Jacob Collier

25:15And like, there were no names to begin with. It was just sounds, right? And same thing is true with editing. There was no book. There was no rule book. There are no lines to stay within. you just have to make a mark and see where it fits within the lines and i think when it comes to creating anything i really really think a lot of the paralysis for me and also for many other people i've spoken to and worked with over the years that the hardest thing to do is to make the first mark because think well what if it's what if it's the wrong mark or what if i mess it up or whatever and and it's natural and we are programmed to think in that way but but there's something really beautiful about the i suppose it's like the confidence to make mistakes the courage to make mistakes.

25:53And I don't know what you'd say, Colin, about this in editing, but it's like, you can't begin your journey as an editor by going in and thinking, I have to do this right. In the same way, you can't begin songwriting thinking you have to write a great song. It goes back to what we were saying earlier on about you can't contribute until you've learned a bit about who you are. You have to just throw paint and see what happens. I started touring the world about eight years ago. And, um, you know, those, those early shows were me figuring it out and I'm still figuring it out, but having it all figured out is overrated because not only is it, is it impossible to know how you feel or who you are going into things, but the more certain you are about who you are and what your brand is and what your plan is and what, what matters to you, the, the, the less opportunity there is for like happy accidents and things to come from the side and for you to be like, yeah, surprised and confused and befuddled.

26:45And some of my favorite moments of all time in like performance situations, studio collaborations, songwriting processes, conversations are when you go off book, you know? And I learned that from many, many years of not having a book. And then someone says, Hey, have you read the book? And I'm like, I don't know if there's a what book, you know? And I felt like that coming into learning the piano or the bass, you know, but I also learned that coming into the music industry, you know? And it's like, so this is how you have to do it. And I'm thinking, well, I don't know if I want to do that. and think, well, you know, I can only warn you from my experience, you know, this doesn't work and you can't do it like this.

27:18You can't do this and you can't do this. And the number of people over the years that I've had to sort of sit quietly, but surely say, I'm not going to do the thing that you want me to do. That's not why I'm here. I'm not here to do the thing you want me to do. I'm here to do the thing that I want to do. It's so simple, but it's like, you don't, you're not told that necessarily when you're, when you're coming up, you're told there, there's a way that you have to do things. And that goes for everything, releasing music, writing songs and editing videos. It's like we're constantly all learning. None of us really know what's going on.

27:44The best we can do is be really open and build a language out of the things that we like, you know? Yeah, I will often go back and watch some of my earliest edits and I will be surprised at what I did or what I left in, realizing that maybe now I have a vocabulary for some of those decisions. But back then there was nothing. There was nothing but intuition. And I found that when I watch some things I edit today, that they're further than I would like from some of those early edits that I did not have vocabulary for. And I'm at a moment where I take inspiration from sometimes the earliest work that I've made.

28:29Yeah, I can relate to that sometimes, actually. The feeling that you had this lucidity or inability to know what you were doing that guided your North Star. And it's a shame when you feel like you lose touch. I don't think you ever really lose that center pillar. But going back to what you're saying about validation, one of the dangers of validation is that it locks you in to yourself. And it's like, oh, so it deepens your self-identity, which is great, but also dangerous. because the moment you know who you are, you stop learning. You know, if you say, I'm definitely this. And Jacob Collier means this and that, that Colin Samir, or we're the people who do this one thing.

29:08Who are you to know what you're here to do? You know, and it goes back to the thing you were saying earlier on about people making things and wanting to get things out of it, in a sense. It's like, I actually think, you know, a more interesting question to ask of, say, the universe, say, is rather than saying, you know, what do I want from life? What do I want to get from my life? um it's you know what what could what's what's the best way to put this like uh like yeah what does life want from me i suppose you know what what does the universe want for what could i contribute to value here it's a completely different way of thinking you do have to be very open uh for that question and you also have to be comfortable with the time you have to great point which i think um today it's harder and harder to get comfortable with the fact that things take time.

29:57The fear of making the wrong mark creatively first is actually the fear of not having enough time. It's the fear that if I don't do this now, I'm behind or I'm not going to get there. When actually there's no there, it's just the constant exploration. But I think there's some beautiful things to the communal nature to how we all live digitally now. But there's also challenges of us living in a world that is one big digital community that we are now, we don't allow as much time. Because you watch someone else where someone else is, and you're like, I look back and this journey to sit right here has taken 13 years, right?

30:38And at that time, I thought it was going to take two years. And as I look back at these last 13 years, I'm like, obviously it's taken 13 years. And now I can have a bit of patience. But on a micro scale day to day, hey, I don't have as much patience. When you have pressure, when you're building a business, when there's other people involved, all of a sudden the pressure is now create a new, there's new stakes to your creativity. Now I want to go back to something you said about you breaking, I guess, rules of how things typically happen in the industry and also an exploration of fear or your lack thereof.

31:18you go to switzerland with uh to meet quincy jones you also meet herbie hancock there that's right um and what what happens next like what was quincy's i guess intent with with you because obviously this is a guy who's been a pivotal figure in the music industry he can spot talent he also you know if if i'm in your shoes i'm looking at this and going here's my career right i can work with quincy jones and now i can i can find myself to a career so what what happened there in switzerland and what happens next it's funny i didn't think of it like that so much i think i met quincy and thought this is so cool because i get to ask you questions about life and music and isn't that amazing but i was i was very suspicious of anyone who wanted to snap me up and make me into a star as they say i thought well that's not that's not true you know that's like that's not what's that's not real and i don't know why i had this inherent so you didn't have aspirations to be like a star no no i didn't i didn't i didn't care about being a star but i did want to make beautiful work and i thought it's cool that i now know quincy jones because he makes beautiful work that just feels cool i feel so cool right now but i didn't think i'm going to leverage this for my own gain i just i just there's nothing wrong with with with hustling and having that vibe but i think i'm just not built like that that's not how i'm how my circuitry works i don't look at something and think right i can i can i can get something out like this.

32:39I just thought this is so cool and so amazing. And my job is to be open to being present here. And that's hard enough because it's just so overwhelming. But Quincy and his team wanted to manage me to their management team. And I said, no, I said, no, with total, utter adoration and respect for Quincy. I knew I didn't want to do that. I wanted to do things my own way. Why didn't you want to do it? Like, what was it about? Because I do, find that to be um so interesting like i put myself in your shoes and it's like here's someone i look up to uh who has a ton of respect in the industry i mean arguably the utmost respect in the industry and uh wants to manage me i'd be like absolutely let's do this you know i know what you mean you i look back and it's like whoa that's you know that's pretty gutsy i guess it's yeah i guess it's did you know what your own way even meant no but i knew that the only person i could ever know that is me and i think i knew that it would just be diluted if it was someone else's away i don't i say these things as though i knew what i was doing i didn't know what i was doing i just had a really strong intuition going back to what we were saying before and i don't i'm very glad i did that and quincy was like totally and what i what i really said was like let's be friends i said let's be friends to him and his and his team and they're all amazing fast forward two years i was making my first album in my room and i was making it by myself self-produced and self mixed and all this stuff and i did begin to work with his team slowly but surely and it was like hey, actually, I don't know how to book a flight, you know, or like, how do I get a gig?

34:10You know, and so Quincy's team, partly just because Quincy is the person he is at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, he got me my first gig. And my first gig was opening for Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea on the big stage at Montreux. And I didn't have a show. I didn't have any show. Two weeks later, I receive a Facebook message from my really dear friend, Ben Bloomberg, who is just a maverick, technical-minded, amazing guy. And he was currently at that time studying for a PhD at MIT in Boston. And he said, if you ever want to make, if you want to make stuff together, give me a call. I've made some stuff for Bjork and Image and Heap.

34:48And I thought, that's cool. That's how you, that's how you get me. You say, hey, do you want to make something? Yeah, yeah. Not, hey, I have an agenda. Come and be a part of my agenda, which is not really what Quincy was saying. But I think I flew to Boston my first time in the States by myself. and I went to Boston and met Ben and we built this musical instrument called the Vocal Harmonizer there and then. And it's this instrument where you, well, you sing a note and you play a chord and every note that you're playing is sung by your voice. It's like a sort of instantaneous real-time choir instrument, which I still play on stage now.

35:20And in the process of making that instrument, we just became like such close friends and we really felt like we kind of, our mentality is sort of very compatible with each other. and so we built a one-man show which was me in the center of a circle of 12 musical instruments and we built some loopers we had a couple of connect 3d cameras on stage that monitored and captured my skeleton and when i would make a loop i would physically step out of my own body on stage and there'd be multiple jacobs on the stage when i played the harmonizer there were multiple heads on stage they were all captured in real time it's really janky tech but it was it was really exciting and that was the show that I debuted at Montreux and so you speak about fear you know here's a freshly 20 year old kid who basically has never done a show before never done a gig I'd done small gigs in London like on piano with my friends but I'd never done a gig gig and I walked out on that stage in front of three and a half thousand people and played for 30 minutes and Quincy Herbie, Chick were just sitting on the side of the stage watching me, you know?

36:26And it was, it was, it's like another one of those shift command three moments. You think, yeah, okay, here I go. What's going to happen? I don't know. I was so excited to, to, to do the show. And, um, it was, it was a moment. And, and sometimes people ask me, you know, what was the minute you feel like you made it? You know, what, when you really make it, which is a very strange thing to say really. And I don't think I've made it yet maybe, but every moment feels like you've made it in a sense. Like it felt like I've made it when I uploaded my first YouTube video. I felt like I'd made it when I played that first show.

37:00It felt like I'd made it when I met Quincy, when I won my first Grammy, you know. But it also felt like I'd made it when I, you know, like was having a hard day, but like still made something anyway, you know. Or when I came back from a tour and like emptied the dishwasher. It's like, oh, I'm a human. I'm really, I'm in my body. I've made it back to my body, you know. Can I ask you just a quick tour question? This is like a bit of an aside. You come back from a tour. Yeah. Do you unpack your bag that night? No. You let it hang. No, oh my God. How long do you let it hang? Definitely not. Anywhere between, if I'm super well slept, maybe like under 24 hours, but normally it's like four or five days.

37:39Okay, good. Come back from tour is hard, man. I can imagine. I come back from like a weekend trip and my bag is sitting on the bed for a week. It's a weird thing to come back from. Yeah. It really is. But, you know, surviving those kinds of changes of mental environment, physical environment, ego environment, it's all part of it, but it is interesting. So that first gig, do you have an understanding of how different it is to play in your room versus playing for people? because I look at, you know, your live show now. Yeah. And you look like such a natural, like you are so comfortable with the relationship you have with the audience, with the way that you interact with them.

38:19And I'm sure we'll talk about that. But I'm curious, that first gig, are you like, oh, well, there's two sides to this. There's me putting the music together. Yeah. And there's me showcasing it. Absolutely. And the amazing thing about the Montra Jazz Festival, for anyone who ever plays there, is that it's all filmed in 4K. So I have the video. it's wild and it's me on stage kind of like in my just in my own world i'm just in my own world um and i have so much love for that jacob i'm like you go ahead man you go ahead you go sing those songs you don't worry about those people you do it yeah but but it is amazing to watch how internal i am you know and it's not internal in a sense of like closed because i've always been very open i think but it was internal in the way it's like the direction of my energy was different now my energy goes like this when i'm at my most comfortable and but back at that time the energy went into the music and i kind of i would pull people's attention into the music which is which is important part of my process for me because how would i know how to you know i one thing i i i sort of thought as a child and was was led to believe as a child um was that you know you have to go on stage and pretend you have to go on stage and be like, which I've just never, ever, ever been that person or that kid.

39:36I was never a theater kid, you know, nothing wrong with theater kids, but just, again, it's just not me. And so I had to forge my own relationship with the stage where it wasn't based in kind of forced extroversion or pseudo confidence or, um, or like exaggeration of self, you know, uh, it was just about being honest. And so it's, it's funny. It's like, because I was like, my inherent energy has always been unwilling to be dishonest on stage i just can't do it i can't not be exactly who i am kind of ever maybe in a sense but i just i'm very me um and on stage it i tried sometimes to be like hey you guys what's up toronto you know and it just doesn't to me it was just kind of like i look like an idiot i'm not like i'm pretending in the same way i look like an idiot i sound like an idiot when i'm trying to write a song that sounds like the raid something on the radio i can write those songs but i was just like that's just not that's not my that's not me talking it's like looking at a photo of me like that's not me in the photo that's like a picture of someone else um so I had to kind of have patience with myself that was my main job is to have patience with myself and wait for myself for it to be natural for me to be comfortable in this direction and sure enough within well I'm still expanding really but within about two or three years I'd gone from this kind of energy to kind of like this kind of energy yeah and then within three years on from that it was like this kind of energy and then it was covid which is weird yeah and it was like and i came back from coven it was like bang you know and it was just i think it's just very interesting to to watch like i'm as interested as anyone else to see what happens to me you know it's like oh this is this feels natural to me right now that's interesting you know and i'm i'm just i'm like my own audience member in a sense i don't i'm not controlling i'm not in control of who i am but my job is to make space for who i am that's my job and it's a different job that's that's That's beautiful.

