You Are More Like Grammy-Winner Jacob Collier Than You Think

0:00What do you mean by arrival and departure? So this is my home. If I'm in F, this is my home. I can exist in the key of F for a while and even if I go somewhere else like to Eto 'i flat when I get home you still feel like ah I remember this feeling from before and then you can kind of augment that arrival into something much more

0:29Colorful. And the joy of music is how to make the best, most satisfying kind of tension and then resolve it. So good. Creativity is about breaking things. No, creativity is about building things. No breaking. No building. Or maybe, just maybe, it's both at the exact same time. But how can you build and break something simultaneously, Simon? Well, enter Jacob Collier. Jacob is a Grammy-winning musician who can break and build at the same time. He has the uncanny ability to also turn anything around him into a musical instrument, including his audiences.

1:19If you've seen any of his viral videos online, he literally takes this massive audience and turns it into his own personal choir.

1:37Thank you so much, that was beautiful. I invited Jacob to join me in a music studio here in Los Angeles while he was in town for the Grammys, where his album, Jesse Volume 4, was nominated for Album of the Year alongside Billie Eilish, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift. We had multiple pianos in the room, so to truly appreciate his mind-blowing creativity, I recommend watching the video version of this episode on YouTube. But either way, get comfy, because this is a front row seat to his wildly beautiful genius.

2:16This is a bit of optimism. So you're nominated for Album of the Year for your Grammy. Congratulations. Thank you. You are nominated alongside some musical legends. Trojans. Trojans. Feelings? I heard the other day that I'm the first artist actually in history to be twice nominated for Album of the Year without ever having charted. So none of my albums have ever been on any charts. I'm personally deeply proud of this. I was going to say, I love that. it's kind of a cool stat I mean there's no such thing as album of the year it's just made up someone made that up I'm deeply honored to be included in the number alongside such luminaries I'm not taking it too serious I mean you've already won I mean to be included amongst yeah oh absolutely I mean when it's a fun thing I'm just excited for the day I'm excited to go and hang out with those guys I know a lot of them already you know none of us really know what we're doing we're just playing around there's not a road map to get nominated for album of the year it's this weird thing but I'm very very proud of I guess you could say the values in the album being leveled with those other albums I mean it's just so cool that all those people all the collaborators from all the corners of the world that their energy and my friendship with them just the kind of audacity of the thing being accepted by those people to me I think that's just kind of like it really tickles me and I don't I don't sit around thinking you know I'm I'm bloody brilliant and you know so much as just what an interesting time to be Jacob you know and what an interesting time to be making music because I've made a very unconventional album that is deeply irreverent in many ways.

3:48And for it to be counted as one of those, it's just kind of a thrill. So I'm just taking it each day as it comes. Love. How old were you when your folks started to realize that there was something there that wasn't, let's call it, normal? I think I had an interesting mind as a child. I think when I was small, my mind was interested in things in a certain kind of a way. Did you have brothers and sisters? Two little sisters. Did you have family dinner every night? Yes. By candlelight, still. By candlelight? Oh, yeah. What was the motivation for that? It's just nice. I don't think there was an agenda.

4:19It's just nice. I mean, your parents played the electricity bill, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's something for motivation. And is your whole family artistic? I would say so. I mean, so I was fundamentally brought up by a single mother. And I'm the eldest of three. So we were like a quartet growing up. And there was a deep sense of, I suppose, like introversion, you could say. We all sourced our energy from within each other. The thing that was interesting to me when I was growing up was how much I was encouraged to look within myself for answers or inspirations that might arise. So, for example, say I come to the dinner table by candlelight one evening and I'm feeling kind of angry.

4:58But I don't quite know why. But not feeling angry in a sort of scaled up way. I'm feeling angry in a small way, like a knotted way, like a way that tugs on itself. And also, incidentally, my tummy hurts. So say I feel like this. I come to the table and I say, guys, I'm feeling like this. And the first thing I met with is, oh, so that's interesting. How did this come about? Why did this come about? And how is it that we can untangle this together? Because we're all here together. And so never in my memory did I come to the table with something, a feeling or an experience of something that was met by judgment, you could say.

