As a kid, I was really fascinated by intension. I was intrigued... looking around myself... that people often didn't say what they meant. Like, people, someone would have an agenda and then they'd say something different. And just having always been
fairly like, emotionally curious, I didn't—I was intrigued by that. When I was 12 years old, I played a role in an opera by Benjamin Britten called "The Turn of the Screw". Which, I don't know if you know it,
but it's just like amazing. It's really important music to me because I was so young when I internalized it and memorized it. My character, which is the character of the son,
or the "boy", in the novel, who's called Miles... Essentially, it's a ghost story. So Myles is possessed by the ghost of the dead gardener… And then dies, at the end. I was in three separate productions of this opera,
because it's one of those operas that you do as a boy treble, like when you
have a higher voice as a boy. And so I did three, and the second production was directed by this guy called Tim Carroll. Who was an extraordinarily strong figure for me
growing up, because of this thing he did
when we were rehearsing. So, a number of unusual things about this production: one is that the whole stage was made
out of ice and black felt only. There were no other props other than the people. More importantly, I guess, he made
every member of the cast sit on chairs and we went through the score,
and we didn't get up off our chairs to start
organizing where to be on stage and how to communicate the ideas, and so I think it was the day or two days before the dress rehearsal of the production This is very uncommon. I mean, normally, a couple weeks in, people are moving around and memorizing where to be and you know how to deliver the lines. Instead what he made us do is he asked us to go through the whole opera and for each line that we sang he asked us to extract a verb. So the verb that was kind of "base one". What's implied here? What's the implication? What would be the expected intention of that? So for example this there's one line that I sing towards the end, where my governess, who's the sort of the "good" or "pure, innocent" character, who's trying to work out what's going on with me
who's all crinkled up with darkness and stuff... She comes in to see me in my bedroom and
I'm holding a candle and the candle goes out. And she says, "Ah, the candle's out!" And then I sing: "'Twas I who blew it, who blew it, dear." And so that is like, such a terrifying moment,
because this boy… I didn't blow the candle. The candle went out of its own accord, because
Peter Quinn, the "dead gardener", blew it. So he made us sit down and consider this line,
and I remember writing, you know… "terrify" or something, the verb "terrify".
And once we'd gone through the opera, he essentially asked us to invert all of the intentions. So we inverted the verbs
and wrote down the opposite verb. (Now, having gotten into like, negative harmony or something, it's interesting how similar this idea of "polarity" with intention can be.) But, I wrote down the verb "to charm." For that. Because, to terrify someone with that line,
that's kind of what you'd normally do, that's what I've done in the first production was —
(whisper) "'twas I who blew it!" — you know,
the audience would be (gasps!), you know. But, I charmed, I genuinely completely and utterly charmed the governess. I said: "'Twas I who blew it, it was me!" "It was me, I did it." And, what that presented was not the opposite intention, but this like, dreadful undertone of the original intention. This undercurrent was felt by the audience. It's like "what's going on here?" It's like adding a dimension to the emotional delivery of that line, because all of Britten's harmony there is so… It's like, Britten is amazing at being very very pure and very dark simultaneously, so it was both of those things, it was very pure, and very dark, and there's this charming boy singing this dreadful line and… My brain just exploded at this discovery, because… it was it was as though someone had added a dimension to my brain. All this stuff can happen underneath the surface or something, and it matters, like, it's not invisible. It actually makes a difference to the nature of the thing. Like with negative harmony, I guess, it's not that every line was inverted… it's that the lines that were inverted had such a presence about them, that… they came across with all this like
emotional resonance, you know? And I'd say these lines, and they'd be flipped and then she you know, she'd reply to that by being "reassured"… She was reassured by the thing I said that was charming. And that's so… That has so many more emotional dimensions for the audience to enjoy, and what the audience can then do is climb up and down this ladder of… What do they mean here? And what's implied and what's actually there? Already in that story, which is a Henry James novel called The Turn of the Screw, there's all this weird stuff going on between the characters,
and you can't work out who is… who's on whose side, and you know, who's been influenced by who at what time, and… Just for Tim, the director, to have the wisdom to To not tell us what to do. He didn't tell us what to do with information, he just… encouraged us to invert the verbs and then we tried them out and we saw how they felt and that was the end of his lesson. Me as a 12 year old, I loved that and have since been so… I'm realizing now how much I learned from that experience because I've always been drawn towards things that that aren't… one-dimensional. If I do something that's just, "that's what it is!"
