There's something really powerful when I, for example, hear Bob Marley's 'Exodus' - we know where we're going. We know where we're from.
Vocal rest is awesome. It is like any kind of fast. Firstly, it is a purification of speech. It made me realize how not careful I am with the things I say. It also makes you find new ways of communication and new methods to connect with people.
I did some acting in college. But then everything stopped when I was a junior, in the fall of 2001, when I started becoming religious. Once I became a full-on Hasidic, I stopped everything. I stopped music. I stopped acting.
People aren't religious because it's easy not to be. Like anything, it's habitual, and once it's a habit it's no longer hard.
I think when you're a fan of music - at least the way I've been a fan to artists that have really touched me - you're with them for the long haul. They might do things that you don't understand or agree with, but I think I've always tried to hold my judgment and give them the space to do what they need to do.
I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn't a major part of our existence.
At a certain point, I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity... to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. I felt that in order to become a good person, I needed rules - lots of them - or else I would somehow fall apart. I am reclaiming myself. Trusting my goodness and my divine mission.
It's a holistic process for me during a show. I'm always focusing on the technical aspects of my voice. I try to make my voice do what I want. One big thing I do to improve on each show is to listen back to performances on CD while on tour.
I have a whole regimen to my day: my vocal warm-ups, my prayers, my meditations... I pray three times a day. I try to have a real experience praying, not just do it. I really get deep into the idea and really try to get somewhere with it, to have an in-depth understanding of the idea.
There are so many rules in Judaism, and if you get into them and you get obsessed and you have the kind of life that I have, it can make you a very unhappy person. It can make everything complicated and more stressful than it needs to be, so I kind of loosened the knots a little bit.
What is it to keep kosher? Is it eating kosher potato chips? Kosher is a bigger idea. I think it's about being healthy. But according to some people, it's about not eating this food because it's forbidden by the Jewish law. My view of the halachah changed a little bit. The laws are there hopefully to be a tool.
Every record I do is a learning process for how I want to do the next one.
When I'm meditating on an idea, I try to let the idea completely saturate me to the point where I feel like I'm covering myself in it or totally immersing myself in it, so that everywhere I'm looking, everywhere I'm going, it's through the lens of that idea. And that's sort of what I do with the music - I try to lose myself in it.
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 religious lifestyle keeps you focused. It's helpful when trying to manoeuvre through the music scene.
When I first started, everything happened at once. I became religious, my musical career took off, I got married, I had kids, and all that happened within the course of a year. I had an excitement about this newly found faith, and so I was writing about that in a very evident kind of way.
When I became religious, it was full-force for me. And, through the lifestyle of being out on the road with non-Jewish musicians, in non-Jewish nightclubs and going all over the world - getting out of the shtetl - opened me up to having experiences that other religious men might not have to think or worry about.
In Judaism, there are a lot of rules - everything from which fingernail you cut first to which side you sleep on in bed, to the way you get dressed in the morning, to actual ideas, like ideas about being chosen people or ideas about female/male and how to interact with people from the opposite sex.
I was into acting as a kid. There was a time when I was 18 that I played the boy in a production of 'Equus' in Oregon, and I thought that was going to be my life.
I don't partake, really, of any of the typical rock-star-lifestyle things you could think of. I try to be responsible when I'm out on the road. I take it pretty seriously, what I'm doing, as something that's good for the world, and my family, and everyone.
