URB: You’re also really big on the fan interaction, and it seems genuine! You seem like you want to do the silly little video posts, I saw the one about the juicer dying. And I thought, “Wow!” I didn’t really get into you the first time around because I was like, “Hasidic reggae-rap? What?” But when I heard you, I thought you make rocking the yarmulke cool! How do you prevent yourself from sounding too preachy or how do you respond to that criticism?
MATIS: Well, for me, one of the lessons I’ve learned in my life, maybe in the last five years or so, is that humility to me is the most important quality. No matter who you are, or what you believe, if you believe that you have the ultimate answer, you need to hook everybody on that, you know? For me, music is about creating space for people and the people in that space can find themselves and tap into an inner dimension of themselves and find their own answer. That’s the kind of music that I try to make, to stimulate people to feel but not to tell them what to think and feel.
URB: One thing I noticed is that you like K’Naan, and I do, too. Would you collaborate with him?
MATIS: Yeah, we talked about it and we did some touring together. You can go on YouTube, it’s probably on there, we did a song together. I performed “Jerusalem Now,” and I can’t remember which one of his he did ["If I Forget You"], but we did it for a radio station up in Portland.
URB: Yeah, I feel like you both try to do something similar and express positivity, but express it in different ways. Do you ever feel like you’re mislabeled or misunderstood by people who try to make you feel gimmicky when people look at your musical career taking off and they can’t put it together with your religious beliefs? Do you feel like you need to prove yourself or always be like, “This is me.”
MATIS: I always felt like I wanted to prove something, even before I was religious when I was singing reggae or rapping or beat boxing, I would go into the club, and most of the people there were African-American, and people would look at me a certain way. Then I’d start singing a Bob Marley song, and they’d be really into it, they thought it was pretty cool. I felt like once people experience my music, they’ll understand in a second, but in their initial conception of the idea, it was confusing to people.
URB: What’s your opinion of the whole musical landscape right now?
MATIS: It’s pretty bad. Music, I think, is inherently a really holy thing, a really special thing that has a strong power to penetrate into people. For me, I always felt like, it just felt unnatural to listen to music or write music that didn’t feel like an expression from a deep place. I don’t really understand the whole vibe of party music.
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