, that tree takes on different meaning. If there's no light at all it just looks dead. If you look at light as godly meaning, the world comes alive in a certain way. "
Matisyahu
Tree
Light
World
" It's a holistic process for me during a show. I'm always focusing on the technical aspects of my voice. I try to make my voice do what I want. One big thing I do to improve on each show is to listen back to performances on CD while on tour. "
Matisyahu
Back
Voice
Try
" As a kid, I was really into performing. I would do choruses, I would do musicals, whatever it was. And then, as a teenager, I got into an acting class at SUNY Purchase for gifted kids, and that really turned me on to material beyond musicals, Sam Shepard, and Christopher Durang plays. "
Matisyahu
Kid
Acting
Beyond
" The Jewish world is becoming fully integrated with the ideas of the normal world. They feed off each other. "
Matisyahu
Normal
Feed
Jewish
" The real reason Jews don't have more Hanukkah music is that, historically, American Jewish singer-songwriters were too busy making Christmas music. 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' 'Silver Bells' and 'The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting)' were all written by Jews. "
Matisyahu
Busy
Music
Song
" I do what I love, thank God. I get to make music and get inspiration through Judaism. I can see why people might be surprised, because it's not been done before. It's certainly not typical. People are always trying to wrap head their around it. But it's probably simpler than everyone thinks. "
Matisyahu
Music
God
Love
" Music is my first love and the thing that I feel extremely connected to. I feel like I still have a long way to go within that in terms of being able to perform and write songs. But, yeah, I really hope 'The Possession' opens doors for me to do more acting, because I really enjoyed it. "
Matisyahu
Acting
Hope
Music
" I don't think you could pull one Bob Marley song that didn't have quotes from the Torah or the Old Testament. "
Matisyahu
Torah
Song
Think
" When a person listens to a good song, and they can look out at the world and their lives and see the dark and the light, the negative and the positive, all the different elements, all come together in one holistic poem, that is a very healing and very reductive thing, and that's what my music is about. "
Matisyahu
Light
Together
Positive