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" Music has always been such an amazing tool for me to access self and emotion. "
Matisyahu
Music
Self
Tool
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" I'm not an expert in instruments, beat programming, or electronics. For some people it's all about doing it themselves. But for me, it's all about find the people that can help make my vision come true. "
Matisyahu
Doing
Vision
True
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Matisyahu
Up
Movement
Pretty
" When people feel a certain religion claims to have all the answers, that's what turns them off. "
Matisyahu
Religion
Answers
Feel
" 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
" 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
" 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 went to see certain shows when I was a kid, they changed my life. They made me tap into that place inside myself that I was unable to get to, so music is that tool, that bridge, and that's the kind of music I'm interested in making. "
Matisyahu
Life
Me
Music
" The Jewish world is becoming fully integrated with the ideas of the normal world. They feed off each other. "
Matisyahu
Normal
Feed
Jewish
" Reggae music isn't Jewish, but a lot of the ideas are. "
Matisyahu
Lot
Jewish
Ideas
" Vocal rest is awesome. It is like any kind of fast. Firstly, it is a purification of speech. It made me realize how not careful I am with the things I say. It also makes you find new ways of communication and new methods to connect with people. "
Matisyahu
I Am
Rest
Communication
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Every record I do is a learning process for how I want to do the next one. "
Matisyahu
Process
Want
Next
" I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn't a major part of our existence. "
Matisyahu
Half
Pretty
School
" For me, it's always this constant battle and search when I'm out on stage as to where and when do I really open myself up to the people that are there. How do I let myself feel present in the space, and how do I allow myself to get into the music and interact with the band members. "
Matisyahu
Space
People
Myself
" I think my music has always been a mixture, depending on whom I'm working with - what band, what musicians, what producer. "
Matisyahu
Always
Band
Think
" 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
" I did some acting in college. But then everything stopped when I was a junior, in the fall of 2001, when I started becoming religious. Once I became a full-on Hasidic, I stopped everything. I stopped music. I stopped acting. "
Matisyahu
Everything
College
Acting
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 I'm meditating on an idea, I try to let the idea completely saturate me to the point where I feel like I'm covering myself in it or totally immersing myself in it, so that everywhere I'm looking, everywhere I'm going, it's through the lens of that idea. And that's sort of what I do with the music - I try to lose myself in it. "
Matisyahu
Me
Looking
Music
" I always knew I was different and that people had opinions about me. I guess I learned as best as I can to shield out a lot and live my life from within. "
Matisyahu
My Life
Me
Best
" It was a really strange way that I came into music. Once I gave voice to it, the pit of emotions that I guess I knew was inside of me for a long time, the stream never really stopped. "
Matisyahu
Emotions
Voice
Time