Shlomo Franklin discovered rock ‘n’ roll music in the unlikeliest of places: at his Haredi yeshiva high school in Queens, New York, where a group of students would pass around albums in secret and whisper to each other about new music they discovered: “Have you heard this band called Boston? They're from Boston, and they have an album called Boston with a song called Boston.” Did you know “the guitar player built his own amp, he went to MIT,” and “the lead singer killed himself.”

“It was beautiful,” Franklin now says. He loved the mythology around musicians, their characters, their rebelliousness, their disregard for authority. “Most of all,” he says, “they felt honest… and stubbornly true to themselves.” The sound of the guitar felt like a “weapon against the lie — as cheesy as that sounds.”

But there’s nothing cheesy about Franklin’s story of growing up as a Haredi boy on a farm in Upstate New York and then, after leaving religious life, becoming a singer-songwriter, who has released dozens of songs and performed across the globe.

Franklin’s parents were baalei teshuva who cut an unconventional path. His father, aside from running a farm, is also a wildlife biologist, conservationist and outdoorsman, who spent years living out west in a log cabin he built himself out in the woods and living off the land. He also developed a deep relationship with various Native American tribes, until one day, a tribal elder, a woman, told him during a ritual ceremony “to go back to his faith.” He then came back east and found his own niche of Hasidic Judaism mixed with running the first Cholov Yisroel organic dairy farm, in Bethel, New York.

For the younger Franklin, however, it wasn’t easy. He spent his teenage years riding back and forth between “living the farm life, milking cows, running through the fields,” and attending a Haredi yeshiva in Monsey, New York, with long hours of study every day. “I always liked the farm part,” Franklin says. “I didn’t really like the yeshiva part.”

His yeshiva environment was abusive, Franklin says. “I used to get beat up all the time by the rebbe and the menahel” — or school principal. “I hated it. I hated yeshiva, I hated the religion. I was resentful. I was angry. I was rebellious.”

The yeshiva represented everything he loathed — conformity, lack of independence, and the suppression of his true self.

But his father, Franklin says, represented something more genuine to him. Once, when he was nine years old and riding with his father in his pickup truck, his father told him to open the glove compartment, where he kept a stack of Bob Dylan CDs. “He’s like, ‘Don’t tell your mother, but I want to show you my favorite musician.’” His father played Dylan’s classic “The Times They Are A-Changin',” and, though this wasn’t the rock ‘n’ roll he’d only discover years later, Franklin says, “That was the first time I heard music that sounded like the truth.”

Franklin's independence and questions isolated him from his peers and teachers at the yeshiva. Though the farm offered a refuge, even there he felt alone. Music became his escape, a connection to a broader world that allowed him not only to hear from others who felt like him, but also to express his feelings.

High school was when he began to distance himself from his Hasidic roots. Attending the Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva in Queens marked his first step outside the insular Hasidic community. Here, he trimmed his payes to a length more suitable to a Litvish yeshiva and began exploring the secular world. This period was crucial as it exposed him for the first time to meaningful secular education in core subjects like Math and English. But it also included biology, chemistry — and even some sex education — all of which contrasted sharply with his schooling until then. Looking back on this time slowly leaving the community, he likens it to “backing out of the room very slowly, very carefully."

It was at this time that he started to take music seriously. His musical taste was broadened by classic rock radio like New York’s Q104.3 that “blew my world open” and sharpened by some classmates who knew some of the non-Jewish music he loved. He had so much to learn – to start with, he had no context: no idea whether the music was new or old, whether the musicians were alive or dead. He began to skip classes, spending hours practicing guitar and immersing himself in the world of rock and roll lore. 

After Chofetz Chaim, he attended a yeshiva in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he found teachers with a compassionate approach to Judaism. Unlike the authoritarian figures he had known before, these rabbis behaved with a genuine sense of kindness, embodying their religious beliefs in honest and humane ways. Franklin admired how these teachers made the religion appear beautiful and dignified, providing a rare glimpse of sincerity and warmth within his religious education. Their open-hearted teaching left a positive, lasting impression on him, even as he ultimately decided to pursue a different path.

