Matisyahu Quotes

When making music I sink myself into the process as deeply as I can and forget all of the success.

I'm just interested in meditating on certain ideas, and I like to draw: that's my way of thinking.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

I don't meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.

Inspiration for my music just comes from, you know, my life experiences.

I write songs, and I sing them. I never formulated a plan; I can't tell anyone else how to do this. But it feels right, so I just kind of enjoy it and get on with it.

My intentions have been, and are always, to just really get behind what my ideas are musically and to just ride this thing out, cause it feels good, and I think for the most part it's good music. Even when it's not, I'd like to still search for something that could be even like a little bit mind-blowing or shocking to me.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

When I first started making music, I didn't really know what I was doing. I just wanted to write songs. I didn't have a concept. I didn't think it through. I was just flailing around doing what comes naturally. It took me a really long time to step back and deal with what I was doing with any kind of perspective or self-awareness.

Ultimately, at the end of it, it's just trying to get into that space where you feel like you're hitting the right thing and you're making music. And it feels intuitive rather than being counterintuitive.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

I think maybe one day I'll go back to music. I don't know. I don't know if sometimes you lose a passion or you don't lose it, it becomes more personal and less about sharing it with everyone.

In my personal life, I am very contemplative.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song.

For me, creating music is just as relaxing as sitting down and doing nothing.

I get into a zone where I'm really in my own world when I make music.

When I look back at the record and listen to it, I can sort of see where I was at when I was making it - these brief little moments, different places I was at emotionally.

I've taken a look back at my body of work and tried to deduce an essence, capturing aspects that reoccur. Reflecting on your own product can be difficult yet enthralling.

A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.

Composing is improvisation slowed down.