Quotes from Matisyahu

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.

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.

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.

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

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

You're looking for help from God, you say he couldn't be found. Looking up to the sky and searchin' beneath the ground.

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.

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.

Life will go on without you, because in the end it's not about you.

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.

When I'm meditating on an idea, I try to let the idea completely saturate me to the point where I feel like I'm covering myself in it or totally immersing myself in it, so that everywhere I'm looking, everywhere I'm going, it's through the lens of that idea. And that's sort of what I do with the music - I try to lose myself in it.

Literally, there is a lot of talk about sparks in the Kabbalah. It talks about when God created the world initially, there was an explosion that happened like a Big Bang but based on vessels and light.

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.

Most of my life wasn't about knowledge from books, but experiential knowledge.

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 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.

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.

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.

The beauty of life is not knowing.

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.

We know nothing. And just because you know something to be true at this moment in your life or you feel that it is true, you can never be sure of yourself.

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.

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

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.