5:30Well, why would this? Why would that? And I think that what I learned through music is just the sheer breadth and power of it as one of the more fundamental unravelers of my inner space, if that makes sense. What I find so interesting about that is, and kudos to your mother, right, for affirming your feelings and wanting you to express them in a constructive and healthy manner. I mean, I guess this is a good question, which is when you think about art, so much emphasis is put that artists have to be tortured to create. More songs are about breaking up and loss and stuff like this. And painters, they always talk about the torture.

6:08But in this case, it's the opposite, which it was healthy expression rather than a torture. Yeah. Well, I think music, like other art forms at its best, is a sort of alchemy of sorts. You say, okay, I'm going to take the world as I experience it as it is, and I'm going to morph it into something of value, of light. David Lynch, who passed away just a couple of weeks ago, said that beautiful thing about how negativity is the enemy of creativity, which I really adore. And David is someone who I think had a fair amount of inner demons and struggles and forces at play. you know the way he described it was you know you think about someone like da vinci who you know lives this life of absolute polymathdom and sort of mental intrigue and struggle but actually when he's when he's working is when it flows at its best and it's calm so i think there's something to that i've never really subscribed personally to the idea that you need to put yourself in a big mess in order to create things i think that through the creating of things you can solve a lot of life's problems i mean i think music is is quite an extraordinary place to do it because if you look inside music kind of every force that play is in a sense a reflection of life in some way so in music you have you know symmetry and balance and maths and physics and history and you know geography and the body and all these all these things that make life possible so when you explore it you're kind of studying yourself at least this is how i was were you classically trained i wasn't no so this is talent well i think and practice it was in a sense i mean there's there's a distinction between practice and play practice being you know when you organize a state of play to solve a particular problem yeah like i just want to learn to go really well and really fast that's a particular thing i can practice i can work on that right but i think when i was when i was small i was somewhat resistant to like liturgical practice you know i'm going to sit down and do this for this much time my brain's never really behaved in that way particularly well so i think my approach to learning and practice was to kind of follow the thing that felt interesting and felt like it lit me up yeah which yeah i think when i When I was small, I was quite varied.

8:02I was brought up with so much different kinds of music. Did you paint? Did you draw? Or was music always the thing? I think when I was small, language lit me up a lot. What do you mean? In the sense that the way my mind perceived a particular chord was similar in a sense to the way it perceived a particular relationship between words. I remember being obsessed with just the idea of, for example, what are many contexts within which you can put a human finger? like you say linen on finger or doorbell on finger or hummus you imagine the collisions isn't that the name of your new album Hummus on finger?

8:39Volume 4 but no I think there's something that I learned through my love of words it's like you have these miniature explosions that happen in your mind when two things collide that maybe don't usually collide and you can do this with vocabulary and it's kind of one of the more relatable ways I found of explaining this because you know it's like flint it's like you make a spark out of these two unlikely things and the spark will illuminate something new and you think oh gosh where could that take me that's that strange interesting and so musically that started as you know i'll take these two notes and i'll go but then it became you know genres because i think genres are an interesting and slightly outdated principle but you know what happens if you try to put a banjo in a dubstep drop you know to me it's just interesting it's like oh it's it's almost like a like a level of disgust that to me is kind of like wired into intrigue creatively.

9:28One of the things that I love about you, the way you approach the world and even taking music out of it, I think creativity and inspiration exists in all of us. Yeah. You know, I think everyone's an artist, you just have to find your medium. I think what we're talking about, or at least talking around, is the idea of being hyper-focused towards something. Yeah. And finding beauty or inspiration or interest or curiosity, whatever it is, in something. And as you're talking, like things are sparking in my head. I love the sound of a list. The sound of a list? The sound of a list. If someone could pull up on their phone for me, it's the Shel Silverstein, bendable, stretchable man.

10:10And I'll show you what I mean. And there's a Shakespeare sonnet. Shakespeare did this a lot in his sonnets, where in the middle of his sonnet, there would be a list of like, and this and this and this, and this and this and this. And I love reading a list. I don't know what it is. And as you're talking about how you find the beauty in language, I don't know what it is about my brain that I enjoy the sound of a poetic list. Do you have it? I'll show you what I mean. Oh, cool. Okay, you're great. I haven't read this in a while, so bear with me. And where it gets brilliant is the end. It's called Twistable, Turnable Man by Shel Silverstein, right?

