Levi Robin Is The Folk Hero We Need Right Now
Levi Robin Is The Folk Hero We Need Right Now
Songwriter Levi Robin talks about the magic of seeing what’s already there
Levi Robin, a singer/songwriter originally from Southern California, is a connoisseur of wonders. His journey is replete with experiences of discovering magic hiding in plain sight, like the first time he felt a guitar resonating against his chest, those times when new songs seem to flow through him, or stumbling upon Hasidic teachings that speak about feelings he long felt, but couldn’t articulate. He’s open, and as a musician, understands that revelatory process as intertwined with the deepest secrets of music.
“It’s about the eighth note that is going to be revealed,” he says, referring to an ancient Jewish teaching about a new note you’ll be able to hear in messianic times, which will change your perception of sound. “It is going to be totally new, but it is also not going to be new at all. This eighth note is like an invisible presence that’s here, but we don’t realize is actually this unifying force that if we were to see the world illuminated by it, everything would be utterly new. Paradoxically, it’s a new note that is going to change the way we hear everything, but that’s not new at all.”
That outlook defines Robin’s spiritual quest, and sums up his music career, as well. He was studying at a yeshiva in Tzfat, in northern Israel, when he played one of his songs to a backpacker, who was passing through town. A year later, the backpacker—who turned out to be something of an alternative, countercultural A&R guy—introduced Robin to reggae singer, Matisyahu, and within a few weeks, he went from obscurity to releasing an EP and opening for Matisyahu on his North American tour.
That was seven years ago, and since then, Robin has been touring, recording, and releasing new music. His most recent, Where Night Meets Day, came out in early 2020. Like most of the world, the pandemic slowed things up somewhat, but that hasn’t stopped his spirit of exploration. “I experiment with all sorts of stuff,” he says, although those experiments might not appear on his next record. “I am the type of guy to let things cook. I have a lot of things cooking. Some things might come out in a year, and some things in 20 years. We’ll see. But everything is symbiotic, and it effects everything I do.”
I spoke with Robin about that symbiosis from his home in upstate New York. We talked about his parallel musical and spiritual journeys, how he came to embrace Hasidic Judaism, the directed serendipity that led him to Matisyahu, the cosmic side of songwriting, and his lifelong connection to vibrations and revelation.
Where are you from?
I was born in Pasadena, but when I was about five years old we moved to Huntington Beach.
That’s close to San Pedro, the birthplace of the Minutemen and the DIY punk scene.
It’s about half an hour away. If you’re on the beach you can see San Pedro. I was in the punk scene for a little bit, too. I first picked up the guitar at about 12 or 13. I had a band called the Dazed Youth. At that time, I really liked Green Day, they had the punk attitude, but with a melodic beauty to it that was unique to me.
Was the Dazed Youth gigging?
We were all underage, so there was a limit to the type of shows we could do, but we were playing some clubs. We were selling tickets and playing shows at places like the Roxy and these old famous places from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s that are now just basically pay-to-play—the remnants of what the former music industry was.
Did your introduction to spirituality parallel your growth in music?
Absolutely. I would say that even my exploration in music—specifically once I started writing—is what opened me up to my spiritual impulse. I never really had anything like that.
How do you mean?
I think as I started opening up more to beauty and aesthetics and deeper emotions and questioning—even questioning things on more of an existential level—all of those things started to open me up, bit-by-bit. Each song at that time, at those ages, was a different step. I didn’t really know what I was writing, but I could see in hindsight that I was almost being led, taken by the hand through the subconscious creative process. I don’t even know how much of a conscious role I played in that.
But it was opening something up.
Something was opening up. Some people, when they pick up a guitar, they want to play other people’s music—to play their favorite riffs that they’ve been listening to, and that sort of thing. That wasn’t the way I got into music. I picked up a guitar, and at once, after I could strum a few chords, I wanted to write music. It’s kind of like a painter—it is less common in painting to trace other paintings all day. There’s no shame picking up—even though you have no skills—and try to do something novel.
As you started learning the instrument, did that mirror your songwriting as well?
I saw them as two sides of one thing. I felt like songwriting was my tool toward excavating ancient tunnels in my own Jerusalem underground.
When you say that songwriting opened you up, are you referring to lyrical content, or are you talking about the creative process of writing music?
That’s a good question. I think that different parts of songwriting opened me up in different ways. For example, my writing back then as a teenager, I didn’t really have good ideas of what to write about. There’s only so much you experience at that age. What I would do, in a few words, was, let’s say I’d be strumming a few chords, and they would be the same chords that I felt the day before. But today, I feel in them an outline—there is a little glow, almost like an outline of a door where there once was just a wall—and I take that as an invitation. I allow this mysterious feeling to overcome me and open me up. And that’s through the music I’m playing—through the literal vibrations of notes, strings, and the resonance of the guitar going through my chest—and sometimes when I open that door, a certain part of me would open up. That is what was most intriguing to me, in that place I found somebody in myself who was at once so familiar, but at the same time, almost like an unknown presence. It’s hard to put words to this sort of thing [laughs]. It’s like when a kid suddenly finds that he’s sort of an old soul—that’s not even the right word for it, because it’s more like a timeless place. It’s you and it’s always been you, but it’s also more than just who you are at different points on the linear trajectory of life.
