this is pretty much his bio from the onion. I was expecting a joke article but i guess not.
" I always had a love of music, from the time I was a little kid, dressing up and singing along with Michael Jackson songs. I was in shows in high school, and then I got into reggae music and Phish and all that stuff, and I had a bongo drum I used to play. Basically, I started beatboxing with friends at lunchtime and after school, skipping class and stuff like that. We'd meet up in a park and everyone would freestyle, and I was the guy who made the beats. From there, I left home and went out on tour with Phish, and I was playing my drum in the parking lot and freestyle rapping and singing different songs that I'd heard. Then I lived in Oregon when I was 18 and started playing music with a guy out there, and played the coffee shops and started a band and played a good handful of shows, maybe 30 shows, in the Northwest. Then I did some acting, went to college, started playing around with the effects on a P.A. system, doing that reggae-chant thing. Did that for a couple years. I'd occasionally get up at an open mike night, and I'd sit in with friends who had bands.
Then I went to yeshiva, and when I was in yeshiva and becoming religious, there was a rabbi in Washington Square Park, from NYU. I was very close with him, and I would be there for Shabbos, and he would ask me to sing or rap or something at the Shabbos table, acoustic-style. From there, he asked me to perform at a menorah lighting in Union Square Park, which I did. I ran into an old friend, an acquaintance of mind from college, Aaron Dugan, my guitar player. He had never played reggae before, but he was just a nice guy and I knew he played guitar, so I asked him if he wanted to do this gig with me for, like, 50 bucks or something, and he did.
From there, there were gigs within the religious community, like at the youth center. I started charging a few hundred bucks, got a band, and this friend of mine who I knew from college who went to NYU's music business school told me that he was interested in starting a non-profit for Jewish music, and asked if I was interested in maybe making a record for them. In the meantime, when I was in yeshiva, I'd gotten a couple calls to do some shows with a couple other blacks and Jews who do reggae music. I forget the name of the club, but it was one of the first clubs that I went to after I got religious, down in the East Village. That led to an opening gig for a band, John Brown's Body, a Hanukkah show, and that was the first show where we showed up and the place was jam-packed, sold-out, there was a line around the corner. We did a promo show at the Mercury Lounge, it was the same thing, and then we just moved up. We did Irving Plaza, we did Webster Hall. We went out for four months straight in the van, after I'd just gotten married, and we toured around the country and played six nights a week. I got a bunch of press stuff, a bunch of TV stuff, a bunch of good opening acts, festival stuff over the summer. Everything just snowballed."
