Matisyahu’s New ‘Light’

“This record is in a different place from anything I’ve done before,” Matisyahu says.

“This record is in a different place from anything I’ve done before,” Matisyahu says.

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

Even pop culture superstars need to go to the dentist. As he speaks with a reporter by cell phone from Toronto, midway through a tour that culminates in eight nights of performance in New York City beginning Saturday night, Matisyahu is looking for the street on which his wife’s uncle’s dentist office is located.
“We go to see him every time we’re in Toronto,” the highly successful chasidic singer-rapper-songwriter says, before turning to his wife for further directions. “My family goes with me on tour for the most part, which is pretty cool. We’re traveling together right now in this RV.”

It’s been about nine years since Matisyahu (born Matthew Paul Miller) began his musical career. He’s been married four years and has

sons aged 3 and 2, so his life would have changed a lot anyway. But his growth and learning process has frequently been played out in public, from his sudden departure from JDub Records for mega-label Sony, to his recent break with Chabad.

Is he a natural magnet for controversy?

He laughs heartily at the suggestion, then says, “I don’t know. I really got trashed by a lot of people when I said I was no longer affiliated with Chabad. But one of the guys who was most vocal in attacking me came to see the performance in Denver and he retracted everything [negative] that he’d said.”

In conversation, Matisyahu is compulsively modest, yet well aware of the impact he has had both in and out of the Jewish world. Discussing the various brouhahas surrounding him, he says, “Maybe I’m not the best at expressing myself with words. People are waiting for me to slip, for the expectations around me to be broken. It’s a fear-based behavior; people are afraid of evolving with me.”

To some extent, that particular fear has been a constant in his life ever since he discovered Orthodox Judaism. Raised in the suburbs as a Reconstructionist, the young Miller was a self-admitted drug user and a Deadhead before a year in Israel sent him off in a different direction. His parents were, he says, shocked at first.

“I left home at 17 and had already been through some life experiences,” he says. “After I became religious, I moved back home — I had been living in Bushwick, but the lease was up. It was the worst possible thing that could have happened. My parents had to put up with all the changes, and I’m sure I wasn’t easy to put up with. There would be friction over little things; my mom would come home with groceries on a Saturday and ask me to help unload them, and I’d say I couldn’t because it was Shabbos. But gradually they saw that this was something I was serious about, something that was helping me grow up. Now they’re very cool about the whole thing.”

In a sense, that has been the pattern with Matisyahu’s career: make a sudden break, engendering a storm of criticism, wait out the storm and gradually people will come around. That is essentially what happened when he left JDub — the label’s founders, Aaron Bisman and Jacob Harris, very quickly decided not to go on the attack and any fans who felt betrayed got over it. Since the current tour has been playing to full houses, his departure from Chabad seems to have gone over the same way.

That break, he says, was precipitated by his growing friendship with Ephraim Rosenstein, his former therapist and now his teacher, close friend, adviser and, most recently, collaborator on “Light,” the musician’s first studio album in nearly three years.

“He’s been a big influence in my life,” Matisyahu says. “When I was in Crown Heights, he’d be coming there from Hebron regularly, doing therapy with people. He is particularly good with ba’alei teshuvah; everyone who goes through a change that deep should be in therapy. He helped me regain my footing, and when my therapy ended we began a different relationship.”

Rosenstein would send Matisyahu recordings of his commentaries on passages from Torah. From there he moved into an analysis of some of the competing ideologies within the chasidic world and, finally, larger issues of philosophy.

“Basically these ideas became the running theme of the new record,” Matisyahu explains. “Conceptually, my earlier records were [a reaction to] becoming religious, to reading Psalms for the first time, to reading Tanya [the central work of Lubavitcher thought] for the first time, finding things that spoke to me. This record is a big evolution; it has a new depth.”

That might account, in part, for the long time between records. But there was also a shift in working methods, he says, that contributed to the recording hiatus.

“The way ‘Youth’ was made, we did it in the midst of touring,” he says. “I was writing songs during the sound check before a concert, we’d fly back to the States for a week of recording, then go back out on the road. It was completely chaotic.”

That sense of chaos, he adds, was part of the decision to change labels and management. And he vowed that the next record would be created under more relaxed circumstances.

“We spent the whole year making this record,” he says. “We didn’t want to just rush it out, though. We’re doing this tour to regenerate a buzz. We’re playing with me as the headliner, so that we can reach out to our core fan base by playing two or three hours a night instead of the 45 minutes you play if you’re lower on the bill.”

“Light,” which will be released in March, involves some musical changes as well.

“I’m 29 now, my musical tastes have changed a bit and this record is in a different place from anything I’ve done before,” Matisyahu says. “I’ve spent the last three years working with voice teachers, I’m singing more than I ever did before, trying to find my voice, where I am today.”

His vision of his place in the future is, like his remarks about controversy, an interesting mix of self-deprecation and a strong sense of his role.

“I feel that I’m very similar to the people I sing for,” he says. “I think this is what they get from me, too. They feel that they see themselves in me. I’m kind of the guy they grew up with. I don’t see myself as some big star; I’m someone who really struggles and was confused trying to find my place. Miraculously, I was able to find some aspect of truth and some direction in my life. And where Hashem comes into it, a lot of people are looking for that and they feel that I touched upon something, and if they see that I could do that, they feel that they may be able to do the same.” n

Matisyahu’s third annual “Festival of Light” will begin on Dec. 21 and will be followed by concerts each of the following nights through Dec. 30; the performances on Dec. 21-25 will take place at Webster Hall (125 E. 11th St., Manhattan), while the Dec. 26-30 concerts will take place at the Music Hall of Williamsburg (66 North 6th St., Brooklyn). For more information, go to www.matisyahuworld.com.