The lyrics that would flow from that place, I would let them come subconsciously. I would even sometimes mouth words while I was strumming those same chords. They would go from just literally mouthing sounds—vowels and consonants—and letting it develop from nothing into fully coherent lyrics, full songs, ideas, reflections that honestly, to me, I didn’t understand how it reflected my life.
Did you craft the songs after the fact? Was it first these intuitive experiences with music and then the craft came afterwards?
One hundred percent. It’s drawing down a certain something first, and then the real craft of songwriting comes after that.
Not to overanalyze it, but it sounds like you’re talking about taping into your spiritual root [shoresh haneshama שורש הנשמה], or something that’s intrinsic or core to who you are?
I’d be happy to use those words, too. And that was why I was bringing this up, because you were asking how music might have affected my spirituality and vise versa. I was saying that music is this process—and specifically songwriting—it’s what began the process of the curtain being lifted a little bit for me. Seeing that my soul is hewn from something that is utterly familiar, when actually felt, but utterly foreign to the context of my life as I knew it. I had no words for it. I had no language for it. I had no idea, but it was the most enticing, and at the same time mysterious, path, which I all of a sudden saw placed in front of me.
Did you start exploring spiritual systems to tap into that outside of music?
That took some time, but not a lot of time because everything was moving very fast. I am not sure how much to get into here to be honest [laughs]. I left my home and my family for a bit of time, and when I did, I befriend an older group of people who sort of took me in. The guitar I managed to bring with me—along with the shirt on my back—that got me my stay and my in in different places. I was always taken care of and embraced. I was taken in by these people. I was living with them, and they were having different parties—looking back, it probably wasn’t the best thing, but it was part of the journey—and at one of these parties, people were ingesting all sorts of things, and I saw one guy in the corner of the room just sitting in lotus position, meditating. I saw this light around him, and I just let myself walk towards him. I was letting myself be drawn, and I walked up to him. I ended up befriending him.
I left all of these different types of friends, and ended up coming back to my hometown. We ended up having a really great friendship. You could say that he introduced me to spirituality in language. Everything was still very primordial and unarticulated for me at that time. But with him, he was already listening to people like Eckhart Tolle, and was even exploring the Vedas and things like that in Hinduism. He was a Hindu. His father had been a Hindu monk, so he had background. It was great. I remember Eckhart talking about how to see that you are more than your mind by starting to take notice of the gap between your awareness and your thoughts. That you are more associated with that awareness or consciousness that is perceiving and taking in, rather than sometimes the chaotic mind that people feel lost trying to identify with. That was a glimpse of freedom in and of itself. Very basic, 101 in spirituality, and those sorts of ideas. We started meditating. Basic meditation, nothing fancy, we set a timer, say 45 minutes, and “Boom. See you on the other side [laughs].”
Did he teach you basic meditation techniques?
You don’t need a lot of techniques if you have a certain raw desire to go deeper. You can have great techniques of gracefully diving into a body of water, but at the same time, you can just jump. You’ll still get in there, and sometimes that’s even more important. We had that. We were like study partners [חברותות], he was the study partner that God sent me at that point. I remember telling him one day, “You’re so lucky that you belong to an ancient people who has this rich spiritual tradition.” [Laughs] Little did I know.
How did you eventually connect this to Judaism?
Conversations with my dad. We were very close, and I was telling him about everything that I was going through. Buddhist ideas, different things,Taoism, and such. He was always interested in it all. Then one day he told me, “This reminds of something in Judaism.” I wasn’t happy to hear that. In fact, I was pretty reactive, emotionally. I said, “I am talking to you about these really deep things and you’re bringing up something silly like Judaism.” In my mind, Judaism was extremely childish, and I had no real reason to think otherwise.
That was kind of what my father told to me, too. He said, “You know what, you’re reacting from ignorance. You don’t really know anything about Judaism. The only rabbis you’ve ever known are more like CEOs and CFOs. Not spiritual leaders.” I said, “Ok.” He said, “I met a real disciple once, a spiritual master in Judaism.” I thought, “What are you talking about? Spiritual masters? Judaism? I never heard of such a thing.” He said, “I still remember this rabbi. It was back when I was a hippie on Venice Beach. I befriend these hippie Modern Orthodox dudes, who started a Young Israel. They needed a rabbi, an interim rabbi, and they had a young Chabad rabbi come in.”
