A teenage Phish fan who became a Hasidic reggae star
Matthew Miller dropped out of high school on the first day of senior year to follow the jam band Phish around the country. A few years later he was studying Torah all day in Crown Heights, and by 2006 he was topping Billboard's digital chart as Matisyahu, a Hasidic Jew singing reggae and beatboxing.
A West Chester, Pennsylvania, native whose birthday is June 30, 1979, Miller grew up in White Plains, New York, in a Reconstructionist Jewish family. He rebelled as a teenager, though a two-month school programme in Israel in 1995, where he was confined to campus for disciplinary reasons, stirred a stronger sense of Jewish identity. Back home he fell into drugs and the touring life of a devoted Phish fan, followed by a spell in rehab in upstate New York.
A wilderness school for teenagers in Bend, Oregon, changed the direction. He finished high school there, discovered reggae and hip hop, and found that in a place with few Jews he had become the token one, which made the religion feel newly relevant. He began doing open mic sets and later performed for more than a year in Bend under the name MC Truth.
Returning to New York, he took classes on Jewish spirituality at The New School, practised reggae in his bedroom over hip-hop tapes and started attending an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side every Sabbath. A chance meeting with Rabbi Dave Korn of the Chabad House at NYU, the morning after a night of drinking, led him to move into Korn's home to study. By November 2001 he identified with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, and early the next year he moved to Crown Heights and withdrew from popular culture.
The music career took off anyway. His debut album appeared in 2004, and a live version of King Without a Crown reached the Modern Rock Top 10 in 2006, the year Billboard named him Top Reggae Artist and Esquire dubbed him its Most Lovable Oddball. Trey Anastasio of Phish invited him on stage at Bonnaroo in 2005, closing a circle from his fan days, and he later worked with producers including Bill Laswell and Sly and Robbie.
Source: Matisyahu
