It's been nearly three years since the release of Matisyahu's Youth, which debuted at #4 on the charts and earned him the title of 2006's Billboard Reggae Artist of the Year. Now, with the follow-up, Light, completed and awaiting a release date, Matisyahu releases Shattered, an EP that acts as a trailer for his forthcoming LP. In this Starpulse Q and A, Matisyahu discusses some of the themes that are introduced on Shattered, including spirituality, finding one's self, and the darkness that exists in the world.

This EP has four songs on it and I wanted get your thoughts on all of them, starting with "Smash Lies".
"Smash Lies" is a song that was produced in Jamaica by a kid named Steven McGregor, son of Freddy McGregor, a famous singer. He's a really big up-and-coming producer. He's worked on Movado and Sean Paul, does a lot of the really current dance hall out of Jamaica. Really, me and David Caan, the producer on the record, just wanted an excuse to go to Jamaica (laughs). It's a style that, I think, is really kind of futuristic. It grabs people right away. It's something that I've been wanting to do since I started, which is a song that's kind of a "banger," so to say. Something that you could hear on a hip hop station, or with some hardcore reggae vibe.

Reading the lyrics, what came to my mind, and perhaps this is not what you intended, was authentic living. The line, "Strives to be alive everyday," made me think of people who go about their daily routine and they're alive, but they're not really living. They're more like automatons.
The concept of routine is certainly difficult and it's an issue that we all face, including myself as a touring musician. Whether it's going from city to city, doing show after show, or the regular nine to five, we all have to somehow wake ourselves up, spiritually, from the inside. People use all sorts of means to do that, like substances to jolt themselves up. Letting go of all of that is one of the lies that we can smash. When a person lets go of all their vices and all the things that they use to feel alive, that's when they come to this place, and this place is actually the meaning behind the title of the EP. "Shattered". The person comes to a shattered place within themselves and they can emerge with a new life, so to speak, or a kind of real existence.

How about the song, "So High, So Low"?
One of the main inspirations for this EP was a story called "The Seven Beggars", written by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who lived in the 1800's. He's known for the many catastrophes that happened to him, including having a son who he thought was the messiah die. When that happened he stopped teaching traditional Torah lessons, not that that they were very traditional in the first place, but he stopped teaching them and instead started telling stories. He called them bedtime stories to wake up the children. The most famous one is this story of The Seven Beggars. It's okay not to be familiar with the story since, despite it being a big inspiration, it's only subtly mentioned in the song.

The story is of these two children who escape the sacking of their kingdom. They end up spending seven days and nights in the forest. Each night a different beggar comes to them with bread and water, but they won't take them out of the forest. Each beggar has an apparent deficiency that turns out to actually be their advantage in their services to God. There are all these stories within the story. One of the beggars is a hunchback, who is little but carries a lot. And this beggar knows of a tree that's on the side of a road to nowhere. It casts a shade that has a place for every creature in the world. For every bird a spot on its branch. At the end of that song, it says like, "I am searching for the shade of the tree, I heard about it in the breeze, they say it exists at the side of the road, which road nobody was told." That's one aspect of the song, but it's multi dimensional. There's also the idea of extremities and going from a high to low place, or of being in the process of high being low.

And what about the track "Two Child One Drop"
I did a cover of "Watching The Wheels" for a compilation of John Lennon covers to aid and create awareness of the situation in Darfur. That's when I really started to learn about the genocide happening there, and the child soldiers. Soon after I got involved with a film, Call + Response, which also focused on child slavery and the many brothels around the world, which was just earth-shattering eye-opening stuff for me. It all started coming around the same time, and this was all when I was writing this record, and again the theme on my record was about these two children in the wilderness, so I started to tie it in. I have a friend, Ephraim Rosenstein, who's a mentor and teacher to me. He's a brilliant writer, philosopher, and psychologist with a very deep background in Jewish and Hasidic thought. He's whom I've been working with on most of my ideas in the last few years. We started comparing the story of The Seven Beggars with some of the atrocities that were happening around the world, so we came up with this story of two children who were African soldiers. It's based on a story we'd heard of kids escaping from a child soldier camp and walked across the desert.

The song came about musically from my guitar player Aaron Dugan and myself just sitting around in my loft in Brooklyn. He's play and I'd beat box and sing over it, and we'd record these sessions of jamming out for about an hour. That's where the "Bom bom-bom bom, bom bom-bom bom," bass line in the song came from. I wanted to write about this situation in Africa, but it seemed very difficult since I'd never really written about anything but myself, my process, and my experiences. How could I possibly try to write about something so far away and tremendous? But once we had the bass line, it just got into my bones and chilled me a little bit. I pulled out this writing that my friend Ephraim had done based on this story, and I started to re-write what he wrote in my own words. I felt all of the sudden that I was right there, that I could somehow completely relate to it. A lot of people worked on this song and it ended up turning into a really epic piece.

It seems like for this track, the film, and the compilation CD, you confronted a lot of the ugliness in the world. How do you do that without being consumed by it?
For me the issue is more of not forgetting about it rather than being consumed by it. It's so easy to get caught up in our lives-and for me to get caught up in all the shows and touring- and, in general, we live in a time where we're so separated from the darkness of the world, spoiled in a sense. I feel that there is a duty or a responsibility to tap into what's happing in the world, all aspects of it. And I feel that one of my daily challenges is to pull myself away from everything else and to confront these things. To actually feel them. To see this footage of a child having a gun put into his hand and being forced to kill his own family. To learn of children being taught to do the same to the families in their own villages and to actually feel and take those things in. In my lifetime it's always been very hard for me to pay attention to those things, to acknowledge that they actually happen, and to not only to know of them, but to feel them emotionally as well. As a musician it's important to feel all those things and to see all the darkness that's out there in order to combat it.

And how about the track "I Will Be Light"?
"I Will Be Light" was a song written by myself and a songwriter named Trevor Hall. He's a young man living in LA who's become a Hindu. He makes pilgrimages to India and is pretty religious. He's an amazing singer I saw four or five years ago when he was 17 or 18 at the Sundance Film Festival. He has since toured with me and become a close friend. He came to New York and, again, the lyrics came in a spur of the moment sort of way. One of the central themes of this song is the idea that a person has a body and that in their body is a soul, this spark of light, almost like a star in the night. A tiny star amidst a huge realm of darkness and there's only a limited amount of time for this light to be produced and then it goes out.

A lot of this record is about my growing up and becoming more mature and one of the central themes is that everyone deals with the idea of death and recognizes that a person has a limited amount of time in this world. You may feel that it's going on forever, but if you just step back and look in the context of space and time you see that your life is just that, a flash of light and then it goes out. That's the central theme of this song. A tiny moment in the time of a life to shine and burn away the darkness.

How does this EP relate to your forthcoming LP Light?
I think, first of all, three of the four of the songs, with the exception of "Two Child", are going to be on the record. "Two Child" is going to be offered as a bonus song, that a person will get with the record. The way I see it, the EP is sort of like a trailer for the record. It's not really two separate things. It's not really that the EP is one thing and Light is something else. And Light which will be out this winter, somewhere near January, February, or March. God willing.

Interview by Ben Kharakh

Starpulse.com contributing writer