10:44He's the twistable, turnable, squeezable, pullable, stretchable, foldable man. he can crawl in your pocket or fit in your locket or screw himself into a 20 volt socket or stretch himself up to the steeple or taller or squeeze himself into a thimble or smaller yes he can, of course he can he's the twistable, turnable, squeezable, pullable, stretchable, shrinkable man and he lives a passable life with his squeezable, lovable, kissable, huggable, pullable, tuggable wife and they have two twistable kids who bend up the way that they did and they turn and they stretch just as much as they can for this bendable, foldable, do what you're totable, easily moldable, buy what you're soldable, washable, mendable, highly dependable, buyable, sellable, always available, bounceable, shakeable, always unbreakable, twistable, turnable, man.

11:26Oh, fantastic. That's very, very good. I love the list. Tumbles off the tongue. I love the list. And the bits in between are just me getting to the list. Yes, of course. You know? Yeah. And so as you're talking about this, this idea of hyper focus. Yeah. The reason I want to talk about it is because I want people to be able to see that they are more like you than they think they are. Yeah, right. I feel very similarly to this, actually. That is a beautiful poem. And the thing about that list is it's like you have a series of miniature chemical reactions that go off in your brain. But the thing about it is that everybody who's ever perceived language, or you could say music as well, has experienced a version of this.

12:08And the thing I always try to emphasize to people is how similar making music is to listening to it. It's the same exact thing, except the other way around. So when you listen to something, you might be in a particular mood. You might say, oh God, and I'm trying to reverse engineer the emotional remedy to my mood. And I know that the right song will hit the spot right on. It might be like a Bon Iver day, but only Bon Iver can hit the spot or Sifian Stevens day or Earth in a Fire day, whatever happens to be. But your job as a listener in a sense is to find the right component that matches your energy that will sort of pull it out in that gorgeous way that you want to emphasize or get away from.

12:44Yeah. I either want to be sad, so I'm going to play myself sad music, or I want to get away from sadness, so I'm going to play happy music. Well, usually the thing that's right for your space will meet you where you are and then modulate you slightly to somewhere else. And so I guess that the thing with making music is it's similar. And it kind of comes back to the candlelit dinner scenario of how are you feeling today? And whatever you say is actually fine, but it's just like a starting point. So you play how you feel where the rest of us make a playlist for how we feel. Exactly. That's beautifully put.

13:12and I think the thing I've learned to do I'm not great at reading the dots and the notes and all sorts of things like this but I think that for me I've tried to learn how to be as fluent as possible in music as a language in general so that if I sit down and play how I feel something will come out that's of some kind of value based in my experiences first as a listener and then secondly as a maker and the whole thing goes around in a circle and the service you provide to an audience hopefully is one of meeting them where they are and modulating them slightly I'm so curious like do you make time to play or do you find yourself just playing because because when you started as a kid it was something you did for fun you weren't taking classes you weren't it wasn't like you had homework to do and you had to prepare for the piano teacher but now it's a career yeah now there's expectations now you have to play at certain times and certain reasons yeah you have to prepare for things has it become a job like where does job and joy intersect or separate That's a beautiful question.

14:11I think it feels very much... Because you don't want to be singing the same songs 40 years from now. No. So the funny thing about my performances, the things I prepare for are that they're not designed to be the same each time. So the preparation is as much of an internal emotional space one as it is a fingers one. I kind of spent a concentrated period of time towards the end of my teens really getting that language together and sort of understanding, okay so here's how to create tension here's how you release tension here's how you ask a question and give an answer here's how you twist or turn or whatever you have with the things and so i think that now when i when i sit on the stage i'm not thinking so much about the grammar of it this the syntax of how do i put this thing into words as well i'm more thinking how do i best articulate the thing that's that i'm feeling or the thing that's in the room how do i best turn that into something that can be accessed or related to.