Then what my brain does is manifest stuff around it, all the stuff behind it, all the stuff that could have caused it, or… In some ways, that's why I'm good at reharmonization. Because I take a melody and I see all the stuff that's possible around it. But just doing the melody on its own, that's not really something that I've done too much of. It's harder for me to do that. That's not so in my nature. The whole concept of departure and arrival from a harmonic point of view… Because of this kind of… storytelling exercise, it was enhanced in a narrative way at that age… if I'm building up to a climax in a solo Am I going to play, you know… I'm gonna get to that bit where I play a really high note, and it's really loud like [vocalizes] and I hold the note and everyone goes crazy. Like instead of the loud note, I might play a quiet note at that moment because everyone's expectation is heading to a place and I thrill at avoiding that, that's like a classic thing with my harmonizations I guess. And it's not that the original expectation is erased, by any means. It's that people notice the absence of that. People notice the absence of their expectation being fulfilled. And that is… a really interesting emotional choice you can add to your repertoire as a human being, I think. One very concrete example would be in soccer, (or we'd say football,) If you take a penalty, If you look left, and shoot left:
base level one. Like, no bluffs. If you look left and shoot right, then I'm bluffing, so I've displaced the expectation by one level. If he thinks I'm gonna bluff, I'm gonna double bluff and I'm gonna shoot left, which is the same as level one. So, you know, you're now on level you're on level three or something, you know, "double bluff". That exists only because both of our psychologies have climbed up one notch, and then I've… I've out-thought the goalkeeper. That level also exists if the goalkeeper never even considered I was doing a bluff. If you just took my looking that [way] at face value, and save the ball on that side, Then that… that's his response. The interesting thing with with expectation is you know you and I have been steeped in just harmony for a while So if I play a progression of chords to you then you'd be likely to have a very qualified idea of where that chord is going to end up I've always loved to out-grow myself. I've loved to outgrow my own expectation So if last time I arrived at this cadence, I went there, then next time I'll go somewhere else, you know? Or, if this voicing is likely to go there, what happens if I go in the opposite direction, and how can I make that functional? The interesting thing about that though, is that… I don't— The audience doesn't need to trace my thought process to be affected by my lack of fulfilling an expectation because I believe that underneath the thing that I did is created this kind of space where There's some kind of emotional tension and release that's possible underneath the surface of something, you know. It's not about "this is this, and this is this". It can be, this is what could have been, and it's not there. And that can be a lot louder than actually "what is there?" Like all the best stories… You know all the best characters that you fall in love with in books and stuff. These people are interesting because They're not necessarily one-dimensional characters. There's more to them than that. And so, I guess it's a really really long answer to kind of say that this idea of a multitude of… axes, when it comes to navigating emotions not only "there's this or there's this", but "there's this and then there's this… …and there's this, and there was always going to be this."