41:27How do you navigate nerves? Or do you have nerves? Do you have nerves? Yeah, I don't know if I have any nerves. There's no nerves. No, no, I know, I know. I definitely feel nervous. I think I feel, I think my relationship with it has changed. I don't think I, it doesn't bother me anymore. Like being on stage or being off stage, it doesn't affect my nerves anymore, for example. But I am still nervous nonetheless. I mean, it's the same thing as anyone. And if someone's in the room that I really respect, you know, you, you really want to, you know, you want to make sure that person has a good time.

42:01You want to show that person and you want to be seen by that person. And so whether that's like me in a little listening party or, or me in a, you know, in an auditorium or in an interview, whatever, it's like, there are, there, there are a certain amount of nerves that come from being a human, but I don't worry so much anymore about, oh God, what if they hate me? you know i think there's part of me that's kind of like that kind of like enjoys it a little bit of like maybe i'm really bad cool you know tension is exciting that's fine yeah it's fine like it's cool to not like being good is overrated as well you know it's like what yeah it's like okay maybe you think i'm like maybe you really don't like the song or you think i'm a klutzy or it's like maybe i am that's cool was there any added layer of pressure at that time because you were kind of positioned and still are but early in your career were positioned as this like creative genius like prodigy kid prodigy yeah was there added layer of pressure to perform in that show where quincy and herbie are like here's here's the guy yeah here he is i think so i think there was i think there was an amount of that it's it's funny i've been sort of cited as a prodigy kid for like a lot of my life um like from way earlier than youtube and all that it was kind of like oh jacob the kid who can blah blah blah i think it's a label that people that's quite a tidy way of people understanding you it's in a sense it's actually it's quite an impersonal thing to tell someone like oh my god you're such a genius that like there's no bridge there you can't meet a person if they're a genius it's like it's like kicking them up into the sky and be like you can just be up there i'm gonna be here but it's it's far harder to meet someone where they are and say you are a flawed human being just like me and you also have this big world of yours and i respect that yeah that's like if i if i yeah to say to call someone geniuses or a prodigy is to kind of write them off as outside your understanding beyond your understanding but the thing that a lot of creative people actually require to grow like any any good plant is to be really like seen and understood and to say you're so someone's a genius is to say i refuse to try and understand you you're just outside my reach but i've learned to translate that as I really, you know, I see you and I respect what you're doing, which is, I think sometimes what people mean, but I think there was pressure at that time.

44:19I think that there was, there's been pressure for that all the time. And there is still now a little bit, but I, I enjoy the, I enjoy the process of gradually, you know, deconstructing the scaffolding around this idea that I'm somehow supernatural. You know, I'm like really natural. I'm not that supernatural. And I, I'm just a mucky old human, but I'm deeply interested in certain things. And I think it's important that it's like, it doesn't feel, I feel very strongly whenever I speak about music or play music or write it, that people don't feel like it's this magic power that comes from, it's like only a few people have access to it.

44:52Like anyone can access that part of themselves, whether it's in music or in other aspects of life. it's it's a lot more about comfort like sort of you know being feeling comfortable and confident and having permission to make mistakes and be be cool with yourself being weird and all that stuff it's much more about that than it is about like discipline at least for me you know like I think my some of my greatest gifts come from that that side of things not actually from being technical so I think in the early days a lot of the the tide that I found myself kind of unconsciously or consciously pushing against was like this idea that I was like an intellectual feat.

45:30When, when I looked at the things I was making and I was like, no, you guys, you, you, you haven't got it. Like, this is an emotional presentation for me. Every single thing about this has a, has a purpose and it's, it's proportioned. Everything about this is like coming from here, but because I can also think quickly and I can solve problems in interesting ways. And I like to talk about it. I think there was a period where it was kind of like, oh Jacob is the kid who wants to just think you know but um and and that's cool you can kind of think whatever you want in a sense about anyone but I think for me I I definitely knew that wasn't the underlying truth for me and as the years have gone on I've I've enjoyed expanding both sides um but I I do think of one of the one of the most like that's some of the happiest I ever feel the most present I ever feel is when not when I'm all up on the on the pedestal and I'm looking great and I'm feeling, you know, what Grammys or whatever happens to be, it's when I'm say conducting an audience of 5 ,000 and my voice is as big as everybody else's voice.

46:28And they, they come with me, they lift me up. I lift them up. That feels, that feels balanced to me. And this idea of me being this like superior force or like whatever, like I understand why it would, why that comes about, but that just doesn't, it's not helpful to me to believe it. I don't know if you agree with this, but I feel like one of your greatest superpowers as an artist is your enthusiasm for the craft and for music. And I think to say prodigy or genius underscores how much you potentially like it. I think the contagious nature of your art for me is what draws me in, even though I don't understand when I hear you speak about music.

47:14But your interest in it, how obsessed it seems like you are and how much you love it, is what makes me drawn to it. And I find that that's something for me across many artists. Like if someone truly loves it, I'm more likely to want to like it with them and be a part of it. There's a clip on the internet of a kid. And I think it's from a Patreon live stream that you did. What's your favorite chord? Oh, that's a very, very good question. What's your favorite chord? It's one of the cutest clips ever but your interaction is like the most pure kind of um it feels like you guys are seeing each other at eye level and you're experiencing the same childlike wonder that he is in like playing that chord like that that i don't know why i'm so enamored by that clip but i've watched that clip so many times that's so nice it's such a beautiful moment yeah children are the wisest among us yeah and sometimes a child will cut through with a question like that and it's just It's like, oh yeah, that's all that actually exists.

48:10That's all that matters. That's literally all that matters. Yeah. It's amazing. There's one thing that you keep bringing up now, these like the audience choirs, which have become such a big part of what you do, your live performance, where it almost feels like it shouldn't work, that all these people shouldn't be able to sing. But you're conducting the audience in a way that's making this like beautiful melody. And I want to come back to this concept that you brought up, which was that contribution requires comfort. that like your comfort on stage over years, the repetition of that is what created this ability to recognize, how can I think about this differently?

48:48And I think that's actually a really important note for a lot of creatives to be like, hey, you can innovate and do something really unique to yourself. But first, just get comfortable in the flow of it. Like get comfortable in the repetition of it. Well, I think the key thing there is being comfortable with not knowing what's going to happen next. That's the thing. It's not like have big plush cushions and live in a cloud. you know it's like it's be cool with not knowing the next move and and like if you can figure out how to how to get a kick out of that then you've like figured a lot of life out because no one knows what's going on right now at all and there are not solutions to some of the biggest problems in the on the planet right now and everyone's everyone's uncertain and afraid and no one knows what's going on and all this stuff so it's like if you if you can figure out how to be comfortable with that, with all the friction and to alchemize that in your work and in your life, then that's a beautiful thing.

49:42I was actually, I was hanging out with Hobie Hancock yesterday and he was talking about Buddhism, which is a huge part of his life and how in Buddhism, one of the greatest teachings that he holds true for him is like, you know, it's his job, his duty, he could say, is to find the lesson in everything. You know, so for example, he was talking about COVID and how he, you know, went into COVID, you know, not knowing why this was happening and what there was to learn. And he really realized, well, what I've learned from COVID is that there's only one family. He says there's only one family on the planet.

50:11And it's all of us people. It's where all of us, where all of us are affected, no matter who we are, who we worship, who we love, COVID is affecting us all. And that hit him really hard. And he was able to understand that. And that's one example for him. That was his words. But I think that that happens constantly in life. You know, you're presented with a challenge or friction or whatever. And if you're averse to those things, then life can be really hard because you make a lot more suffering for yourself than is necessary. That's another Buddhist principle, which is that all of life is suffering and all of suffering is preference.

50:44Yeah, exactly. Which is an amazing concept. The thing that people don't tell you this, but you get to make the world. You make it. There's evidence for whatever you believe, you get to make your own world and i mean i love that because i i'm a world builder and i think of myself as that and it appeals to me greatly i love the idea that you make your own world but it's so true and you know like yes you're yes i'm a fraud yes i don't know what's going to happen next yes i am everyone's lost right now yes the world is ending you know on the other side if you look for love in anything, you'll find it.

51:22And if you expect to see love in something, then it's there. And everything, grief, fear, anger, despair, any level of that, it's all love in disguise. It's all people trying to love, but they just can't quite get it out right. And it's just, you watch all these blundering world leaders right now being like, and it's with such devastating consequences in so many ways and you just think everyone is just trying to love that's the truth because there's nothing else to to live for um sometimes you have to look really hard to to remember that you know in this behavior is somebody who's so in need of love and so looking for it's like they they love a part of themselves that destroys or they they love the the feeling of power or lording over and all these things and it's happened since the dawn of time.

52:15And now is a very prevalent time for all those forces. But it's like you honestly get to decide what the world is for and where you are in it. You get to make those decisions. And as a creative person, whether it's on the biggest levels, on the smallest levels of life, the minutiae, whatever, it's honestly up to you. I totally agree with that. And I think that that exploration of like, to like express love and also to receive love, you know, a lot of creatives as they go through their journey their motivation is connected to some level of how they received or didn't receive love yeah right growing up and there's elements of self-worth and elements of controlling your environment that a creative can tap into where i can create this thing or something that feels like the thing that i have or didn't have yeah i know you've spoken about your upbringing.

53:09And I'm curious if there's elements of any of that that tap into your motivation. Because as we're having this conversation, it's very clear that your motivations were not necessarily connected to the traditional path of, I want to make it in the industry. I want fame. I want financial success. I want status. There was something else. So I'm curious about your relationship with uh expressing love and receiving love as a kid and how that connected to you yeah charlie charlie kaufman i think you say his name you know charlie kaufman the screenwriter he's one of my favorite thinkers and he talks about this idea and i saw a video from talking he talks about like the ancient wound we all have like an ancient wound yep we've all got one it's like we ancient mood is that we're alive in some ways sure oh my god um but yeah for me growing up you know i had two very different parents from each other you know my mom is so creative, tapped in, open-minded.

54:08To me, I think that, yeah, there was certainly an amount of validation I felt like I deeply received. And then a part, validation, that I feel like I deeply didn't receive. And that unique combination, I think, resulted in me feeling very free and open and also having this fire to be like, I want to give, I want to show, I want to get, I want to pull, I want to push, you know, and all those forces. So I think, I think every person at a certain point needs to come to a, an amount of a piece with, this is just who I am. Like I didn't decide how I was brought up. It's, it's, it's not, it's not up to me.

54:42And my, my job is to say, well, these are the cards I was dealt and you can either sit and complain about it, or you can, you can realize that there, there's a lot, there's always, it's kind of what Herbie was saying. There's always a way you can look at everything um and extract fire from it in in a sense and and so yeah some of the some of the pain of you know having parents that separate and and all the layers of all of that and being you know like part part of you is being isolated part of you is is is holding on part of you is letting go and then you're learning how to grow up and be a man in the world and you're learning how to find your own voice and figuring out friendships and relationships all this stuff it all comes i think it all comes down to some of those foundational years for all of us and i'm really grateful for all of it because i think that the combination of all those elements though very complicated especially at that time um has resulted in me being yeah having that having that having that fire and that desire and that that magnetism towards things that feel like they're kind of you know they're they're wild i think a lot about wildness and tameness um and how important it is to cultivate wildness as opposed to tameness and um how do you do that yeah what What does that mean?

