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.

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.

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.

What is it to keep kosher? Is it eating kosher potato chips? Kosher is a bigger idea. I think it's about being healthy. But according to some people, it's about not eating this food because it's forbidden by the Jewish law. My view of the halachah changed a little bit. The laws are there hopefully to be a tool.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.