Like the "underneaths" of what brings us to places, harmonically, or in life… It's something that thrills me to no end and it's something I'm consistently thinking about and I'm now realizing how much I internalized from that production of The Turn of the Screw, age 12. Here we go And finally the lead… Let's check out some of the other parts So it brightens on the second after that note. Because it takes four chords together. Oh, that's a nice 50 cent… I tried not to touch a piano and I didn't do it on MIDI I use my ear to try and get here, and the reason it works is because… [sings a B], that melody note, it's like the major third of the G major chord to which it's going. So you can say that's down 14 cents, Because it's a major third. And *that* now is the root of a Bmaj7 chord with an added 13, but it's over the F♯, so it's in second inversion, and because of that That can be brighter than −14¢. Because it's the root, it rises. So −14-ish, and then 0-ish, and then this can rise because… Pythagoras would say that every fifth gains 2 cents, and because that's an [sings] "A minor chord", the B has risen by 4 cents. So it's brighter than the original B by a little bit. And then all you need to do is just exaggerate that motion. It doesn't sound so far-fetched, because in terms of just intonation and tuning, that's actually like a fairly qualified motion. It's just I've like exaggerated everything about it. And then going downhill like I mentioned the thing about the 7th. You know, it's like 30 cents different. And that's really nice and low. So I guess that is that's why tuning is important, because… you can get away with stuff. Yeah, the clumsiness of equal temperament, I think, makes some of the subtleties of harmony more difficult. Your ear cannot hear (♪ "my"…)
it going anywhere other than there. Because it's like, "we're definitely in 440, man,
we're there." But if, everything is tuned into […] sorry, into equal temperament, even if I just pitch shifted, you know… if I started up here and pitch shifted the […] down, That wouldn't be satisfying because of this like… those kinds of nuances I think make it… more enjoyable. I want to show you Fascinating Rhythm. Because I think you get you'll get a kick out of it. [verbalizes drums] There's all the audio files loading up. [laughter] There's a lot, there's a lot. There was this: Let me show you these two chords: So that's the top. You know I said about, "fourths are too big on the piano"? So, because every fourth is two cents too big, if every fourth is made two cents smaller, and the voicing is: [ascending F♯, E, A, D, G, C] Which is this voicing, then that is I guess six… Yeah, so 12 total cents lower.
So, I tuned this chord from the bottom, I did the bass voice first, and I actually didn't try and make this microtonal. This particular example, starting from the bottom and trying to get each of these fourths to tune… You get that sound, and then… [sings] …or something like that, so how many fifths have you gained? [sings] E, B, [G♭, D♭, A♭, E♭, B♭, F, C]. So 8 fifths. 8 times 2 is 16. So, the difference you're hearing is 12 cents lower for the fourth, and +16 for the fifth, And so that's like 30 cents. So that's why it sounds weird. But the base is just in equal temperament. It's only the upper structure that's actually out of tune, just because of the tuning so it's fun Like I realized I've done it and it sounded weird. I just sort of chuckled a little bit and then left it in. Wanna have a look around? So each of these tracks is a whole group of tracks. So… This is, like this one for example is a folder of all the mandolin. And the ukuleles are nice. These are the mandolins. There's more mandolins. Yeah, and here you see there all the voices. [June: Ahh.] [June sings vocal fill] Yeah, right! So like… And there's all that percussion stuff. [counting beats] So just to show you that the snare sound… So that is… That is an autoharp. You know what an autoharp is? So that's knocking on the back of an autoharp I've returned to be in this key. So it resonates, all the strings resonate, and on top of that… It's a little drum, one finger on a little drum I bought in a charity shop for £2. And then this here is more snare, and this is… Like so half of this sound is um… That's a little pot. And that is claves, but slowed down two octaves so, instead of it being, like… [♪] or whatever claves are, it was like [♪]. And then I'd shortened it and cut it, so it just goes [♪]. And so it adds like a really nice B-side to this A-side. It just balances it out really nicely. And then the autoharp resonates… and then this thing, is like a djembe, nails scraping on a djembe, in a circle. Like… Where's the big great big [vocalizes heavy drum]? Because that is me hitting the back of my double bass. I'll get my fist… but slow it down one octave, so instead of going [oomph!] it goes [bwham!!] And then added a bunch of reverb to it. Yeah. (♪ Touch me, like I've never loved before ♪)