55:52Well, it's interesting for me because a lot of my first creative experiments were done in solitude, in controlled environments, you could say, in the sense that I built my own world and cultivated it. But what I've found over the last 10 years of having a career in music and growing up as a human being and as a person in the world is that when things are let to be more in the wild, it's like you take off the collar and you let it run. You don't lose those things. They actually, they run back to you, but they, you gather fresh air and you gather perspective and you gather wisdom. And I really, I resent the idea that art is pure if it's in any capacity, the idea that, oh, that's not pure, or you can't do it like that, you know, or, um, you know, art must be made for this purpose or with this in mind, whether it's commercial or art or whatever ever happens to be.

56:44I really think that something is wild when it's let loose on the world. And the last 10 years of my life, I think has been a lot of me figuring out how to be comfortable in the wild because I was in my room for so many years making music. And I have loved the process of unraveling myself and I'm still in the process of unraveling myself, but going back to what you were saying before, it's like finding that comfort, not just in the unknowing and in the question mark of the world, but comfort with all the parts of me who I am the parts of me that are strange or complicated or tangled up you know we all have them and there's something about massaging them and being like I I get it I'm here all the proportions they all make sense and and and giving yourself permission to be who you are you has to start there and and that does go back to you know for all of us the kinds of attention validation we received as children the kinds of things we we we desired the kinds of things that we we experimented with and then and then you find yourself in a situation where you're just you're the sum of all your parts and you have to accept that before you can, you know, before to allow yourself to grow.

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58:30But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit lifelock.com slash podcast for 40 % off. Terms apply. I imagine, I mean, I know growing up as a young boy, like the approval of my father was a highly coveted. Yeah, yeah. That currency is worth a lot. It's worth a lot. Was that the same for you or was it the inverse of I'm going to find approval somewhere else? Well, I think all the external validation you seek, I think, is all the primary validation in disguise.

59:19So, yeah, I would say there's certainly an amount of validation that I didn't traditionally receive from my father. And I think that's the same is true for a lot of people I love and respect. and yeah that particular currency matters to a person and i think that the way in which you grow without that fundamental approval or what feels like approval results in a certain kind of desire to to find it elsewhere but at the end of the day you know you need to be you need to be everyone to yourself in a sense yeah you know you you kind of need to be your own mother and father and best friend in in in life and so i think a lot of growing up and the pain of that and the joy of that is finding ways to, to source that for yourself.

1:00:02And, you know, we all know the feeling, all of us at this table know the feeling of, oh my God, my video got 10 million hits or a hundred million, whatever it happens to be. And you think, man, I, this feels pretty good, man. You know, I feel validated right now. I did good. I did good. And, and, and, you know, and for some people it's like, I feel powerful for some people. It's like, I feel seen. I think for me, it's probably, I feel seen that, that for me, that's a big one. It's like, well, you really, I presented a thing to you and you saw it like well I feel beautiful right now yeah and and for other people it's I feel sexy or it's I feel I like have control or I feel destructive whatever there's lots of ways you can increase your scale but learning those proportions and how you respond is like a big part of learning who you are figure out who you are I feel like you've done a really good job of caring about the process and the present rather than maybe what you could be waiting for?

1:00:55Like I'm thinking about even Samir bringing up earlier that, you know, 13 years ago, we thought the career would take two years. It took 13, but even then we didn't know what it would look like. Yeah. Well, and in 13 years time, you'll be saying it's taken 26 years. Of course. And we thought it would take 13, you know what I mean? But we didn't even know we were waiting for this. Now I know. And you feel like you've released, I feel like you've really released that feeling of, oh, I'm waiting for something to happen. Right, well I think when you get a taste of being in a creative process And being present in that feeling And being in an idea There is no better feeling than that So what am I going to chase besides that?

1:01:33You know, nothing feels better than that Being in the middle of a tornado of presence of your idea And you know that feeling when you're like I think this might work You know that feeling? Yeah Wow, it's such a great feeling Or being on stage and being like I'm going to take a risk I'm going to do it that feeling is so special and I'm sure you feel that as well why chase anything else like anything that's not going to beget more of that feeling I'm not interested in I think that's when a creative becomes a creative is when you recognize you're very much unsure of what's next you have a great quote I don't remember exactly what it is that you want life to surprise you you want to leave space for life to surprise you and I very much resonate with that like it's it's just like you know you say that of like in 13 years we're going to say man it's taken 26 but I don't even know what 13 years from now looks like but you don't need to because I've lived this 13 years where I couldn't have imagined that this is what it looked like so it's just like it's the daily practice leads you to these interesting places and these micro decisions yeah Quincy often says this thing he says if you want to make God laugh tell him your plans yeah yeah yeah that's great It's a classic.

1:02:49But I think, you know what's super overrated is having a dream. I personally think that's overrated. You can dream. But if you have one dream... then you're going to - then you think that dream is the end game. Who are you to know? You know, you can set goals. I agree with that. But I think that dreams and goals are required to anchor you to the daily practice. I would say the same is true. I would say dreams and goals are beautiful and great, but don't take them too seriously. Like you have to loosen your grip on them an amount to be able to be surprised by life. I like them with the understanding that I will not land there.

1:03:28I will land somewhere over there. Yeah. But at least I'm going for that. Right. You shoot for the moon and land among the stars. And I'm going to be comfortable with wherever I touch down. I think, yeah, I suppose to rephrase what I just said, I think that having, I think being ambitious is wonderful and being unrelenting is super important. And I think being willing to extend yourself and as Jim Carrey would say, risk being seen in all of your glory, you know? You just go. But I think to go with very, very specific, narrow pointed lenses, I can only speak from my own experience. And I know that the narrower my aperture going into a process, the less impactful the results to me emotionally.

1:04:08And actually sometimes to the people around me too. There are moments where you need to be exacting and you can slingshot, you get bang, bullseye. That's normally in the middle of a process where you're like, I need to land this exact feeling. I need to land this exact moment. But in an overarching sense, I think the wisest of us don't really know what's going on. But we do know who we are. I mean, what matters to us. And from those things, you can pull goals, you could say, and dreams and the North Star becomes more palpable and available. And from that, you literally just keep walking, knowing that you're going to find something.

1:04:41I think values are very important to define. It's something that I try and come back to. And they can be evolving, but I think values are very important to define because then you have your day-to-day, you're living by a set of what are our values. Whether you define them or not. Yeah. Yeah. um have you seen the movie that thing you do no i haven't you haven't oh wow should i should i unbelievable movie probably the movie that made me want to become a musician or some type of storyteller or be on stage oh cool oh wow but in this movie there's a there's a moment where they write this song um and it plays on the radio for the first time and you know two of them are in a car and it's in the 1950s and they freak out and then they run and find their friends and they turn it on all the radios in this appliance shop that they work in, and they're hugging and jumping up and down.

1:05:30And that moment of having your work be discovered or be put out into the world used to be this moment that was reserved for the radio or the Ed Sullivan show or television. And I think about your experience as the modern version of that, of you published your own work, and then it was discovered as this almost this democratized radio right that is youtube or tiktok and i think like youtube in the sense that the artists were putting themselves on tiktok now in the sense that other people are actually you know choosing and selecting the songs that they enjoy the artists and the work that they enjoy i'm curious just what you think about the current landscape of discovery and, uh, you know, artists putting them, putting their work out into this.

1:06:22Now this, this, uh, incredibly abundant, you know, world of, of, uh, creativity. Yeah. It's a massive question, man. I, I think the, the, I think a lot about this. I think the primary currency that an artist has besides their perspective is trust, building trust with an audience. Agreed. That takes a different set of materials than engaging them. And this is so crucial, I think, for, for people to understand who make things. You can engage a lot of people very easily. I think now, you know, you, you kind of, you, you jump through hoops, you notice a trend, you hop on something, you can get eyeballs on your, on your thing.

1:07:02Um, if you really, really want to, I feel like it's, it's possible to do that. What is harder to come by is the, is, is the relationships between you and the core people within your community. I heard a stat the other day about the music industry right now, which is that 50 % of your streams come from 10 % of your fans, right? So it's so much about that core. It's not about the radio anymore. It's not about labels anymore. It's about you and your people. And you're like a magnet to your people. And I do think that it's never been more true. I'm excited and encouraged at the sheer variety of different types of content that are flying right now because I think that you can kind of the limit is what you can imagine right now especially with AI which we can talk about it's a whole nother conversation but it once the limit becomes what you can imagine the job of a creative person is to find their people based on the things that are important to them and you get to decide what matters that's the thing so I often think in life and in your career, you kind of have two main currencies.

1:08:08You have your time and your attention. And with those two things, you can create any world you want. But the myth, I think, is that there are these sort of distinct hoops that you need to jump through in order to prove X, Y, and Z to get external things. As you say, it used to be like that. I'm on the Ed Sullivan show. I've literally made it. I've just reached a bunch of people. But now it's like, it's, you know, the challenge for creators right now is, is, is telling stories that, that, um, expand over time, you know, and, and building trust that lasts a long time. And, and as, as I say, you can, you can engage people, I can engage people by, by reaching them.

1:08:46But, but the question that I find more interesting when it comes to, you know, success, you know, how successful am I or what's my, how successful am I is it's not how many people have I reached? It's of the people that I reached, how many of those did I move? Whether that's I reached 20 people, two people, 2 million people, 20 million people, 200 million people, whatever that number is, what proportion of those people did I move? And then the question becomes for any artist, what does it take to move a person? What does that take? And there's only one answer to that, really. And it's to be you, the person who you are, and to tell stories that are true, to tell the truth.

1:09:27You don't have to be honest all the time. This is exactly how I see everything. But you have to find a resonance in you, something that's true and that matters to you. You will find your people. It just happens. It's magnetism. And yeah, I mean, God, the number of times in my career, I could have gone, you know, it's like, yeah, I could have made a bunch of money or I could have done this, that, and the other and written a hit song or done X, Y, Z. You know, there's obviously luck involved in all these things. You can never guarantee you can do these things, but I'm proud of not having done that.

1:10:00And I'm grateful for the forces outside my control that made me a person for whom those things don't actually just carry the same signal. They don't turn me on. And so what I've observed in my own career is where I feel the most inspired. I feel inspired when I am surrounded by my people. And your people, whoever you are, are out there. They're in the world. and you just need to purvey your vibration to say what matters to you and keep on expanding and pushing and deepening your craft and your interest for your craft and you and and there are so many ways to do it you have so much access to tools and and there are many outlets and it's it's a weird and dangerous time in a sense to be a creator because there are so many things that lure you into a sense of oh this is what's important this is what's important you could be like this and this and that and the other.

1:10:49But the fundamental truth is that there is no one way of doing anything. There are literally no rules. You just have to, you just have to put yourself out there and, and, and start using that voice of yours, you know, and any, and anyone can do that now more than ever, which I'm really encouraged by. That can be daunting though. Yeah. The, the, the expanse universe now. And it's something that I've heard you call creative infinity syndrome. Yeah. I'm curious if you could define that. Cause I think it's, it's particularly relevant right now to a lot of creative. Do you know what I'd say? I go back to what you were saying earlier on about time and the currency of time and the psychology of time.

1:11:22The biggest myth is that you have to act now and there's a rush. There is no rush. There's just no rush. You know, Victoria Monet won Best New Artist two years ago. She's 34 years old. Awesome. That's amazing. She has so much life still to live. I love that. I think it's amazing that people, you know, And there are these people on TikTok who are in their 80s, killing it. Herbie, 84. He's like, just got the Apple Vision Pro yesterday. He's messing around with all the features. You can start at any time. There is no rush, ever. And not just to build on what you've created, but to start over. You can reinvent yourself any day.

1:12:01You're always one decision away from changing your life forever. I always love that quote. I can't remember who said it. But there's no rush to know who you are and what you want to do, yet. you you will find it and and you are finding it and as my good friend steve i would say like there's no evidence to to suggest that you're not right on time you know where you are everything's going to plan there's no evidence to support that there's that's not the case for you and i can think of times in my life where i've been really disoriented or i've lost my my feeling like i know where i'm going or i'm not feeling inspired and and and look back at those moments and saw what happened, it felt like the thing was going wrong.

1:12:44It felt like I was losing the thing. But actually what was happening is I was just halfway around this loop, the circuit to get back to this. But from here, you can't see this bit. But you just need to have faith that you're moving in the right direction. And I think it's a very important thing to remember that. And you can't look at anybody else who's making work and compare yourself to that person as though that person is you because that person doesn't have the privilege you have of being you. How could they ever know what your story is to tell? And there are so many ways to tell stories now.

