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" 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

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" Reggae music isn't Jewish, but a lot of the ideas are. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Every record I do is a learning process for how I want to do the next one. "

Matisyahu

Process

Want

" Judaism is my life. Everything I do is through the lens of Torah. "

" With music, you're working with a producer, and you walk out of the studio six hours later with a track that's almost completely finished. There's an almost immediate payoff. "

" 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. "

" 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

Kind

" I felt a real strong connection and still do with Hanukkah. So it started out by doing concerts on Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights tour, and then, yeah, let's make some Hanukkah songs. Let me make a Hanukkah song that kids can listen to, party to and get the spirituality of it, because it is not just about dreidels and having fun. "

" 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

Men

" 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. "

" 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

Music

" I think my music has always been a mixture, depending on whom I'm working with - what band, what musicians, what producer. "

" The place that I'm trying to come from and where I'm trying to make music from is when I feel like I'm able to somehow, like, transcend it all and just speak right to God. "

" 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. "

" My music is not really about one ideology. It's not about one truth. "

" 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. "

" When people feel a certain religion claims to have all the answers, that's what turns them off. "

" I remember the moment when it hit me. I was walking down Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, and it felt like I was literally walking out of a jail cell that I had been in. At that moment, I realized I could shave if I wanted. It was up to me and no one else. "

" The best part of touring is the opportunity to make the music. You get to do what you love and have the ability to go out on stage every night and create. "

" The religious lifestyle keeps you focused. It's helpful when trying to manoeuvre through the music scene. "

" The idea that God's mercy is connected to whether or not I shave is ludicrous, and I need to just trust myself, and that, you know, if I'm deserving of God's mercy, I'll get it, regardless of, you know, my beard. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We're so quick to go to make things black and white, and to put things in their box. But everything is this mixture - and that's what this world is - is this blend of different things. "

" 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. "

" 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. "