A Quote by Matisyahu

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.
All I had was a CD with beats. I wrote to every beat on that CD, and when I got off punishment, I put out my first mixtape. I passed it out all around school. I started going to the studio. I started doing shows.
Over a year before I started recording Salad Days, so I finally sat down and was like I have to do this. And it did feel like a chore. I was looking at it in a completely wrong way, trying to one up myself. Just the typical sophomore album bullshit. The main thing I got out of it is I eventually gave up on all that stuff. I had to re-learn why I liked making music in the first place, why I liked recording in my room all the time. Because it's fun. It's fun for me.
We found out that we were dealing with a completely unregulated chemical, this chemical PFOA. This was a chemical that was a completely manmade material invented right after World War Two, didn't exist on the planet prior to the 1940s.
When I went to Egypt right after 9/11 I was very upset. I used to live in Egypt. I had a lot of friends there. I spent two years teaching there. I had very fond feelings for that part of the world, and the fact that a culture I liked so much had attacked my own culture was really very upsetting to me.
We are open to the world; the world is at our doorstep. It washes in, not just through the windows, but we are immersed in it completely - through the Internet, through the media, through people traveling, coming here, as well as Singaporeans going abroad.
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.
The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving. I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't want to see it... I had to start in the dark.
If you talk to people in the military, they'll tell you it takes 3-to-5 years to completely change a culture. It's about making sure, first of all, that everybody understands what the intent and what the vision is. Then you have to map out how you're gonna get there. And as you start to do that, you've got to find out who's in and who's not in.
As a woman, birth control can really mess you up. Like, I switched and it completely messed me up - not completely, but I just started breaking out and as soon as I got off it, my skin was completely clear again.
I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they're a necessity. When I'm playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected - to my music.
I started out coming from more of a concert music background. It just turns out that 20th-century music techniques lend themselves to scary movies and horror movies.
I'd say recording and playing on stage are two completely different things. Being up in front of all people is like jumping off a cliff into icy water. The recording process is a totally different energy.
But I'd say recording and playing on stage are two completely different things. Being up there in front of all those people is like jumping off a cliff into icy water. The recording process is a totally different energy.
We cannot treat people with a right to asylum the same way as people from a safe country. They need to be sent back. That is, from our perspective, completely clear. On the other hand, we should scrutinize the now completely outdated principle that only the migrants' first country of arrival should be burdened with their registration as well as with the process of sorting out who has the right to asylum and who needs to be deported.
Every time I felt the pain coming on I'd go downstairs and hammer out an idea. After a few months I started to take a look at what I was making, I had for the first time in my life written a large grip of songs completely alone and without any expectations or plans of what they would be for.
For Democrats who are feeling completely discouraged, I've been trying to remind them, everybody remembers my Boston speech in 2004. They may not remember me showing up here in 2005 when John Kerry had lost a close election, Tom Daschle, the leader of the Senate, had been beaten in an upset. Ken Salazar and I were the only two Democrats that won nationally. Republicans controlled the Senate and the House, and two years later, Democrats were winning back Congress, and four years later I was President of the United States.
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