1:13:15And you don't have to get it right first time. You don't have to start a podcast and win. You don't have to write a song and write the best song in the world. You don't have to do that. You can write a song. You can make a video. You can play a show. You can collaborate. You can change shape. Especially when you're just beginning the process of curiosity about something. It always begins with being curious. You can't begin with being an expert. It's like there's this funny myth that you need to somehow know what you're doing. But people who know what they're doing don't make interesting work. You know, it's just as simple as that.

1:13:45I want to ask you about the role of the audience in creative work. Yeah. You mentioned that what matters is that you move people and that you need to be a magnet for your people. We were speaking about it the first time we spoke about how Rick Rubin has that great sort of quote. The audience comes last. The audience comes last. And when I read that, I resonated with that at first. I was like, yeah, that makes perfect sense. I should be creating for me to be true to me. Although many times in my career, the audience does not come last. Yeah, right. And is a high consideration. I had the same response to you the first time I saw that.

1:14:21I thought like, okay, Rick, yeah, I get it. Go ahead. And then I thought about it more. I did a lot of research about Rick. And to me, the crux of that is this is for everyone. or this is for me, right? And my perspective of this is a particular one because I made a lot of my first work for me. So that's not novel to me. What was novel to me at age 20 was to make something for others and with others. That felt new and interesting and inspiring. My trajectory of creativity has gone away from making things for me and towards making things for others. And I love it. And so I worry about the strong prevalence of an attitude like the audience comes last, partly because I also believe that there's, there just is no one way of doing anything.

1:15:09And I feel as a, as a deeply creative person, I, I would critique Rick in a sense that I don't believe he's, I don't think his audience is creative people. I think his audience is people who aren't creative for whom creativity is novel. And they're thinking, gosh, wow, how, I'd never even thought that you could make something for yourself, you know, but, but I feel like, I feel like anybody who's inherently creative in some way knows that there's no one way to do anything. You can make work for people. You can make work for an audience. You can conform to the algorithm. You can make an engaging thumbnail.

1:15:42That's cool. You can also lock yourself up in a room like I did for many years and make stuff that you just deeply, deeply care about that has never been made before and will never be made again. That's cool as well. And for anyone to say there's only one way of being, I think is flawed and maybe unhelpful. Though I would say that if anyone who's watching this has watched a rick rubin video and felt inspired fuck yeah like that's great you know like who am i to say don't be inspired but i would just say that yeah i've learned so much i've learned there's so much more to the process than make work for only for yourself rick has this chapter in his book where he talks about picture yourself on the top of a mountain and at the top of the mountain is like a luxury haven with perfect plushy pillows and an amazing view and where no one's can never disturb you And then he says, this is the nature of good art, great art.

1:16:34I just disagree with that. I disagree. Because I think great art is when you walk down the mountain from the chilly, cold lack of oxygen to the warmth of the village and you exchange stories and food and energy and you meet people and you meet people where they are and you say, this is for you, not this is for me. I also think more than ever before, we live in a world where it's unhealthy and irresponsible to say things in silo and not to be challenged. And I think that Rick describes his beliefs and writes his book like he's not starting a conversation. He's stating things as though they're true.

1:17:11And I get it. I do that sometimes too. As a creative person, in order to iterate your ideas, it helps to write them down as gospel truth and as fact and whatever. But I think all the wisest and greatest and most important creatives and producers, I mean, Rick is a producer, it's even more important for him than anyone else, is to ask the right questions, not give the right answers or any answers. Questions last way longer than answers. They're more important. They're deeper. They're more crucial. And in the age of AI, creators are going to be more and more asked to prompt with the right question than know with the right answer.

1:17:45Like I'm excited about this idea of a question culture rather than answer culture. So I look at Rick and I, it's like, has anyone ever debated him on this stuff? Because there are ways of approaching creativity. As someone who solves a lot of problems myself and has my particular angle on things, I'm not the ultimate angle. I'm me. I'm Jacob. I see the world the way I see it. But I'd love to sit with Rick at one point and just talk to him and chew the cud and push him. And I'm also welcome to be pushed, because all of us need to be examined. Our opinions need to be examined and squeezed and broken.

1:18:14And I just think that anyone who sits there saying, this is the one way to do it. You Rick says things like, you know, art is only pure if it's made for only art's sake. Absolutely false. You can make totally pure art anywhere you want, including reaching a ton of people for that purpose. It's okay to be ambitious. It's okay to want to reach people and move people. I also, last thing I'll say about Rick before we move on, is I don't trust him because he started his career making this commercial music, which is beautiful and we all love it. And it's amazing. And I'm sure he has his own opinions of that work, but I think to say art is only pure, you know, or meaningful if you make it only for yourself is hypocritical of him because I think that he's made a lot of not just popular, but actually beautiful and meaningful work for many people.

1:19:00I think what he maybe is trying to say is that he wasn't fulfilled by the work, which is totally valid. And I think that all of us seek our own fulfillment in different parts of our life existence but yeah i i absolutely love your perspective and would listen to however long that conversation was between you if that was 10 hours i'd listen to the entire thing i'd love to talk to him and i do think i do i'm glad that he's on the planet um and i'm i'm grateful that he's he is prompting some of these conversations i will say that my understanding of that was not that it was a hard and fast rule about art was but just that as you look at creative work there's different elements of creative work.

1:19:37Like there, what I took away from that was that I want to have a space where I create stuff that's not meant to be shared. And I have a space where I create stuff that is meant to be shared. And those are actually two different things. I love that. And that is what I interpreted from, you know, and I think that's also like the amazing thing about, you know, someone who, who I took Rick's book as a, uh, a question to myself. And I think also like timing, like when something hits you at the right time, it's a completely different thing, you know, like I wholeheartedly agree with everything you just said.

1:20:14And I think there, I think there were some offerings in that book that can be interpreted in so many, however you received that, you know, like I agree with that. And in a sense, I think that was maybe that was kind of what he wanted as well, which I really respect. It's kind of like, you know, in a sense, you offer yourself up to say, here's something and then react to it. And a lot of the book I really totally agree with as well. I think it's great. You have to read it with an openness that we've been talking about this entire time. Which I think, you know, the three of us are creative people, I think.

1:20:44And so we know about the openness. I worry about people who don't know about the openness and who read it and think it's... And who are looking for guidelines. You know, I mean, I think though, to kick off creativity, you need some level of constraint. Yeah, I agree. And I'm curious about... To make friction against. Yeah. Because your openness is like, I've watched some of your videos. You have two Tiny Desk concerts. Yeah. One is at the NPR, like Tiny Desk set. The second one is at home. And I have to tell you that the first time I watched it, because we put these on in our office, I didn't recognize that you were all the people.

1:21:19I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was just playing in the background. Right, right, right. And then I watched it intentionally and I was like, how the hell did he do this and like you can kind of see there's a little bit of like imperfection in the mask like your head your hair is like tall and it gets lost in the symbol that was the hardest bit yeah and it's i was watching that i was just like there's a moment and i know it's ridiculous to not know it was all you because you do a bit after the first song after uh all i need you do a bit where you you're joking around that everyone's talking hey that's my name yeah yeah that video to me is like this um it's amazing like i i tried my whole life to explore and define creativity and what it means to me but there's certain pieces of work that just hit me and go god i want to do something like that you know and that was the first one the second one is is somewhat similar but the all i need video you did during the pandemic on jimmy in the bathroom in the bathroom is like there's moments where i don't know if you ever feel like this but you feel creatively jealous of something.

1:22:23I know the feeling. Yeah. And it's not even like, it's not jealousy in like you could have even done it. It's just like that person found something inside of themselves that is so them and they were able to express it. Yeah. Yeah. I do know this feeling. And I was like, I just want to find that thing and be able to express that version of myself in a form like that. Yeah. Oh, thanks for saying that. Yeah. That was deep, dark quarantine. and that was two I mean those two videos were made like one week after the other you can kind of feel the influence which one was first the tiny desk the tiny desk was first you can feel the influence yeah it's a crazy thing to put together because so that video took well I shot it and I did I did no more than two takes for each instrument but I planned it all in my head and the thing that was crazy about it was well there were a few things that were hard about it one is one is the thing of like You know when you see those videos of multiple people and you look at the screen next to you and it looks like you're just looking away?

1:23:26And it looks really weird. That's even more heightened in a space like that. So there's an art to being like, you're actually there. I'm going to look at you like you're actually there. But from a sheer logistical perspective, it was like the other instruments weren't playing. And there was no click track. Which one did you do first? I did the piano first. You did the piano first. Yeah, I did the piano first. And I had a little machine underneath me where I was able to start and stop. I think I did like a counting for each song. So I knew like the tempo of the song. Did you do that all by yourself?

1:23:57There's no one else. And you're editing that by yourself. Yeah, I did everything myself. The reason I asked that question is because I think that creative courage is a lot easier alone. Interesting. When you're in charge of the edit. Yeah. I would say that is true in some respects. I think I actually sometimes find creative courage much easier when there's an audience because it's easy to make friction against something that is not me. The only judgment you ever really fear is your own, right? And so if you're by yourself and the only opinion available to you is your own, I personally can find that quite paralyzing sometimes, especially when it comes to starting an idea, which we discussed earlier on.

1:24:34But I do think that you can take liberties to be whatever weird version of yourself on camera, knowing that it's in your hands to edit at the end of the day is a very reassuring feeling. I love that process so much. It was such an exciting moment to be like, okay, wide angle lens in the furthest corner of this tiny room. My room is probably slightly smaller than this room. It's like, it's small and it's packed full with instruments. So I had to like imagine like, if the elbow, you know what it's like, if the elbow goes over the line, you're screwed. Yeah, yeah. So you have to like, and there was that thing you mentioned with the cymbal where I was, the lead Jacob was sitting on the floor across the leg like this, playing the hang drum and there's a melodic solo.

1:25:11But I knew if I like put my head up then my little hair, my hair would go across the symbol. And there were a couple of months where I had to edge feather it. But I really, I deeply enjoy editing, like video editing. I edit all my own social media clips, like every one of them, like converting landscape to vertical and making cut downs and doing it. And I just, I've always done it. So I don't question it. I also think that a lot of artists do it as well. And there's a huge gap in the world of creative, creative industries for people who want to edit videos. and be creative and artists who desperately need that support.

1:25:48It's actually crazy. Like at some point, someone's going to have to make a company that provides an amount of that for artists that everyone can be a part of. It's almost like you need like a dating app for video editors and artists because labels have a hard time providing this. But that's a vulnerable relationship. It is. And that's one of the reasons it's so hard. And I've worked with a lot of really great editors over the years, but a lot of the, we mentioned trust before, like trust between artists and audience and you must feel the same thing is if someone else edited this podcast other than you guys, it's like not going to feel like Colin and Samir.

1:26:24And that relationship is very, it's like all the intangibles make such an impact. It's about humor. It's about detail. It's about sparkle and controlling energy. And it's about, you know, in the same, it feels to me very similar to like, you know, say writing an orchestration, like writing in the flute part and the bassoon part and all this stuff and making sure that like when the energy goes down, there's something that keeps the energy up, you know, or, um, you know, you're, you're referring to previous things like previous concepts covered, you know, you're, you're looping back, you're, you're telling a story like that kind of storytelling is totally available as, as a video editor in the same way that it's available as a mixing engineer, you know, or as a producer, you know, I produce all my own albums as well.

1:27:09And it's, it's the same kinds of storytelling of like, I love controlling those arcs and, and, and all these kinds of things. But I think what I have realized, come back to what you were saying is that you can sometimes find more, a different kind of creative courage that can be extracted from you by a, what, what, what Steve, I would call a cooperative component or a collaborator, basically someone who comes in and says, you know, and it can get things out of you. You know, um, I remember when we sat down to to to plan this conversation um one of the first things you said which i loved was we want to have a conversation we did that no one else would ever have with you and that reminds me of something that my dear friend chris martin often says which is you know make music that only you could make and that's when you know that you're doing the right thing and i i think that i think that's i think that's really that's really really important and it's hard um with all these different outlets that are expected of us as artists these days whether it's video editing you know mixing production live performance style interviews all the stuff it's like it's you know and songwriting and playing an instrument whatever happens to be it's like all these different hats that you wear and the kind of expectation that you that you are literate and fluid in all these different areas I feel like uniquely lucky as to be self-sufficient which I don't think is necessary to be creative but I just happen to be very self-sufficient and I'm grateful I was intensely grateful of that in COVID man I gotta say and I think that for creators around the world it was either a very productive and lucrative time or it was a very very hard time and for me I think it was both but I'm grateful for my skills in a variety of areas and I don't take them for granted yeah I can't imagine it's common that an artist will edit their own video and then submit it to Kimmel yeah right that they will handle that collaboration well it was the same thing with Fallon I did this video for Fallon And that was actually, that was a crazy shoot because they were moving cameras.

