Top 45 Matisyahu Quotes

The kind of music I’m trying to make is conscious, to make people think and feel and get inspired.

When I’m onstage, I’m not thinking about ideas. I’m not in my head at all. It’s a more physical experience.

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.

There was a time when I was fighting with the decision as to whether or not a Hasidic man could go out and have a music career in the world and be involved in pop culture. For me, I was able to bring those two things together for quite some time.

I was into acting as a kid. There was a time when I was 18 that I played the boy in a production of ‘Equus’ in Oregon, and I thought that was going to be my life.

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.

Music has always been such an amazing tool for me to access self and emotion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I listen to music, there’s usually some aspect of that music that I like, and that’s what I take and try to bring into my own music. Bringing in other musicians to collaborate with is a good way for me to test out new ways or make music that I might have not discovered on my own.

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.

I always had a love of music, from the time I was a little kid, dressing up and singing along with Michael Jackson songs.

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

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.

I don’t partake, really, of any of the typical rock-star-lifestyle things you could think of. I try to be responsible when I’m out on the road. I take it pretty seriously, what I’m doing, as something that’s good for the world, and my family, and everyone.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I get on a real serious health kick when I’m on the road, because as a singer, you can’t really get sick. If you get sick, your whole instrument stops working. I’ve done all these different vitamin drinks. I drink coconut water, and I run. I eat food. I juice.

I think when you’re a fan of music – at least the way I’ve been a fan to artists that have really touched me – you’re with them for the long haul. They might do things that you don’t understand or agree with, but I think I’ve always tried to hold my judgment and give them the space to do what they need to do.

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.

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.

When I first started, everything happened at once. I became religious, my musical career took off, I got married, I had kids, and all that happened within the course of a year. I had an excitement about this newly found faith, and so I was writing about that in a very evident kind of way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My life is not separate from my music, you know? It’s not like a day job that I leave and go home. It’s who I am as a person and how I am trying to grow, come closer to God, be a better person.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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