As his musical tastes expanded, Franklin became obsessed with bands like Guns N' Roses and especially its iconic guitarist Slash. His love for music became a form of resistance against the religious constraints that had defined his early life. His interests were not secret, the principal at Waterbury, Rabbi Daniel Kalish, knew that “I had posters of Slash in my dorm room and he would come in and ask me questions. ‘What's that guitar? Explain this to me.’” One day Franklin told him, “‘Rebbe, Slash is coming to town. He's coming to Connecticut.’ And he’s like ‘Shlomo, you have to go!’” Much to his surprise, the rabbi lent Franklin his own car — with a full gas tank — so he and a friend could go to the show.

In concert, Slash exceeded expectations as “the man, the myth, the legend in person.” Despite getting in late the night before, Franklin made sure to get to shiur the next morning, to show his gratitude to the rabbi. After class Rabbi Kalish shook his hand and in his hand was some money for the ticket – “he wanted to sponsor me to see a rock and roll show.” It was an act of generosity of spirit that lives with Franklin even now. “I really think he deeply respects what people are into and what makes them happy. And to him again, there's not that strong a contradiction between someone enjoying, you know, a raucous rock and roll show and learning [Torah]…. Joy is essential to life. And it's essential to his Jewish way of life. He's a beautiful man.”

Ironically, though, seeing this different attitude to Judaism helped Franklin understand it was not his path to take. Until then, Franklin had thought that he just hadn’t met the right teacher to inspire him to love Judaism the right way. But then he met Kalish and thought: “He's really doing it right. And it makes me really happy that he’s out there.” And yet, even with the right teacher, he realized that Haredi Judaism was not for him. Rather, by the time he left high school, he felt ready, “to be a rock and roll guitar player in a rock and roll band.”

Franklin’s journey of self-discovery took him to Israel, a common destination for teens and young adults exploring their relationship to the Orthodox community. Here, he wrote his first songs, inspired by the likes of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash. Returning to New York, he pursued the dream of becoming a musician, performing at iconic venues like the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. Franklin found a new community among musicians, many of whom shared similar journeys of leaving religious backgrounds.

In 2018, while living in New York and touring, he released his debut album “Apt 16” to general acclaim, one critic captured the tone as “both defiant and sweet.” And, once the worst of the pandemic was over he moved to Nashville to be closer to the music scene.

Moving from the Haredi world to the music world was a paradigm shift for him. Even now, at the age of 28, Franklin is still working through the experience. On the cover of his new album Most People Are Lonely, he is clean-shaven and has traded in his yeshiva clothes for a plaid shirt, overalls, and baseball cap. Though musically the song is more upbeat than a ballad, the lyrics of the title track contain the sad refrain, “You can cry all night / With nobody to listen / And your heart remains / A secret well hidden.”

He seems to have some distance on his Hasidic upbringing now, though, and seems hopeful and reflective rather than traumatized. He went from a place where he was taught “you should fear the outside world,” to a life where he was “shown an unimaginable amount of kindness and generosity by complete strangers.” But he learned from the experience and feels stronger for it.

Franklin has several pieces of advice for others leaving the Haredi community, emphasizing the importance of finding one's own path and building a new sense of community. “It's really hard… People spend so much time online. I think the whole world is starving for communities, certainly in modern America.” That yearning for company can be even more pronounced for people, like Franklin, who come from places where they were so deeply immersed in society every day with communal activities consuming their daily lives.

Today, Franklin’s music is a blend of his experiences, capturing the essence of his journey from a Hasidic Jew to a country musician. His lyrics explore themes of identity, freedom, and the search for meaning, resonating with audiences who appreciate his unique perspective. Even though he has largely abandoned his former life, through his music, Franklin continues to draw from both the worlds he once straddled, creating a voice that is both distinctive and deeply authentic.

And Franklin still embraces his broader cultural heritage. “I love being Jewish. I think we're as good people as anybody else. I don't think we're better. I don't think we're worse… It's also not lost on me that so many of the great songwriters are Jews: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, those are from my top five. You know, Johnny Cash wasn't, but the others are. I think we're a good bunch, you know? I'm very proud of it.”

Dan Friedman and Shulem Deen contributed reporting.