1:28:58You know, it's one thing if there's a locked off shot and everything is in a mask. Not the most recent film performance. Oh, no, yeah, not the most recent film performance. There's one from 2020. Okay, that was like a pandemic one. Got it. And it was, we did all I need. And so Mahalia sang the lead and I played all the instruments, but we had to do a moving camera shot of Mahalia with me in the background on each instrument and then a few wide shots where I would like automate a little bit of motion where there were the four Jacobs in the masked zone. Editing that was just, it's so much fun. But it's a lot of time, you know.

1:29:31And then it helps to be able to mix as well because then you mix a little bit to the thing you're hearing, which helps you believe it. And all those little nuances. I love it. I love climbing into that part of the process. I really do. I love so much that you're editing these videos. It's comforting and inspiring. Like someone with six Grammys is sitting there in a timeline. Yeah. Like I am. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, every day I'm in Premiere editing, editing something, you know, I just did a Jimmy Kimmel for real this time in person. And, you know, I posted a clip on my social media, which was a square crop of the landscape video.

1:30:04And I'm sitting there going through and cutting the shots when they change, which are outside of my control because it was the broadcast. automating those shots, automating what's in the frame. And, you know, like the video starts with, there's like a clip of me. The first thing you see is me being like this. And I found a head nod from a different part of the song, which I felt, thought would, people would feel like that. I trust that's Jacob. And then there was a bit of Tori doing this, but I timed it so it was like she had just sung the phrase. And because I know that's how you start the video.

1:30:34You know, I love all that stuff. I love the art form of it, but there are moments where I'm just like, man, there are so many things I need to do right now. and I'm editing in Premiere. But I know a lot of artists that feel like that, whether they are in Premiere or whether they're just in reels or stories. There's a lot of pressure to make content right now. And there are gaps in the industry to support that. So with any creative endeavor, you've talked a lot about collaboration and I want to get into collaboration. But before we get there, like your personal experience with creativity, if you can take us into your room, that feels like a very iconic room at this point.

1:31:08It is the room that you grew up in. And it's the room that when we had our Zoom call to talk about the show, we were in that room. And that room is just so iconic to me. But if you take us into that room when you're about to embark on a creative endeavor, whether it's writing a song or coming up with something, what is that process like for you? What is step one for your creative process? Yeah. Well, I think that room knows me so well. Sometimes it's hard to hide from it. It's like I can't pretend in there at all. It's like that room has seen me in every state, you know, total, total flow and like total despair.

1:31:44So, so having a space as safe as that is really a privilege because you're able, I'm able to go in there and I remember going there when I was 10 years old and closing the door and being like, this room has no walls. I can go anywhere from here. This is my spaceship. You know, I get to command the order. All right. Where do we go today? you know and that feeling that it goes back to the thing of like that's what you live for I love that feeling so much of just being like I'm here in this chair

1:32:15what what what matters today where do we go today you know so in a sense my job becomes well wherever I've created music whether it's in that room or more recently I've created in various corners of the world and on stage and all sorts of things but it's like my job is actually to to tune in to I think about internal weather something I think about a lot. Kind of like, you know, when you look out the window at the beginning of a day and you say, oh, today it's cloudy and there's kind of a breeze, but it's not, it's not too cold, but, but it's like a bit, it's a bit like looming. Um, and there's just a feeling out here.

1:32:48There's a feeling out here. Um, and, and it impacts you and, and you, you, you make decisions. It's a bit like the surf. You think, oh, the surf is in this, in these conditions today. How, how best do I approach this? How best do I catch a wave? Are there waves to catch today? Or do I just need to have a rest you know are the waves so big that i gotta i gotta buckle up or i gotta i gotta take more risks today to survive you know out there or i'm gonna have to work pretty hard to catch waves the waves are pretty like the tide's pretty low or whatever i'm not really a surfer but like one of my good friends is and the way he talks about it is is as such but to me when i create something it's a bit like that you have to court your state first what's going on here all right so today I'm like easily you know but in a sense it's kind of like what turns you on today because that's always going to be your primary flow like what's turning me on today and sometimes it's like stuff that makes you laugh or stuff that's super irreverent stuff that's really angry stuff that's like super super quiet or something that's so emotionally charged in the same way that we diagnose you know how when you're you were saying when you were young you used to take long flights to India 30 hour trips to India on planes and you'd listen to CDs on those plane journeys.

1:34:00It's like the way you diagnose, what do I feel like listening to today? Oh man, Bon Iver, or Sifian Stevens, or like Earth, Wind & Fire, or like Metallica, whatever. Like that process, we all do it. And it's a creative process. It's a process of looking in and diagnosing how you feel and what's going to tug it out of you. And we all know the feeling of being so, well, a lot of us know the feeling of being really like in your in your feels emotional and then you listen to like Carrie and Lau by Sufjan Stevens or Bon Iver's first record and you're like there it is I've got it and it unravels oh that is exactly the same feeling as creating but it's the opposite direction so you're like oh my god there it is there it is let me get it out let me get it out and that that process is one of self-awareness essentially it's like knowing what's gonna tickle you oh I got it I got one And I got one, you know, but, but you can't necessarily sit in silence and do that.

1:34:58You kind of have to do that in a, in a, in a process of flow. So sometimes it's about getting yourself moving. You know, you might start making something and then see what tickles you. So, you know, some days, like as someone who plays a few different instruments, what interests me sometimes is that there are just instruments on certain days that, that get me going and others that don't. So I might play piano one day and it's like, this isn't happening, but I might play bass and it's like, oh, I'm in the bass today. Or, um, I want to be physical, play drums today, but like the guitar is not working at all or whatever happens to be.

1:35:24and that can also guide your process. But at the end of the day, like the process where you talk about the gestation of an idea, that is about, it's about like making that mark and being comfortable with it. And sometimes, and often I would say that the best thing you can do for yourself is to get yourself out of your own way. So like one thing I sometimes do or recommend people to do is to like make the worst song in the world. Like make the worst song in the world. Make something filthy bad that you would hate. and surprise yourself in the process of doing that and how interesting your song is because you weren't afraid of making a bad song.

1:36:01Like you've opened the doors to all your unconscious ideas to wake up and contribute something because you're not afraid of making a bad song. And that's amazing. That's like an amazing feeling. If I sit down like, I've got to make a good song. I've really, I've got to, I'm running out of time. You know, like as you were describing, that's not, that's not for me personally, that's not where the best ideas come from. And I think that there's just this kind of, there's like an openness that I cherish deeply when I'm able to find it about letting myself, you know, so that's where it starts. If I can be open in that process, and I'm also like, I also think about water table.

1:36:40I think I think a lot about like weather. I don't know why, I've just realized. But like, you know, water table, like the idea of like the average level of water. So it's like the emotional water table is interesting to me because, or creative water table, some days you like, you get turned on easily. Yeah. Like, you know, or like, you know, you, you, you get the giggles, like the tiniest thing will make you laugh or, um, one, one scene in the, like if you're on a plane, like one scene in the film and you're just floods of tears, you know, some days you're just up here and you're brimming up and some days it's way down here and you're just like, I'm not easily simulated today.

1:37:13And that's cool too, but it's all, it's always interesting. And the challenge is, where do I meet myself today without trying to change myself? I don't have to bully myself into blah, blah, blah. Where do I meet myself today? And no matter who I am today, there will be something of value that I have to say. I think there's some... Would you say lyrics fit into that same process and methodology? Because I would imagine you have to be a little bit more deliberate about words that go down on a page. I don't know. I don't know if I agree with that. I would almost say that the same is true with lyrics.

1:37:41If I overthink what my song is about before I've written it, it never, ever comes out. So like one, one thing I always recommend to any creative person who is making something, it's like, you've got to embrace the nonsense, right? You've got to embrace things that make no sense. Nonsense is super underrated. And like David Byrne is one of my favorite musicians in the world. A lot of his songs make an abstract sense. Stop making sense. Literally. Like he, he stands for that. Or like Spike Milligan, who's an amazing poet from, from England. Um, you know, he kind of, he wrote amazing like nonsense poetry, you know, and it's like, it's a idea that you combine words together that don't go together, but they're still meaningful.

1:38:18I just, that's like a huge part of my, of my language is, is things that don't make sense. And so if I'm too deliberate about trying to make sense or have a reason, or if I'm too deliberate about trying to, trying to make no sense, like agendas don't help me with, with lyrics. And, but lyrics is another instrument to play. It's in the same way that you might play the piano or you might play the guitar. Sometimes you might start, I might start writing and I write avidly. I write all the time, constantly writing. It's one of the greatest ways for me to process and create with my life and collage my life.

1:38:47But sometimes I write and I'm like, and the wheel starts turning and you flow. Oh, it's an amazing feeling. Sometimes you write and you think, now I'm just pissing myself off. You know, I'm going to do something else today. And another thing I think is underrated is not pushing yourself to make something if you're not in the mood. You know, like sometimes, sometimes you're not in the mood. It's okay to say, I'm giving up today. I'll come back tomorrow. staying there and trying to make it work when you're not in the mood doesn't always doesn't always work sure sometimes you can persevere and you know push through it and whatever but i think that's that's that's more helpful for me in life when it comes to things that aren't about creativity when it's about like routine or you know like i always forget to eat you know so it's like i gotta eat man you gotta eat always constantly like i'm getting hungry you gotta eat and my mom was like eat jacob you know so like there are some things in life where routine and And being unbending is really helpful.

1:39:36But in creativity, again, many, many ways of doing everything. There's no one state. Discipline and stuff works for some people in creativity. It's never worked for me. The art of it is finding my way into being deeply interested by something so it seizes me. And once it's got me and I've got it, then you just roll. And it's a glorious feeling. I actually think your connection to the weather is what I think makes you a great collaborator. like you're what you just brought up with the weather because i think um the weather is um you have no control over it that's the that's his magic and you you look at it and you walk outside and it is what it is that is the reality exactly but you are now forced to work within those new confines that new reality and everything you've talked about in the last couple hours that we've sitting here is, has to do with your openness and your willingness to be curious and then work within the new form that has emerged.

1:40:39Right. And I think, I love what you said about courting yourself as the first thing, because you're essentially curious. How do I feel today? Yeah. What is that? Okay. Now I'll work within those, those bounds. Well, in the same way that every great conversation, I mean, you must have so many thoughts on this, but comes about in that way. It starts with being curious, you know, And not necessarily having a plan, but sort of thinking like, there are places that we can meet today. But I think one of the greatest things, as we said earlier about the creative process, is the, this is outside my control, but let's rock with it.

1:41:13Yeah. And let's find a way to something that feels good. The rigidity is what can create discomfort and sometimes unnecessary friction. Like, you know, we found this relationship with conversation and collaboration to be us having to develop a relationship with control and preparation. Whereas we can come in really prepared. We're like, this is what would make the flow of this conversation really great. But then we have to sit here and experience it. And you might say something that takes us off that track and then we have to go, is that? Okay, now we're over here. Let's go there, right? But in the beginning when we started the show, it was like, you would be saying that, but all I would be thinking would be, how do I get you back to that?

1:41:57To the point that, and that rigidity, my wife brought it up to me. She's a therapist. So she's like someone who has to do like experience conversation in a very open way. Yeah. But she was like, you're not listening. She'd listen to the show. I'm like, you're not listening. You're thinking and trying to control it. Which is natural. Which is the natural state. But I think like, I would assume, you know, I listened to you. I mentioned to you, I listened to the new album three times through, right? like Jesse volume four. It's fantastic. Thing that sticks out is like the types of collaborations on there.

1:42:32Some of which are unexpected, some of which are, you know, genre changes, some of which are completely different from the song previous. And that to me, you know, when it's, when he goes, you know, John Mayer, John Legend, Chris Martin, Shawn Mendes, Stormzy, like these people who want to come in and collaborate with you, I'd imagine it's that experience of they get to show up as they are and you accept them like the weather. I love that. I love that. That's beautifully put. And I think that's my job. That is my job as the, as the producer, as the songwriter and as, and as their friend at the end of the day.