15:01So that work, that practice is less about, I practiced for two hours this morning, so I'm ready. It's more like I've tuned in enough to know, or I can laugh at myself enough to know. That kind of, as an improviser, those principles end up having more of an impact than any particular skill or thing that you might have. So one of the things that I admire about you, and I find remarkable, is your ability to use the audience. And I've been in audiences where musicians have attempted to get us to do the singing. And I'll be totally honest, it sounded terrible. Right? I admire the attempt, but it has always failed.

15:38Your work is the opposite. I'm amazed with these huge audiences that you are making good sounding music with people who don't necessarily know how to make good sounding music. at what point did you realize this actually sounds good yeah it's not just it's not just doing something you know community wise it is an ongoing process of like deep fascination for me i i mean to take you back to when i was like two some of my earliest memories as a kid at those woolly half memories that you have at that age were of watching my mother conduct because she's a conductor so she would raise her arms or move her body and it was like casting a spell you know suddenly the room would be transformed into this thing that had many arms and legs and was just running around and making these paintings and it was just crazy like yeah it was literally like magic right i was obsessed with it how can you do that that's it go like this and something happens yeah but and the thing about it is people would leave the room not just having played the right notes but they would leave them just feeling better about themselves and life they would have been like lit up or lifted up i didn't really question it i just thought this is what music can do this isn't that cool and she would have students come over to the house and they would come in downtrodden and they would leave the house and they would be uplifted but this this is worth double clicking on which is you're two years old yeah and your introduction to understanding music was not somebody sitting at a piano it was your mother you said it was like a magician like your mother raises her hands and music comes out of her hands yeah well she was playing music through other people yes she was she was like so you see the hands moving and the music comes out so this is your introduction to the magic of music exactly kind of beautiful hugely important but i never thought I wanted to be a conductor that sounded super stuffy you know oh I gotta get my baton out and sort of read the parts and you know order people around no but then you know as sometimes is the case what your parents do and the way that you see them behave just ends up coming out through you so it was I can specifically remember the moment where my audience interactions graduated from kind of the Freddie Mercury call and response type thing to like a three-part polyphonic organ and it was in San Francisco at the very end of February 2019.

17:45And what had happened is I'd been singing Blackbird, the song by the Beatles, which is a legendary banger. It was one of my favourite means to an end to get the audience to sing because everyone knows the song. And so I'd got these loops going at the end of the song through the audience because audiences like to be loops. It's one of the things they enjoy. So I'd got the middle group. I divided audiences into three, normally into three because three is a nice number for audiences. So the middle group were going, singing in the dead of night singing in the dead of night and on the left they're going singing in the dead of night on the right they're going singing in the dead of night so it's a lovely like triad we call it a three-part chord and round around around it went and I slowed them down and slowed them down as I like to do and at the end they just went so singing in the dead of night and they sang with this big F major chord and it was great and then I just kept them there and then I suddenly realized hang on you want an A you want a C you want an F so I can just what happens if I just point so I just looked at the group and I pointed up and they all went like this and then and so we played around a bit with it and it felt crazy it felt unbelievable because first of all I knew at that moment that I was I was continuing the line that that my mother had sort of drawn but it was different because these people had no music parts they had no instruments and they had there was no plan there was no rehearsal it was just the intuition to know how to operate within a container that I'd given them.

19:08And the container was the key of F. That was essentially it. So you know you're in F. That's where your anchor is. That's where your imagination feels. I'm at rest, harmonically. So you know how to operate in and around F. Everybody does. Everyone who's ever heard music does. Because being in a key is, I would say, inherent to us. It's extremely deep as a concept. So the idea, though, that I could navigate or move around in and around a key center through them without uttering a note was deeply moving to me. As you're talking about it, and I'm thinking about it, and I've seen some of the videos of yours, when you're going like this, and then you go like this, everybody knows how far to go down.

19:45And if you go like this, everybody knows how far to go down. Moving your hand very low down or moving your hand just a little bit. And everybody gets it right. That's a strange, like we take direction. But to your point about the music is in us, we may not know how many keys on an octave. sure sure sure the point is is you may know nothing about music but you know the distance between notes because you've we've all listened to music our whole lives exactly and you're playing with that in other words the music is in us even if we don't all have the facility to get it out of us exactly exactly so here's the thing about music it's beautiful it's very it's very simple at its heart and the audience choir as i like to call it has been i would say my greatest teacher in simplifying music because there's no rehearsal and there's no planning and you're working with what people don't know that they already know but they actually do know it, which is always, always more than you think it is, musically and otherwise.

