I Will Be Light

Album: Light (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is a song from Matisyahu's third studio album, Light. The track also appeared on Matisyahu's 2008 EP Shattered.

    The song was recorded in Jamaica and features the legendary rhythm section Sly and Robbie, with whom Matisyahu's worked in the past.
  • Matisyahu told Star Pulse that this "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."

    Matisyahu added: "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."

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