Laptop speakers don't do it justice. It's a big sound. Lil' bit of piano. It's under the surface, though. Check this out. So… The lead vocal is recorded a number of times. So first all there's… it's whispered: [June: Wow.] and hard panned. Sounds pretty sinister right? Then they're doubled: Hard panned. And I took out all of the breaths. And then that's before you get to the lead in the middle. So you have these whispering and double track… but on the double track ones, there's no bass Yeah, so you have taken away the bass here So there's absolutely no… it just is, [♪], only from that frequency upwards. So all of the wealth of the richness of the deep sound comes from the lead vocal, and then it has this wide like subsidiary voices that just make it breathe like spectrally speaking, you know. These guitars on their own are nice. So here for example the voicing goes… Like the the inevitability of the major for me is just so tender, because that G here [sings] is a fifth, and now it's a root…
and it goes from minor to major. That's actually like a "negative" perfect cadence. The choir. See at that moment I added a couple of colors… that note just comes in and goes out. Just to reassure you that you've arrived somewhere. And that like, has a sharp, has sharps in it. So there are two… and they're really low in the mix. And then you know, disappear. But these were very, um, these were very improvised I didn't really plan I kind of just I tried a bunch of stuff out. You see with all the muted voices are the ones I didn't use Yeah, I kind of just followed my ear on that one. I spent like six months on this song. This was the longest song it for the whole album. I think I've never spent longer on anything, actually. I wanted to get it right. Oh, I should show you Flintstones. Well, I plan all of this one on this: The difference in this one and "You And I" was that
"You And I" is completely improvised. I can show you the "You And I" session, it's very different from this one, because this one has like a specific number of parts, you know, that are just all the way through, except for the binaural bits The binaural bits is when it does surround sound basically, so like the end for example Each one goes like in different direction. Yeah. I definitely arranged this one first, whereas… "You And I" was four days work. I sat down, I thought, you know, I'm arranging it right now. I sang: And then I sang: [laughter] I remember, I have a memory of um, sitting in the studio with Herbie and Quincy, like, they came to visit and I… I'd finished the album, we were mixing it with them and We played them "You and I" and that chord, that E♭ Herbie was like, "stop, stop the record!' "What is that chord?" It was really nice. [June: That's quite a compliment.] [sings DΔ over E♭ polychord arp] Yeah, I just thought like… that's such a precious memory to me, like just, Herbie digging that, I was like aw man… Yeah, because then it becomes the dominant chord. The D jumps to a D♭, and it leads you to A♭sus. If you zoom in here… This is the volume of this whole group So it does this to get out of the way of the lead vocal, so here for example… there's more notes now here. If you show someone this it's like,
"what?!", you know, but it like… I guess while I'm making this I have to remember where all the notes are I have to know that basically it's upper part of the voicing and lower part of the voicing. See the problem is that the order changes, see how these are a bit more purple? The purple ones were the first voices I did and then I added the other ones later, like I went back and added all the new colors around so I did that to help me organize it in my brain. I guess when you go into your world, then you just know where… you kind of know where things are I'm sure you can relate to that. But it does look a bit alien to… if you sort of show it out of context. It's kind of, almost mosaics and stuff. [Jacob and June sing the bass] [June: Right here!] ♪ "Awake…" Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, I forgot about that! [June: It's, I dunno, it gives me all the feelings.] Great. Oh, that's nice. It's an E♭7 chord with a D in it. [June: Yeah, perfect voice leading, going to a…] Each one has a place to go. I wanna show you the guitars. [June: The F♯ there (♪). So beautiful.] Yeah, that little 11. Love it. Just poking in there. The nice thing about this is that, This is like you just improvise like "hold it… I think it's hearing something like that" And you're just gonna follow your ear, you know, you wouldn't like plan any of that, it just sort of happens. It's like improvising but in stopped time. What I think that has a, um… if,
[singing slightly flat] the third is low down there… Quite quiet. But sometimes with major chords, you can just pay at the fifth triad over the root and it's like, enough, to be a major chord. When I was little I used to sing with Norah Jones songs where I'd get a Norah Jones song and sing, and turn off the bass on my speakers, and sing the bass a fifth lower than than the recording… I used to freak out with this. Yeah. And you can just sing: "Nightingale…" You know… it makes everything one more color. Yeah, all the overtones rise by a fifth, which is fine because of the harmonic series but it's just super fun. Sometimes I get stressed out though, I'm not… capturing enough of what I'm thinking about. There's so many ideas and then I'm worried that in ten years I'll be like what was going on in my head. That’s why I have this little book… [Camera guy: Nice jump over the XLR cord.] There are just so many, so many things here. Thoughts and thoughts and thoughts and thoughts.