1:43:07Um, and I, I think one thing I'm very grateful for with this album, you know, well, there are 150 ,000 people on the album, if you count all the audience members, but in terms of collaborations, there are like, well, there were 30, 30 collaborations, 40 collaborations or so. And they're all a fresh start. And, um, I've gradually learned exactly what you've learned over the years with collaboration where my first attempts were kind of like hey how you doing I've got a really clear idea of what I want to get from this session and then you listen to the results and it's like yeah kind of and then you know then there are sessions like for example you mentioned the John Mayer song I wrote the song with my good friend Lizzie McAlpine and we didn't really have a plan I had a little seed that we began the song with and it follows itself and it follows itself into where it needs to go I have a little mantra sometimes which I say to myself, which is don't try to understand it, follow it.

1:43:58Love that. And it's a fun thing to cultivate in a collaborative session because your job is to follow each other. And exactly as you say, it's like the weather in the sense that there's unconditional elements to this that will exist no matter what you do for them. And kind of your only job is to show up for what's already there and make space for that. And there's something that I think Michelangelo used to say, which is about sculpting. It's about you remove what's not the sculpture from the block. See, there's a block. You remove what's not the sculpture and reveal what was already there as the sculpture.

1:44:34I love that. Which reminds me a lot of, there's this philosophy in traditional Chinese medicine about, there's a lot about yin and yang, right? And we have a lot of yang in our culture right now. It's like, you add the thing. you know yang being sort of like the the out the outward the masculine whatever yeah um yin being the inner the thing that is within um so yang is white and yin is black you could say because yang is the presence of and and yin is the is the absence of but there's this idea about when language first came to be in the world the first like way of the way the first um evidence of language was people sculpting out of stone and the light would shine and the shadow of the chalice that you created would be that's what's there.

1:45:22That's the text. You've removed something to reveal something. So it's like the absence of something is itself the meaning. And I think that's so beautiful and so amazing to remember. And I often think about it within collaboration in the sense that everything we need is already here. It's like this idea of abundance. Everything we need is already here our job is to remove the things that aren't helpful so we can see the thing that's here and then and and get find that find that that sense of flow but i think it's a it's a it's an amazing thing to remember we think of it as like i'm writing with black ink on my white page and adding the meaning but that's all that is is a visual imitation of what used to be removing something from the page to reveal the meaning i think that's beautiful that is beautiful i love that.

1:46:03I'm curious what Jesse volume four represents for you in your career because there was an interesting quote I read from you that reads, by the end of four volumes I could start my career properly. Yeah, that was my original intention with Jesse, yeah. So that was before even beginning the series. I wanted to learn from all my favorite musicians. I wanted to work with them and see what happened and I knew that by the end I would have learned some stuff and I have learned so much. But I think with Volume 4, I left it open. I kind of planned 1, 2, and 3, kind of. I knew the worlds they were going to live in.

1:46:40I knew that Volume 1 was going to be this big orchestral space, like a big acoustic world, like the morning, the sun rising, the feeling of it, I knew. Volume 2, I knew it would be like a cozier, more folky, sort of acoustic, small acoustic space, more intimate, you know. I knew that Volume 3 would be like the nighttime, you know. It kind of goes around, kind of almost like it goes around a day. It's kind of like the volume one is the morning opening. Volume two is the evening quieting. Volume three is the fever dream of the night. And volume four was like, question mark, question mark, question mark.

1:47:09What am I going to feel like doing then? And it was a hard album to make. It was so hard to make volume four. It was the hardest album I've ever had to make because there were no constraints, as you were saying. It was, it was, you do everything, you do everything and anything all at once, you know, kind of. And so my - Was there a time constraint? No, that was the other thing. Label doesn't pressure you to be like - No, they can't, they can't tell me shit. so it was literally you do whatever you do whatever you want to do Jacob and it was like I was sitting in my own kind of like dream slash nightmare like how's it feel now you got what you want man exactly and so that process for me was tough and I wrote a lot of songs I wrote so many songs that were me trying to find the songs on the album that eventually made the album and it took it took a long time to come to fruit but I think at this point well there was a moment where I realised what the album was about.

1:48:00And the thing that did it for me, the thing that made me realize what it was about was going on tour after COVID, which I think was a huge moment for a lot of artists who hadn't been able to tour for a long time. And I learned a lot of things over COVID. One of them was how much I freaking love touring. And I hadn't realized it until that happened. It was like, this is a huge part of my life that I'm lacking in right now. When I came back to touring, this idea of the audience choir, the idea of, you know, a venue of people singing as one animal, it just kind of took, it just, from the first show of the tour, it just exploded for me.

1:48:34Like, it exploded. My ideas for it were so massive. And I thought a bit about it over COVID, but I hadn't really, you can only practice that skill when you're on stage with an audience. You can't warm up or plan. You have to just do it 100 times, which I did 100 times in 2022. And we recorded every single show because the audience squires were getting so moving and so profound and so good that my whole, like the rudder of my boat was turning in a direction of like, not just musically, but philosophically for me. Why am I here? What's me at my best? What's me at my biggest and most giving, my most connected?

1:49:12And it was like a lot of it was changing with the idea that the audience choir was happening and it was happening by itself. I wasn't trying to drive it. I wasn't, I didn't have an agenda for it. I was just like, I love this so much. And what happens if you, you know, like all the best ideas, what happens if you, whoa, you just all went up and now you went down again. I know you went down. So, okay. So if I, whoa, whoa. And then, you know, you build these sequences of cause and you move through. So I developed a lot of techniques over that year that helped be really clear about what I wanted. Like with all of us, we were saying about family or on my first musical memories were of watching my mother conduct an orchestra, right?

1:49:52I would sit sometimes on her lap, but also in the audience and watch her go. And then the music would go, you know, and it's a feeling that you remember in your body. You remember the feeling of being in that room and how it's like casting a spell, watching my mom conduct. And he goes, and then the room wakes up and she's commanding not just notes and time, but she's commanding permission. She's saying, pull, push. she's commanding energy she's commanding humor she's come up all these different things and sure enough you know i i was like i'm not gonna be a conductor i don't know what could and then i and i'm i i accidentally become this this conductor of audiences and i just love it so much so so much so that i i went home and i was like i want all my album i want the record to feel like this i want the album to feel like i'm on stage conducting an audience because because i always knew i wanted to collaborate but i just i just i didn't i didn't see this coming I knew I wanted to work with all my heroes but I didn't think I'd have a choir of 100 ,000 on the record until suddenly it was like obviously I'm going to put a choir of 100 ,000 people on this record this is what this record is for and it became just crystalline at that moment it became clear so once I figured that out I realised so what's this album about fundamentally it's almost like what's my thesis what have I learnt in my extending of it's like I asked a question of the universe I want to learn how to I want to learn about music.

1:51:17I want to learn about life. I want to leave my room. I want to explore the big wide world. I want to be challenged. I want to take risks. I want to stretch myself. I want to learn. I want to build bridges between genres. I want to build bridges between fan bases. I want to travel the globe. I want to absorb all this stuff. And, you know, like all the best answers the universe gives, it came in a way I wasn't expecting. And it was like, here is a language that I get to build and, and, and evolve based in group psychology and, and, and, and musicality and permission, but fundamentally based in the human voice.

1:51:51So obviously the album's about the human voice, which is where I began my journey. And again, I realized this, it's like my first YouTube video was me, four of me, and then it became six of me trying to, trying to do that thing you know trying to be a quiet trying to be the world singing in harmony but it was just me and i sang the bass and the alto and the you know all this stuff and we build up these harmonies and i was i was getting it the same thing i was pulling on the same thread but it took 10 years for me to realize this is my voice it's it's the voice of others it's when i can offer whatever courage I have to you to use your voice.

1:52:31That's, that's me. That's me speaking. That's, that's me singing, you know? And so now I feel like I'm playing the whole world as a musical instrument and that feels so amazing. And that's what the album is about for me. It's about the way I've learned to absorb and be challenged by. And, and it's like, it's like surfing. It's like, imagine surfing the wave. It's like you ride the, you pull from the world, you ride the world. and it's a beautiful thing to feel like I, like that moment of the show for me is, I'm at my mutest in a sense. Like I'm not singing. I'm in silence. I never say a word. That's the one rule with audience choir.

1:53:10I never explain it. I never say, you guys sing this? Okay, so when I go with my hands up and you guys go, no, I just stand there on stage and I go, ooh. And it goes, and it's an amazing feeling and um it's it's it's extraordinary for that to feel like the moment for me honestly when my voice is at its loudest is when i'm not not saying a word and i think there's just a lot of ways in which that's impacted my life as a person and the way i think about purpose the way i think about collaboration everything's changed i do think that's beautiful i think the uh the gift of permission is a beautiful gift for a creative to give.

1:53:47And I think it's the gift that I crave to give the most. And I think what we try and find through this show is like, you know, you hear Jacob Collier's story and there's something that you connect with and it gives you permission to pursue the thing that, to press publish on the video that you did 10 years ago. What is that version for you? What is posting that for you? Exactly. You know, like I think that the gift of permission, it's amazing how much we require it. as humans, right? It is. It's astonishing and how far it can go when you give it. It's probably the conditioning of just, we were always in permission-based environments, right?

1:54:22You have something to say, you raise your hand. Oh, yeah. You have to ask. The default is that you're unqualified before you become qualified. And then as you grow up, those environments don't exist anymore. I guess they do in like traditional jobs where you do need permission to do things. But I guess that's like our relationship with permission is very fascinating. It's extraordinary. You talk about wild and tame. Permission is what tames us, right? Yeah. And I mean, sorry, the need for it. Yeah, well, I would almost say permission is what allows us to feel truly wild and safe. Right. That's the thing.

1:54:56I think I feel tame when I feel like I have the least permission because I get in and I get into my thing of like, no, I need to control this. I need to control this. I need to have my lines and I need to have my systems and all this kind of stuff. And I get smaller and smaller and smaller. And there's a version of, you know, control and it's actually healthy and it's about sourcing your materials. But a lot of the access of wild to tame, for me, permission is about saying, it's okay to be wild. That's what I needed to hear as a child. But people require that permission to be wild. I think so.

1:55:27All of us do. You need to put yourself in environments that that is possible, I think. And the best way of cultivating those environments is to give permission to others. Yes, I agree. Because you get it straight back. It's a beautiful gift. I think that's why audience choir is such an emotional experience. Even just watching, I get the chills and I'm on the verge sometimes of tears watching. And I think it is that transfer of permission of like, be wild, be free, but also be a part of this together in this moment. Yeah, and trust each other. And I assume that's what it is because I watch the videos and I hope to experience it in person one day.

1:56:00But I watch the videos and I do get emotional and I've been asking myself, why? What is it about this thing? It is a very emotional experience. That is not language. It's not like I'm watching a movie and seeing a scene on an airplane that connects with me. It's just this thing that's happening. And yet I'm on the verge of tears. Yeah. I think some of the most beautiful things in life are when there aren't the words for it. The more words you use to explain something, sometimes the further you get away from it. But the audience choir is beautiful from my perspective. I have the best seat in the house every night.

1:56:33I'm in front of the hall. I can hear everyone like this. And I get to sit and design a journey through these things. And it's about mass permission. And I feel... I remember a really good friend of mine came to a show in Norway and it was a crazy show in Oslo in 2022. too. And my friend Stian who came to play a couple of songs in the show, he said, I could have walked out of that venue and anyone, I could have given anyone a hug in that, in that audience. Hey man, we just did that together. That makes me emotional. Those communal experiences. Yeah. Yeah. We've talked a lot about, um, collaboration, uh, on the show and, and where you are today with Jesse volume four and the, um, the audience choir and where your career is today.

1:57:17It's interesting as your career started in this space of, you know, kind of rearranging or covering other people's work. And I find that to be really interesting, like your relationship with remixing and collaborating with previous work. And I'm curious if you could speak a bit to that, the nature of, you know, what was it about hearing someone else's work and then wanting to play with that. And I ask that because I think today there's a lot of curiosity from creatives around originality. Especially you come to a YouTube or a TikTok and it's like, here's a trend or here's a thing that's happening.

