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. – Matisyahu
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. – Matisyahu
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
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
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
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
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
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
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. – Matisyahu
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
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
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
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
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
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
My music is really about people connecting with their identities, even if they aren’t Jewish. – Matisyahu
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. – Matisyahu
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