20:40People are not silly. People really tuned in. And I love to think about this. Music really is, you can distill it to very, very simple axes. For example, the axes of high and low. Everyone understands this. Everyone gets it. Everyone, children, grownups, everyone. It's like, here's a high note and here's a low note. Okay, got it. Because it's speech. We all speak. We understand the contour of speech. And then there's loud and quiet. Everyone gets it. I intuitively understand what you mean. Loud and quiet. It makes sense. And then there's like many and few. Everyone understands those principles.

21:12You get it. It's a thick chord like this. There's a thin chord just like that. And everyone understands, okay, I get it. It's like looking at a landscape because it reflects the world so well. And then the deeper you go into music as a process of learning or play, you kind of increase the resolution of these axes. So it starts with every kid. I think I was going to say, why don't we do it? Go to the piano. So you've got high and low, right? Yeah. That makes sense. And you've got wide and narrow. That makes a lot of sense. You've got loud and quiet. But then, for example, there's this idea of arrival and departure.

21:51Everyone actually understands. Everyone has departed or arrived at some point. Example? So if I'm in F, which is the key I was just talking about, and within the key of F I have like localities you could say. So I have like next door neighbours, so that's one neighbour, B flat. What do you mean by arrival and departure? So this is my home, if I'm in F this is my home. I can exist in the key of F for a while and even if I go somewhere else, like to Eto 'i flat, when I get home, you still feel like, ah, I remember this feeling from before. So the idea of arrival, you could say, comes from being not F, something that's not F, like C, arriving at F, right?

22:39And I'm home. And then you can kind of augment that arrival into something much more

22:49colourful. And the joy of music is how to make the best, most satisfying kind of tension and then resolve it. So even the most gnarly sounding like a chord like this, that's a weird sound. But if you're careful, then all those notes can move in directions and go, oh, I see. It's like the temperature of the shower has changed. Oh, I get it. You know what I mean? So this idea of essentially movement in and around axes is so interesting. And yeah, if you think about departure and arrival, or you think about inevitability, this is such a beautiful, very subtle thing to describe. One of my favorite things to do with the audience is I'll get them to sing one note.

23:27I'll say sing F, and they'll go like this. And then I put them in all sorts of contexts. That context. That context. Right? It's weird.

23:55And you know when you're home. But the exercise that's so beautiful with that to me emotionally is you understand your position in things. You understand your position. If I'm an F in this chord that's a very particular kind of thing to be it's a different feeling from being an F the beautiful thing about the audience choir that I found in the last few years is that it works kind of regardless of whether you're a musician or not I mean the more musicians are in the audience often the faster people can learn but the challenge really is you need over 50 % of the people to know what's going on the rest will follow it's like murmuration they'll kind of follow I think the main thing about my audience now is that they are kind of just that they're open to it.

24:36I'm so curious how you explore different emotions, like real emotions that you have better than happy, sad. Like when you are angry, whether it's that, you know, not that burst anger, how does it show up when you sit down to let it out? Yeah, yeah.

25:24Is it therapy for you? Yeah. So as I'm playing, I'm like, oh, I see. Oh, oh, OK. Oh, I get it. I see. because you start I don't know where I started somewhere down here or something do you use your piano as therapy you know lovesick angry homesick sure you know is it your therapist I would say so should we go sit down in the chair is it you know poets right poetry yeah even if it's not for anything is it the kind of thing that you just do all the time is it that you like Like, I'll give you an example, right? I've had a busy week, you know, and I'll be like, oh, I haven't gone for a run in a while.