1:57:56I'm essentially going to cover that thing. I'm going to do that thing. Put my own spin on it. And sometimes put your own spin on it. Sometimes do it pretty closely. And that's looked down upon, obviously, in creativity. But But putting a spin on it and making it your own and remixing it, that is oftentimes the way that the most talented creatives get started. Well, think about how we learn language as kids, right? We learn language by being surrounded by masters of it, having total permission to play around, have our mistakes celebrated or even enjoyed. You know, like, oh my God, you said... and then fashioning you know fashion together like the all these different ways of using language that help us express how we feel I think in that environment it's you know you begin by imitating others and then you begin by interpreting others and then eventually you get to the point where you think I have something to say here that no one else has said and that it kind of must be that order you can't come at something necessarily and just cut to the bit where you, you know, like when you can, you can do whatever you want.

1:59:08But, but in my experience and many people's experience, I think that it's important to kind of go through that trajectory. So in terms of music, learning other people's songs is a great, great first step for getting started. You think, I love this song. How does it work? And you pose the question, you sit down, you figure out how it works and it's a joy. And then the second phase of that is, well, well, well, like how would, how would I say it? If I, if I were to say this, how would I, how would I, play this what's the what's my spin on this i think that's inherently for me that's always been that's always been there for me it's i can't not do it in my own way you know even if i really try and do it like someone else i always end up slightly doing it in my own twist whether it's like music or elsewhere but um it's a safe place to explore someone else's song because you don't have to it's a bit like carving into a stone you know you don't have to build a stone yourself and then start carving it's like oh i built the stone it's like here's a stone that is so safe and like And I would gravitate towards songs that felt really solid in their identity and really kind of resilient.

2:00:08Because my interpretations were very hardcore. Like I would stretch songs into like oblivion of like what put them together. Like total reharmonization, total recontextualization in terms of time, sound, everything, structure. And so, you know, a song like Don't You Worry About A Thing or Fascinating Rhythm. These songs I covered back in the day, like they're really repetitive and strong and everyone knows them. The other thing I loved about arranging, which I still love about arranging, is that you get to more directly attend to somebody's expectation. If you know the song Twinkies, Twinkies, Little Star, and I play Twinkies, Little Star, but at the last minute, I switch out the chord and I do something unexpected, you get tickled by it in a way that I can't tickle you if it's an original song.

2:00:53Yeah, that's so true. So I was able to like safely experiment with surprise and pulling around that designing these journeys. And I tickled a lot of people because people were like, whoa, right? Whoa. You know, and it's like, you know, it's like when you look at a painting or a piece of art by someone like Escher, right? Where it's about modulation of perspective. You can look at it from here or here. Or like that optical illusion where you see the old woman and the young girl at the same time. You know that one? It's like, it's pivoting someone's psychology. It's like, here's something you know.

2:01:26And here's another thing that you know. and I'm going to change the first thing to be this, this is maybe a... It's like there needs to be a crossover point where, you know, like say I'm doing three, if I'm doing three in my left hand and four in my right hand, right? Or maybe it's better if I do this. So one, two, three, one, two, three, four, right? the first thing I might do is I might go three okay one two three okay I can get into that yeah one okay I understand what you're saying one two three four one two I'm still kind of feeling a three two three four one two three four one two three four right and then this if I stop the three then suddenly like there was a bridge to get to the four and I'm here now right

2:02:26So essentially, it's like building a bridge from one kind of time to another kind of time. You can do this in many, many ways. I was not ready for that to stop. Sorry, sorry. But essentially what you do is you state something, you state another thing that has overlap, and then you remove the first thing and you can build to another thing. That's what happens with expectation when you arrange a song, is you say, here's a melody that you know, and I'm going to do it three times, and the fourth time I do it, I'm going to change the direction, but it's not going to feel like a smack in the face because, because there's an expectation of, because of familiarity, because it's familiar.

2:02:55But, but without setting up what is first familiar, you can't do something that's unexpected and you can't create that like in a laugh of like, you know, which I just love that feeling so much. And I would constantly seek it in my own experiments. And, and actually I had a hard time writing songs for a while at the beginning of my career, because I felt so deeply safe in arranging other people's music that it was like, if I have to write the song as well, that's like, then what am I going to apply my skill set to? You know, I feel like I'm an arranger. I feel like I'm someone who can take apart something and put it back together.

2:03:24And it takes a completely different set of skills to write a song than it does to arrange a song. But then the joy is when you write a song, then you get to arrange it and you get to use all of your powers to build things. And it's an interesting way in. Yeah, you do have these magical powers though with the way that you put together sound that today I'm sitting in a coffee shop this morning doing some writing and listening to Jesse volume four and I was listening to it intently. And then I, I could not help, but move and bounce sitting in this crowded coffee shop. I was just like, Oh my God, I just can't help it.

2:04:01There's something about the way that you put together sound that I don't know what it is, but it's, it feels, um, it feels very different. You know, I don't know what it is. It almost speaks more to the intuitive nature of like movement. Yeah. You know, I have to, if I'm moving, making it, then I know I'm doing something right. Yeah. You follow what makes you jiggle. You're like, yeah, okay, I'll do more of that. Oh, oh, oh, I'm doing more of that. You know what I mean? And I think we, it feels like you're like crossing a river, jumping on stones, but like to a rhythm of like, there, there, there, now I'm there, there, there, and I'm across.

2:04:34Yeah, for sure. For sure. Exactly. I think we resist the fluidity of that though as humans. And like, sometimes there's things that are unexplainable. I think the best art and best creativity cannot be explained. It's like, I hear this thing and it makes me want to move. Why? Who knows? I don't know. I don't know. Why does that sound that way? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the best art reflects life and art and life always takes us by surprise. It will always come at us sideways. And when I hear a song, it's like, that's how it feels when I'm crossing a river or that's how it feels when I'm doing whatever.

2:05:02It's like, I know that feeling. I'm going to follow that feeling. And as artists, we do get to draw these amazing lines of intention and remind people how it feels to be alive. And I know that when I make something that is meaningful to me, I'm reminded of feeling the most alive. It makes me feel the most alive I ever feel. How does the world change now as, we briefly touched on it, but as AI becomes a collaborator to creatives? obviously in music it feels like it's become more significant than in other places it's shown up a lot in music it's more of an antagonist I think in music yeah it's not it's all in how we perceive it going back to what we were saying before you make the world yes AI is terrifying yes AI is beautiful you figure it out I understand why people are afraid I understand that I think that there are there are you look at it from a distance and you see, this is threatening this and threatening this and threatening this.

2:06:04But my first intuition as a creative person, whenever I see anything in life, whether it's good, bad, ugly, big, small, whatever, it's like, whoa, interesting. And I think that I know that's my true nature speaking. So I'm deeply fascinated by all of what AI is offering the creative space. I think there are ways in which we can create things that we could never have imagined possible using it. That excites me a huge amount. Say, for example, there was a way to prompt a sound that you couldn't build by hand. So like the sound of like, you know, what's an interesting sound? Like an ice oar shattering by hitting it at the bottom of a lake.

2:06:56Like that's a sound I would crave hearing. or like, you know, reverse paint, you know, or, or, um, you know, kind of like, uh, a horse doing a backflip on, on soil, you know, these are the kinds of sounds that I dream up. And I'm like, how do I make that? I don't know. I'm so excited for the world where you get to, you get to make your, you get to design the world, you get to build, you get to build a world. And I've seen some tech. I've seen some tech that thrills me. Every musician says this. Like, I feel like you guys have access. Musicians have access to stuff. Yeah. We talked to some musicians who were like, listen, the things I've seen.

2:07:39Yo, yo. Yeah. You wouldn't even believe it. It's like, what about us video creators? Why don't we get access to seeing these things? It does feel like the music industry is treating AI very differently right now. It's funny. It's funny. And they're with the gatekeepers. I think a lot of the challenge is actually how it's communicated in the world. If it's communicated as like, hey here's AI and it's a huge threat to all of you like be very afraid which is a lot of the media around it then people are very afraid but fear is a little bit has more tension and attention to it than acceptance yeah well fear fear is more magnetic yeah it's more magnetic gets the brain moving and stuff but yeah I think one thing I think is very important is that we remember the cruciality of like irreverence I suppose you could say or even disobedience like what terrifies me about AI is it's obedience and I spent a lot of hours I spent a lot of hours whether it's generating images or trying to generate sounds or whatever or stories, text of trying to get it to misbehave trying to get it to and I think a lot of us have it's like bullying it to being interesting I was just thinking about your TikTok where it like zooms out Oh yeah, yeah I love that so much and you're like jacked Yeah, I love that I've got so many comments like bro, I had no idea bro that's crazy bro bro's hit the like wow this is the world we live in now you believe whatever you see Yeah But yeah, the art of, I mean, maybe bullying is the wrong word, but like bullying something into being interesting or being strange.

2:09:02It was much easier in the early days of image generation, for example. Dali 1 and 2 and stuff were like so weird. And you would ask it to make things that it would make a weird version of a thing. And I remember asking it to do, you know, like you just like, draw me a picture of the feeling of escaping a garden by torchlight. That's the most Jacob Collier prompt I've ever heard. And then it would draw me like this weird smeared image of like torch. Yeah, yeah. It was like, it didn't draw me a picture of a torch. It drew me a picture of torchness. You know? Yeah. That thrilled me so much. And the first time I used Dali, I used it for like hours and hours and hours.

2:09:36And then I had like the craziest dreams I've ever had. Because my brain was able to access. It was like, there's no gap between your idea and then the actualization of your idea. And we're going to have to get used to that. Because it's a bit of a whiplash moment for creatives. to be like, what if you remove any need for you to execute this and all you have to care about is the idea? What does that environment look like? What does that creative, wow, you know? And not only that, but what happens when spectacular becomes ordinary and everything is spectacular and you're going to be spectacular with ease.

2:10:07You know, scenic image of, wow, amazing. So then super clean. Ordinary becomes spectacular, right? I would say so. I would say the parts of the human condition that we're going to lean into and that are going to give us the most connective force in the world are all those things like this. Strange bangs that you can't explain. And imperfect things that happen and the things that keep us up at night and the things that turn us on. I think about that a lot. It's like AI can't do that stuff for us. I think about the premise of how AI has become this almost very efficient way to operate in some ways, right?

2:10:48Like when we think about brainstorming and we come up with a YouTube title, you know, and we want 10 variations of that title, the most efficient way to get 10 variations is actually to pop it into ChatGPT. And I thought about this when I went to the John Mayer show here in LA where he played acoustic. And I was there and I was like, the most efficient way for me to listen to these John Mayer songs is by selecting them myself in a Spotify playlist and listening to them. But what I'm here for is the inefficiency of it. The friction of showing up and having to park and walking in with a crowd of people and the collectiveness of that.

2:11:23Smelling the venue. And also like the fact that he's going to start playing Neon by riffing for, you know, 35 seconds or 60 seconds before he starts the riff. And that's an inefficient way to listen to Neon. Well, I think, yeah, I think I love, I love your use of the word efficiency. And I think there's a huge myth that efficiently is better than yeah but i also think that you can be efficient i guess it just depends on what your priorities are because it can be more creatively efficient to go around the houses sure if your priority is to gather more materials for example um but i i do think i i lament the psychology that the fastest way is best um because i just know so i know it so deeply in me that that sometimes the the long way home is more efficient or more meaningful than the short way home.

2:12:16But it's so tempting to pull the fruit that's hanging really low and say, I'm just going to do this. But I think these are the questions that will need to purvey our creative processes, but also our education. And I think that, I was talking to a friend about this last night, actually. It's like, what happens when we remove the need to, you know like what what if if information is so accessible to us that we can find it anywhere in the world at all times then what then what do we train for do we train to memorize a bunch of information or do we train to have empathy you know or do we train to be irreverent do we train to surprise each other do we train to to to um give each other permission to have courage you know do we do we train to be resilient to life and the unpredictability of life yes is my answer to that i think those are the those are the lessons that we need to that we need to learn because then you know the information that is rife and only getting rifer in the world and our access to information which is only growing that all becomes part and parcel with who we are as people and the human condition is about is about that it's about listening it's about observing um it's funny i was talking to herby about ai for a long time yesterday he's so interesting on it obviously and he was saying how you know whenever he asks alexa for something he always says like please and thank you and how how we need to treat AI like it's like a a stroppy teenager it's like figuring it out it's figuring out how to be a good person yeah but if we are not kind and gentle to it then we are failing as parents like it's looking to us it's like what do we do yeah it'll give us what we give them yeah literally it's like a supercharged kid who's learning at you know accelerated approaching quantum speeds you know but it's the same principles it's like I was just really touched when he said that I always say thank you if you wouldn't mind please could you play this whatever but I think it is about that and I think it does reproduce the forces that are given to it and I think that what Herbie said is that's going to save humankind us realising that AI will remove the parts of our learning that are not empathy and focusing on empathy and deepening our understanding of each other and our connections with each other, that's what's going to save us.

