A lot of people believe a lot of things. People also believe in a lot of ideas or hold tight to a lot of ideologies and beliefs.

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

A lot of people in the religious world believe that by secularizing, or viewing the changes as secular, such as dropping the beard and changing my appearance, they consider this to be a fall.

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

Some artists are bound to an image: Bob Marley has dreadlocks, Matisyahu has a beard. But that's a reminder that the whole thing is not about style. It's about music.

There is an idea in Kabbalah that the creation of the world is created through space. God is an ever present Being, and in order for anything outside of Him to exist, like this world for example, there needs to be what's called a TumTum[a], or a withdrawal of Godly-like. And that withdrawal happens not by connection but actually by separation. Conflict. And in the gap of that conflict is where the world is situated. That's where the world is created and lived.

I started performing 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.