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" People aren't religious because it's easy not to be. Like anything, it's habitual, and once it's a habit it's no longer hard. "
Matisyahu
Like
Hard
Habit
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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
" Judaism is my life. Everything I do is through the lens of Torah. "
Matisyahu
Life
Lens
Everything
" The world that I come from is the world of raves, hip-hop clubs, and rock and roll. "
Matisyahu
World
Rock
Hip-Hop
" 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
" My mother's sister married a man from Barbados, and my cousins were raised in Barbados. So we traveled down there, they came up every summer for camp, and I started paying attention to their music. And that was the first place I ever remember hearing reggae and liking it. "
Matisyahu
Sister
Man
Mother
" In Judaism, there are a lot of rules - everything from which fingernail you cut first to which side you sleep on in bed, to the way you get dressed in the morning, to actual ideas, like ideas about being chosen people or ideas about female/male and how to interact with people from the opposite sex. "
Matisyahu
Ideas
Rules
People
" There's something really powerful when I, for example, hear Bob Marley's 'Exodus' - we know where we're going. We know where we're from. "
Matisyahu
Powerful
Going
Hear
" 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
" There are so many rules in Judaism, and if you get into them and you get obsessed and you have the kind of life that I have, it can make you a very unhappy person. It can make everything complicated and more stressful than it needs to be, so I kind of loosened the knots a little bit. "
Matisyahu
Unhappy
Kind
Life
" I still believe there is a lot of truth in Orthodox Judaism, but not the whole truth. Each person has his truth that he has to discover. You don't necessarily have to mold yourself to another idea of who you are. "
Matisyahu
Person
You
Yourself
" 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
" In 2004, when I started recording my first CD, I was coming right out of yeshiva. So I had spent two years completely immersed in the Hasidic culture, disconnected completely from the secular world - movies, music, people. "
Matisyahu
People
Movies
Culture
" I think that listening to music or creating music is a spiritual undertaking, so the process of creating music, you know, involves listening. It involves sensitivity, it involves humility, you know, and then also it's something which is higher than words. "
Matisyahu
Humility
Music
Spiritual
" 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
" 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
" 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 have a whole regimen to my day: my vocal warm-ups, my prayers, my meditations... I pray three times a day. I try to have a real experience praying, not just do it. I really get deep into the idea and really try to get somewhere with it, to have an in-depth understanding of the idea. "
Matisyahu
Deep
Day
Experience
" My music is really about people connecting with their identities, even if they aren't Jewish. "
Matisyahu
Music
Jewish
Even
" When I started wearing a yarmulke, I wanted to stand out or take the form of whatever was inspiring me. But now I think there's something to not working it, to keeping it on the inside, and it just being kind of like a secret. "
Matisyahu
Now
Me
Kind
" The No. 1 best-selling Christmas album of all time is from Kenneth Bruce Gorelick, the Jewish smooth-jazz legend Kenny G. American Jews have always produced a lot of holiday music, just not Hanukkah music. "
Matisyahu
Holiday
American
Time
" Change is an internal thing. Different things happen or transform, and music and art is a documentation of that. "
Matisyahu
Music
Things Happen
Art
" Every record I do is a learning process for how I want to do the next one. "
Matisyahu
Process
Want
Next
" Most of my life wasn't about knowledge from books, but experiential knowledge. "
Matisyahu
Most
My Life
Books
" Reggae music isn't Jewish, but a lot of the ideas are. "
Matisyahu
Lot
Jewish
Ideas
" 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
" One of the first places where I started to respond to song lyrics was in reggae music. A lot of what I was responding to were references to the Old Testament. It was not that I had to adapt the lyrics to the sound. Reggae and the Old Testament are bound up together. There wasn't anything that I had to do. "
Matisyahu
Sound
Music
Together
" The Jewish world is becoming fully integrated with the ideas of the normal world. They feed off each other. "
Matisyahu
Normal
Feed
Jewish
" 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 was 17, I listened to reggae music. I loved Bob Marley. I started growing dreadlocks. It's always been my way, that the outside matches what's going on with me inside. "
Matisyahu
Loved
Growing
Always
" 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