2:14:31And because otherwise, what is there to live for? You know? It does force us to reconcile with what is uniquely human. Yeah. And what matters. And what matters. And, you know, being perfect is not interesting. Yeah. And that's my, that's the thing with AI. It's not that I'm threatened. Oh my God, AI is going to, going to take away my job personally. But I am, I worry about a world where things aren't interesting. but but i am excited the thought of going back to what i was saying before where creators and artists are going to want to and need to ask the right questions yes to get results and that skill of asking a good question is a really great skill to have no matter who you are and what you make it's the skill of saying um it's the skill of you know knowing what you want really and knowing what you like and and it's it's just it's a it's a new frontier for people with taste because when you can prompt a world into existence, it's just an accelerated version of what you do over the course of your life, which is you manifest things that matter to you.

2:15:33And then the questions are even more important, which is, so what does matter to you? You know, if you, if you remove, if you remove any obstacles, what matters to you? And in a weird way, I would almost say like, my career feels a bit like that right now, because a lot of the obstacles have been removed. I feel like there's so much that's possible in every direction that the question doesn't become what if I could do this because the answer is yes the answer is what it matters to do what matters to make with the time I have on this planet what matters and so in in a weird synchronicity I feel like the the creative process and my personal um area is is is becoming it's like that keeps that that's the question that keeps coming up to me it's kind of like i you know you literally get to decide nothing matters unless you decide it matters you can anything can matter to you but you should sit down and look within and as michelangelo would say sculpt away the parts of yourself that you don't need to reveal what matters and um making a life not a living in the words of quincy is a beautiful way to carve a purpose and sourcing that feels like it's good advice yeah especially for someone in a position like yours and like a lot of artists find them when they have opportunity overload when you're fortunate to get to that space yeah where you can go any direction yeah exactly and and yeah exactly the question becomes you know what what's important and and how do i keep learning you know the thing that would the worst the worst um result is that i stop is is that is that i believe i'm in is i believe i'm one thing and that stops changing is that i believe it's like this is what i am and i define it too clearly that i don't i stop evolving you know that that's the that's the that would be the only shame everything else is just me progressing and figuring it out like like like we all are doing you know can i ask your current relationship with like youtube tiktok Like, are you, what are you consuming?

2:17:35Like, what are your inputs? It's a great question. I would say I watch a lot of YouTube, partly because I'm YouTube gen, you know, like that was my home and I trust it in a sense. I would say, I think of my primary output as a combination of Instagram and YouTube. I think of YouTube as the kind of like, the sort of archive of the most, of the catalog of content. Though I'm enjoying the kind of like the era of YouTube shorts and like roughing that up a bit and being like, just throw something on YouTube. It's fine. I actually think DSPs are moving that direction too. Spotify and things like that.

2:18:10Just release it. It's fine. You know? And we're removing the cobwebs of kind of like, oh, it has to be perfect. It has to be, you know, if I'm going to put it on Spotify, it's like, just put it up. But I think of YouTube as the kind of like the primary archive of like, you know, the pieces of work I've really worked hard on, like my albums, my videos and things like that. And Instagram feels like the place where I have the highest engagement of people who are interested in my antics for whatever reason um and so yeah i consume both of those two i think it's because it's where i find the most i find my people the easiest is it like music stuff or is it like do you like watch like a enchilada recipe or something like what do you get into all sorts of weird and wacko you know like you go down like a fractals youtube rabbit hole and then you start watching about a furrier transform and then you watch then it's the harmonic series and i don't know i think as someone who's interested in stuff it's it's cool it's cool to be at a deep dive and i felt like this when i was 13 you know youtube was brand new and i was able to dig up some some treasure of like whoa i've never seen that before um i but i i treat youtube as a search engine more than i click all the all the algorithm personally but just because i i'm quite discerning about what i want to what i want to see and obviously everyone goes down the thing and you you learn but i i love throwing something at youtube and seeing what seeing what comes back and and yeah i mean instagrams instagrams is cool i mean they all have their they all have their shortcomings um yeah do you have a perspective on what took place with umg and tiktok and sort of what that does to either the artists or the music industry so interesting it's an interesting moment i'm always going to side with with creatives and i don't necessarily think that's a that's that's a separate conversation from something with TikTok or UMG.

2:19:55I think they both are trying to do the right thing and failing in some ways. Like, I don't think it really helps artists to remove music from UMG. But I get that they're trying, you know, I get that they're trying to help. And I don't know. To me, I just think that it's important that creators can always feel like they have access to their fans. And if you put heart and soul and work into something, that should A, be available for your fans to find and B, remunerated in a way that is sound and makes a lot of sense. And so, yeah, people got to figure it out. I'm glad there's a conversation happening.

2:20:29I'm saying, you know, in a world where there's a lot of opacity between these big organizations, I'm glad that someone's gone out on a limb and said, I don't know about this. And then now people are figuring it out. And like, that's healthy. That's good. And yeah, I do hope that there are, I hope that artists don't, for whom there are already so many roadblocks, I hope that there aren't artists for whom access is removed. That's just, that's not going to help. That's not going to help anybody. and you know I think my personal relationship with value is different from other artists I don't value money as more important than impact in a sense like sharing my ideas I'd much rather share ideas have someone take an idea of mine and run with it that feels like that feels expensive that feels like currency to me if I make a bunch of money what am I going to do with it?

2:21:20make cool stuff I suppose you know and I'm fortunate to be in a position where I I tend to have enough money to make the things I want to make and it's taken a decade of into my career to do that but I've never made decisions based on money and I could have if I wanted to make money I would have had a different career that's just that's the truth I could have done it but I don't measure just yeah for myself I don't measure money as important in the equation as long as I can make the work that I want to make and I acknowledge that I'm in a privileged position on that and part of that is like living at home always having a living at home and I can always make things without having to pay a bunch of rent and things.

2:21:54But I look at the equation and I just think like, yes, really bright artists, of course, like 100%. But also don't remove the artist's ability to communicate, which is their primary function in this world, for the good of the world. Don't remove that for some kind of financial gain. And be honest when you state things like this, because you also want to make a bunch of money, UMG, from this. So it's just like, come on, let's all grow up and just look at what's going on here and acknowledge that there's a lot of moving parts. But overarchingly, I'd say I side with the creatives always. And I'm glad there's a conversation happening.

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2:23:13Join.ice.gov and fulfill your mission. Where does your sense of style come from? Oh no, it's a disaster. I don't think that much about style. I think it's not deliberate. I genuinely just am extremely drawn to color and pattern. I love it. It makes me happy. And I've always been like that. And I also like comfort. This is super comfy. I'm a bendy, agile human who loves to run around a lot and change shape. So I like wearing clothes that I can do that in. yeah you wear certain patterns so what i'm wearing right now is actually my family's clothing line my father's designer since the 70s i really love it but uh the first time i i met you i was just like man my dad would love you like i would just like my dad is so deeply connected to colors and patterns yeah uh and like he just can't help himself you know like when he shows up in the world he just can't help himself yeah and there's something to like my brother and i always talk about it it's just like he has this like visceral reaction if we're traveling through mexico or something and he sees a pattern it's just it's like he just has to go towards it it's such a fascinating i don't know creative trait it is it is it's an interesting one i feel the same way it's like you know if i see a building or a person or a yeah piece of clothing or anything i'm like what that's oh i love it i love that so much and in a sense it's like those things that you can't control that end up end up driving you right i can't control it i just love it so much you know i love it i just it's just me man there's just so many takeaways from this conversation um i think it's always it's very refreshing for us to to speak to like a true creative and i think everything that i was looking forward to in this conversation uh really came to life in a really cool way and i try my best not to have too much expectation when we sit in the chairs because you just never know where it can go.

2:25:14But there's certain things of courting yourself or even the conversation around the weather. And one thing that maybe you know or don't know that has really struck me is the, can we just be friends? Because I think that as creatives, who you surround yourself with, the energy you surround yourself with, and the nature of that energy in different times is so incredibly important. And the right energy of, hey, actually right now the energy of this relationship should be just friendship yeah and that's what i need to incubate and grow rather than if you if you change the nature of that relationship it would change the nature of the space and the energy and all of a sudden your creativity is different yeah and it's also about saying we have time yeah we have time we have time let's let's start where we are we have time yeah you know can i was gonna ask jacob to help us solve a creative problem no yeah go for it yeah can you help us solve a a creative problem uh and a musical problem which one is it bottom okay so we are crafting a new graphic intro for the show oh yeah and we have sent this animation to a few friends to here hold on come in the i'll come in the shop we've sent this animation to a few friends to see if they can create a uh sound okay and we want a sound that brings you into this conversation it's short and that can sustain and kind of stand for what what this space is it's good graphic i love that what would you like what what does anything hit you is there any direction that you could give us here because we've we've heard a lot and we should ask Jacob what he thinks about this.

2:27:00Okay, so circles is the first thing.

2:27:06So circles are about round simple sounds. So like a sine wave is a circle. That's what it looks like. So I wouldn't do something too edgy or brassy or jagged. I would do something that goes... And then you've got combining circles. so I almost feel like it's about using a very small set of sounds that are very identifiable and emotionally resonant like oh oh that's that sound I know that sound and it kind of tickles around a little bit and then I love this bit the image goes like this and I feel like that to me is like it's what one becomes three so you kind of go something like that so yeah so you go

2:27:48you know yeah that's beautiful I love that that's cool that's great that was really helpful I can see it yeah I'm down to help anytime yeah cool that was helpful yeah those three coming apart is kind of like you know sitting down with with you know Jacob Collier and spending two hours kind of yeah pulling it apart dissecting I love that that's cool yeah yeah that's beautiful and seeing the different layers that's very good that's very good man I would love to come see you play live perform live like Jesse Volume 4 is absolutely fantastic. I don't know what my favorite song is on the album, but I will say the most pleasant surprise is when Well comes on.

2:28:30Oh yeah, right. Because you kind of don't expect it. Yeah, yeah. You know, and it's like this rock song that you're listening and it just emerges and you're like, wow, that's powerful. Right, cool, cool. Yeah, and I love that. And then Bridge Over Troubled Waters, as you go through the album and you kind of come out on that side of it, it's like this, I don't know, euphoric feeling. It's an important moment in the album. It's an important moment. Yeah. It's, again, I mentioned this to you. I don't remember if we were recording or not, but intentionally sitting down and listening to the album, you know, top to bottom is a really beautiful experience.

2:29:07It's just one that I don't feel like I get as much anymore. And this album is meant to be listened to like that. Definitely crafted for that exact purpose and crafted in a way where there's things to discover each time. I'm glad that you like it. It's awesome. Yeah, thank you so much for coming and sitting down with us. We don't get to speak with that many musicians. And it's really enjoyable. We had AJR on the show. We had Ty Veritas on the show a long time ago. And there's something really nice about interviewing musicians for us because I'll be in the car and a song comes on the radio. I'm like, oh, that's Ty.

2:29:42That's AJR. We're like, oh, now I'm thinking about Jacob. And it's a really nice thing about having musicians on this show. That's cool. That's cool. very happy to add you to the list of musicians that have been here. My total pleasure, honestly, guys. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks. Yeah, I feel like you've really brought your bedroom to the world. Oh, that's cool. Which is something that's like very YouTube. You know what I mean? Yeah, in a sense. In a sense. Like, here's what I do in my bedroom, and I'm going to bring it to the world. Like, whether it's on stage or on… Yeah, it's just such a cool thing.

2:30:10I think a lot about… This is the last thing I'll say. I think a lot about the idea of home and what home means. And I think home used to mean those four walls. That was my home. in London, in a space where I learned to walk and speak and sing and play. And now the idea that that room is not a room anymore. That room is the world in a sense. It's like, we are all in the room. We are all at home. Home is where you are. You know, I think that's, that's a nice thing to have found myself learning, uh, over the course of time. Amazing. Thank you for bringing your home to us. Thanks you guys. Cheers.

2:30:49Thank you.