That was who my dad was a disciple of, a spiritual master they called the ‘Rebbe.’ He told me a story about the Rebbe that he thought would demonstrate to me that he was not your average guy. It intrigued me, obviously, but honestly, I had no vision, no ability to relate to Judaism at that point. He said, “Listen, I am not telling you what to do. I am not telling you to go be a Jew. But I am telling you that if you’re seeking truth, and trying to go deeper, this type of reactive conversation that you’re having out of a place of sheer ignorance doesn’t look good on you. Why don’t you go learn something about it, and then formulate something out of knowledge. What if a rabbi one day comes up to you and asks you these questions about, ‘Why aren’t you being Jewish if you’re a Jew?’ You should have something substantial to answer.” I Thought, “Fair enough.”
I went up to my bedroom and I googled the Rebbe. I found a little three-minute talk, and the Rebbe was talking about how in our generation, it seems like so many people are almost as if disgusted by the Torah. Not only do they not have interest, they might even show distaste. He spoke about how the Torah is just like a person, in that it’s comprised of a body and a soul. That the phenomenon of a body devoid of soul is disturbing, if not the most disturbing phenomenon that we can experience in our lifetime, which is to witness a body devoid of soul. We call that a corpse. If somebody has only ever seen the body of the Torah, but never been given the actual soul of the Torah, then there’s no reason to wonder, or no reason to think that this person isn’t a vibrant healthy person for being disturbed by the phenomenon of the Torah without it’s soul, which is its mystical dimension.
That’s the first thing you stumped upon?
Yeah. I don’t know if there was a link on that page, but I ended up on Chabad.org, and I clicked on Tanya, because for some reason I thought I had heard about it before. I thought maybe this would be my one-stop shop, I’ll show there’s no real spirituality, because what the Rebbe said was unbelievably validating. That was exactly how I saw things. But I needed something else, “What is the soul of Torah?” That still wasn’t answered. I found myself opened to Sha’ar HaYichud V’HaEmuna in Tanya [the second section in Tanya], and I couldn’t believe what was before my eyes.
It was speaking your language?
Literally. I couldn’t believe that I found a language for what was being discussed, a language that’s actually communicating the white between the lines. What I thought would be forever ineffable within me, all of a sudden had a voice, and all of a sudden I had a teacher. I recognized a true master of souls within these words.
Did you go down and show your father what you’d found on line?
I came down probably eight hours later or something like that, shaking. It was more than what I thought I’d even been looking for.
Did you eventually go to yeshiva?
I went to Tzfat and studied at a new Chabad yeshiva called Temimei Derech.
How did you eventually hook up with Matisyahu? Is that what kicked your music career up a notch?
Not just kick it up a notch, it brought me out of my bedroom. I was doing nothing to have a music career. It’s cool actually that you bring it up, because how I met up with Matisyahu does link up with Tzfat.
When I was in Tzfat, there was a 6-foot-5 backpacking hippie-looking dude who walked into our yeshiva. That night, we were reviewing whatever we were learning. He came in, and I realized that nobody was going to ask him what he needed. I felt this invisible tap on my shoulder, and I got up and I introduced myself. I asked if he wanted to learn something. He said, “Yeah, I want to learn the Ma’amar V’Ata Tetzaveh,” which is a very specific teaching of the Rebbe’s [laughs]. We sat down and we learned a little bit. After that, we started schmoozing. He told me that he was into music and art, and he likes to travel around and find artists. I said, “After the study session, I have a guitar back at my place, do you want to go jam?” So that’s what we did. We played some music, and he asked me if I had anything original that I composed. I said, “Yeah, I write songs actually.” He asked me to play him something. So I closed my eyes and I sang him a song. I open my eyes and I see this 6-foot-5 bear of a dude standing upon me, he starts yelling at me. “I bet you have so many songs. I bet nobody knows about them. I bet you won’t do anything to make sure they go past your bedroom door. And I hate that [laughs]. Whether you like it or not, I am going to make sure that somebody hears them. Somebody who will make sure that you get heard.” I said, “Ok, go for it.” I hung out with him for a few more days while he was in town, and then he was gone.
A year later, I had already gone back to the States and I was studying at a yeshiva in Morristown, New Jersey. I was living out in the woods there, continued learning, and I got a phone call one day. It was this guy, “Hey, it’s me. I hear you are in the States. So am I. I am in Manhattan. Let’s hang out today.” I said, “That’s cool, but another time. I am in yeshiva, and there is a schedule and everything. It is a little formal, so I don’t think I am going to play hooky today.” He said, “No, you really have to come.” I said, “No. It’s great to hear from you again, but today is not going to work.” And then, all of a sudden, I thought it was still my friend talking, but apparently it was another guy who got on the phone, and he said, “Yo, get your butt down here. I have to hear more of your music.” I told him, “Shut up dude. I told you.” And then there was this awkward silence, and he said, “This is Matisyahu, and my boy told me that he met you. He sang me a song of yours that he remembered, and I’ve got to hear more. I am here for five more hours until I go to London, and I am here with my manager. Get on the train and come.”
