In the world of Jewish music, Matisyahu is a real rock star. The Grammy-nominated reggae artist will be in Kansas City again Thursday, July 7, when he and his band the Dub Trio, perform at Crossroads KC @ Grinders along with The Wailers.
Matisyahu isn’t sure how many times he’s been to Kansas City, but he thinks it’s somewhere between five and 10. The Chronicle caught the recording artist while he was walking around New York City earlier this month before his summer touring began. He spent last weekend in Poland, where JTA reports that thousands of fans packed a stadium just a few miles from the Auschwitz death camp for a concert. He was the headliner of the
Life Festival June 18 in Oswiecim, the town in southern Poland outside where the Auschwitz camp is located.
The festival was founded last year by a popular Polish disc jockey to use music and youth culture to fight anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia, and send “a message of peace and tolerance” from the place that is a symbol of the Holocaust.
He’s also been in Israel performing this week. He will zig zag his way across North America for 54 tour dates, beginning tomorrow, June 25, in Boston, and ending Sept. 7 in Toronto.
This summer tour will support his latest release, “Live at Stubb’s Vol. II.” This is Matisyahu’s first offering since his 2009 critically acclaimed studio album “Light,” which debuted inside the Billboard Top 20 and whose single “One Day” was chosen as the official theme song for NBC’s 2010 Winter Olympics broadcast.
Five years after the release of his groundbreaking original live album, “Live at Stubb’s,” Matisyahu returned to the Austin, Texas, venue last August with his band where he performed what has been described as an unforgettable live music experience. The concert was captured in the form of “Live at Stubb’s Vol. II.” The collection was released as a DVD/CD and a DVD.
When he’s in Kansas City, he said besides hearing songs from “Live at Stubb’s Vol. II,” concertgoers can expect to hear many old songs, “some new material as well as some improvisation.”
He has been described by many, including the JTA, as a Chasidic rapper or reggae star. But when he was asked how the Chabad-Lubavitch philosophy helped him see his potential as such, he immediately answered that he doesn’t “really ascribe to one philosophy.”
But he said Judaism has definitely influenced his life as a musician.
“Judaism is one of the core pieces of who I am in terms of my life and what I do in my life. Everything is influenced by it,” he said.
His music, or what he calls his art, “is an expression of his inner world, which is heavily influenced by my Judaism.”
Judaism started playing an important role in the 31-year-old performer’s life when he was about 16. Because he was an observant Jew before he became a “rock star,” he said keeping Shabbat, even when he’s touring, is “really not an issue.”
“A lot of rock stars have a lot more issues than not performing one night of the week,” he said.
He makes it work, sometimes by arriving in a city a couple of days early or staying close to the venue so that he’s ready to perform when the sun goes down on a Saturday night.
“Sometimes I’ll walk four or five miles to the venue so when Shabbos ends I’m ready to perform. It’s little things like that. My career didn’t start until after I was religious so I never knew anything else,” he said.
His popularity is one reason it’s not an issue.
“I have a draw of a certain number of people that come to my shows. It’s all money and promoters know that. They don’t care if I start at 8 o’clock or 10 o’clock as long as those people walk in the door and pay the ticket price,” Matisyahu said.
He said there is a combination of things that inspire him when he writes his songs, including the music itself.
“I’ll go into the studio with no ideas, with nothing done, and I’ll start working with my band or the producer to create the music. Then I turn off a switch in my head and I don’t think too much. I free associate and I let the music inspire my words. I don’t think about what they are so much,” he said.
He also has had success working the exact opposite way.
“I’ll take an idea or concept and there’s a person I work closely with and we’ll spend anywhere from two to three years to two to three weeks developing the idea and concept and writing the lyrics pre music,” he said.
He mentioned “Light,” his last original CD, as an example.
“That was the story by Reb Nachman called ‘The Seven Beggars.’ We spent about two years studying it and then writing,” he explained.
“On my next record, whenever it comes out, we took the teaching of the Baal Shem Tov, and some of his basic concepts. We went to his grave site in the Ukraine and spent about a week there meditating and delving into his concepts about God. And on the next record we are talking about getting into the Zohar and the Kabbalah,” he said.