26:07I need a run. You know? Yeah. Is it that for you? Like, oh, I haven't been on a plane. I need to play. I just need to play. It's a bit like that. Yeah, it is a bit like that. There's an added layer when you're in front of an audience because there's something that happens as you do that, as you explore your feeling through, especially when it goes through other people and back to you. you kind of just learn how you're doing oh i see i'm i'm feeling like that but yeah there's there's a feeling you get when you haven't played in a while and you can you consider play you can go you can play shows i mean you can always tap if you tap your fingers and things you can do that but there's a particular kind of play that i was kind of getting into there which is more about you you take a starting point and often a starting point is is a strange place or or maybe it's a pleasant place or a gnarly place or whatever and then you sort of as you untangle it it's an immense phony of of catharsis in a sense you see i think oh that is that's the human in me singing you know and and doing things but there's an interesting thing that happens as a as a songwriter because improvisation is one thing right you you improvise and all the great composers someone like joan sebastian bach was he was like a master improviser on the organ i wish i could have heard him improvise but a composition or a song or a piece or a production is like composition in in stop time so i'm going to play this oh okay now i'll play this i'll play Now I'll collide it together and make it make sense sort of on the canvas.

27:28And so there's a funny thing that happens, I think, as a songwriter, where you kind of deliberately put yourself in situations where interesting results will come out that hopefully can crystallize. But that can be kind of a hard thing to do. I guess I'm curious, maybe this is more of a question to you, but just as somebody who thinks about ideas and puts them into words, distills them into concrete ideas, whether it's let's do a podcast or let's put this on the page or let's have a conversation. or let's put together a presentation. There's something that happens to me on the journey from raw starting point energy, life, input, to distilled output, sensible, done, quantifiable, where part of the energy required to make the idea kind of dies and falls away.

28:11Because in distilling the idea, you have to kind of rid yourself of an amount of the infinity surrounding it. But then you get, you whittle it down to this thing. I mean, from my perspective, in my line of work, you could say as a songwriter, that challenge is always interesting it's almost like you have to you have to court the idea and keep it alive for long enough for it to continue to sort of burn fuel as you move through the process of raw idea and to kind of whittle down a day into particularly whittle down a day into sharing the idea and then in your case into maintaining ideas across many many years like you've said something at this point and then 15 years later someone wants you to give a keynote on the same principle in the same way that someone wants me to play a song I wrote 15 years ago whatever like how what's your relationship with ideas of old yeah their gestation and then their kind of continued life as you have always yeah so it's a good question and for years when i after i wrote start with why that's all anybody wanted to hear from me but i wanted to talk about new things of course very much wanted to force me to talk about the old things and i i am proud of my old work.

29:19I still live by the principles of my old work, but I have zero interest in talking about my old work. I'll answer a question or two if people want. I'm happy to do that. But to give a talk, I actually won't do it. And there's a few reasons I won't do it. It's not just, I am a student and I love to understand things. I don't have to agree or disagree or even like or dislike. I just like to understand, right? And once I understand something, or at least I have a good framework that I'm like, I think I understand this. I want to move to the next thing I don't understand. And it's why I like engaging with audiences for new ideas because they ask me questions I haven't heard before and then I get to think.

29:59That's my favorite thing in the world to do. So yeah, I don't want to talk about my old ideas. I only want to talk about new ideas because I know my old ideas and I want to know new things. But there's a line from your old ideas to your new fascination. 100%. I don't disavow them and I'm proud of them and they are the foundations and all of my work is built on the work that has preceded it. But I want to talk about the new renovation I'm doing on the house, not the foundation I built 15 years ago. So are there things that you would, are there any things you would thoroughly disavow? Are there any things you would say, I really don't stand with this anymore?

30:30Something that you used to hold dear? There are, the simple answer is of course. Yeah. You know, but there's nothing that upsets the whole thing. There are nuances and tweaks and language that has evolved that I better understand my work and going through life that necessarily. So the simple answer is yes. Can you give an example? Give an example. Sure. So I define the why as a purpose, cause, or belief. now that I've the work has matured and I've built upon it and I've stumbled upon the infinite game which was my last work I now talk about a just cause and I was like I wish I didn't use cause to describe it's just a purpose or a belief that's still true but I want to reserve cause for this other thing mainly to not create confusion because they're kind of different so like little nuances that makes a lot of sense So here's another question then, or another point to make is, over the last three months or so, for the first time ever, I've had this analysis done of my audience, who my audience is.