A friend of mine drove me to the train station. All was smooth. I got there—they were in a hotel room on the upper west side I think—and I played them a song, and the rest is kind of history. A few weeks later, I was touring with him across country and had recorded an EP that came out a week-and-a-half before that. Immediately, all of a sudden, my life became music. I didn’t plan on that at all. But I was very ready for it at the same time. I was already somebody who had been writing and I could play my material. On the one hand, I did nothing to create that opportunity, but on the other hand, I was ready.
Had you been writing and practicing that entire time?
I had been taking songwriting seriously as a lifestyle most of my adolescence up until that time. I was 20 at that time.
Earlier you mentioned that you would form words while strumming chords. Is that how you write, the music is first and then you come up with the lyrics later?
I was saying that was mostly how I was writing then. It can happen many different ways with me now. Often lyrics are the basis. Sometimes, when I write lyrics it will come done, more or less, with a complete skeleton. I’ll have even a visceral emotional type of realization of some sort of a melody. But when that happens, as soon as I pick up a guitar, I sit down with those lyrics, and the song is basically there. It takes a few seconds to figure out the basic arrangement.
Are you basically transcribing what you’re hearing in your head?
Yeah, but even when it starts with music, that’s still a mode of transcription. I am transcribing things that are more subtle. This type of music that we have on this plane, it alludes to more than itself. It can attune you to the music, to the innerness, to the inner vitality of all sorts of areas of life. I don’t think that music is somewhere and not somewhere else. I really think that there’s something about music that reminds us very deeply to the most fundamental truth of our reality. At the very beginning of our Torah, God is creating the world through vibrations—through divine speech—that has creative potency to bring everything into being rather than in a latent nonbeing. In everything, its very being is singing a song. It’s resonating to this cosmic symphonies of sorts. I listen to a lot of music, but not the type with headphones. I am not on Spotify. I am not spinning records all day, but I am listening all the time. I am transcribing the music that I hear into much more coarse, [or physical] garments of sorts.
That goes back to what you were saying earlier too, about feeling the vibrations of the guitar on your chest.
There’s something very deep about sensitizing yourself, even quite literally, to this sonic spectrum. The Baal Shem Tov [Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of the Hasidic movement], his path in prayer, is literally sensing yourself, and going deeper and deeper and deeper by way of riding the sonic waves of the enunciated words and letters in your prayer. In prayer, if you’re saying these words and letters in a state of devaykus—in a state of cleaving to the Ain Sof [God’s infiniteness]—then you actually link into this creative potency of divine speech. It’s divine speech placed in your mouth, and it’s really not even you praying anymore. It is God praying through you, and you’re affecting the way that the divine flow starts manifesting itself in all its particularities. You can start guiding through your own conscious attachment to the Creator, and you can start having co-creative input on manifesting a better reality for yourself and others.
Are you saying that that process in prayer is similar to the creative process in music as well?
I think what happened to me is synonymous with what the Baal Shem Tov is teaching as a very visceral method to opening up oneself, to being more attuned to the divine reality that is ever-present. And that, if we link up to it, is infinitely potent as well. For me, by some sort of stroke of luck or something, when I started—I can tell you, the first time I picked up a guitar. I think I was 12, and my friend got a Fender Strat. He let me hold it, and it felt really cool. But more than that, I hit the strings, and I remember that sensation of resonance going through my chest. It was like something opened up, and something peeked out at me. And then went right back in. In a sense, you can almost claim that that was the beginning of something. That started me chasing after something. Trying to get out of myself, out of my former frame of reference.
Another aspect of “spiritual” music is repetition, do you think there’s something to a seemingly endless groove that has to do with the spiritual experience as well?
My songwriting is pretty Western, meaning, there’s a point A, a point B, and a point C. You’re not at the same place when you finish as when you start. More Eastern modes—takes these terms with a grain of salt—but a more Eastern mode of music is more cyclical. It’s not any sort of linear trajectory, it’s more cyclical. You are going deeper and deeper inwards, and it is almost hypnotic. I think all music inherently has somewhat of both, but definitely Western music seems to be dominant in there being an unfolding of story. I think Eastern is more centered on really letting go of that. But I do think that both of those forces actually need to be harnessed in some sort of tandem to make really effective music. More that it should be a spiral, that there should be linear trajectory, there’s movement, there’s progress in life. But there’s also a dynamic of recurrence and more of a cyclical nature, but not in a way that there is never progress. That you just climb the mountain to start all over again, that’s not really life either. There is an unfolding story. There is a reality to goals and dreams.
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