And this is the closest to a journal that I keep I have some like plans for my album in here, before it was made. "In My Room": "Woke Up Today, In My Room, Hideaway, You and I, Down the Line", all this is really close…
"Just the Way You Look Tonight". "Hajanga", "Celebration", "Flinstones". Hmm… Such a mess in here, isn't it? This is all the different kinds of silence that you can… that I thought over this moment: [Do you think about your lyrics very often?] Here's why lyrics are a challenge: because… If you don't leave space in lyrics
for people to find their own meaning in it, then you're writing for yourself. With "In My Room", because the music was so dense already, I focus on simplistic lyrics that have a lot of space in them. I hope by 30… When I'm 30 I wanna still be alive.
That'd be nice. That's the main thing. You look so worried! If I planned it… anything I plan right now will inevitably not happen, because I'm planning it, so. It's a difficult one to answer. I almost just want to learn as much as I can and then… Step two, after "In My Room",
not that this [was] step one necessarily, but… I'm going to do a bunch of collaboration with people. Like orchestra and big band and artists and stuff for this next project, I think. Because there's so much music
I wanna make right now. And… I don't know, 30 seems a long way away. Seems a long way away. Yeah, I don't… I don't even know where I'm gonna where I'm gonna be living or who I'm gonna be seeing or… For now, I think the best thing I can do for myself is just to concentrate on… …on doing the stuff and giving myself
some time to breathe. We were talking about that, on the phone.
As an unashamed introvert, it's hard to survive on the road sometimes because
it's all about "energy out" and not about "energy in",
and my energy is like… "going into my room". So I think right now I'm trying to find the right balance between "energy out" and "in". It's really hard because, it's tempting when you go on the road to just go
"out out out out!" because it's so lovely, and then after about a week of that you realize
"oh, I'm really tired. I have no more energy." right now I'm trying to think about
how to get my life into a… situation where there's both all of the crazy excitement of, whatever, and also breathing space and time for me to not think about myself. Everyone who surrounds me, especially on the road, is thinking about me and make sure I'm okay. And it's really healthy not to think about yourself, obviously To put yourself outside yourself and see the things that are happening, but also the whole big great big picture is a nice perspective challenge, so that's something I'm thinking about.
Or "not thinking about", or something. I'm just so excited to get back into the creative space and make more stuff. After a year of touring these songs they've evolved so much, and will continue to have over the next couple months, and then after a while, it's like, I need this new flow of something which will then in turn spawn another thing and turn around but yeah, I've done I've done so much more teaching especially since the interview went up actually.
It's really wonderful to… to talk about all this stuff, and then after a while you realize that the value in the thing is doing it not talking about it. Suddenly it's difficult to connect all these words with all these sounds when you talk about them so often, you know I think that that connection is really really important and that's a tricky one because I love talking about this stuff. But it's all about the balance, you know. Because one without the other I think is a shame. But the value in an idea is the doing of it, and that will teach you more about it, and that will have more… that will have a longer life than just writing it down on a piece of paper, because yeah, when you die, you don't… you don't take any ideas with you, you just leave behind the stories that you told. [June: Hajanga.] Yeah, Hajanga! So, yeah.
YESSUH