Jacob Collier, Part 1 | Broken Record

foreign [Music] today is the first of two episodes featuring a musical genius multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier in 2011 when Jacob was only 17 he began posting videos to YouTube of himself singing and playing music they were a massive hit this breakout video a rendition of Stevie Wonder's Don't You Worry About a Thing received millions of views and praise for musical Legends like Herbie Hancock David Crosby and even Quincy Jones since then he's gone on to release Five albums including his 2016 debut in my room and 2022's piano ballads an 11 Track album of improvised piano pieces he played at various shows during the recent tour throughout his career Jacobs collaborated with artists like sizza Coldplay Ty Dolla Sign Tori Kelly Daniel Caesar and her he's also won five Grammy Awards and is the first UK artist to win a Grammy for each of his first four albums on today's episode Bruce tell him speaks with Jacob Collier about the making of his latest live album his creative process and his musical admiration for Stevie Wonder Jacob also plays piano throughout the two episodes illustrating Advanced musical Concepts these conversations with Jacob are the world's most interesting music theory class ever a Master Class this is broken record liner notes for the digital age I'm Justin Richmond here's Bruce sedlam and Jacob Collier Jacob Collier thank you so much for having me it's great to have you here you know as part of your quest to remake all of western music oh gosh is that my quest it seems to be your quest you're very busy that was the old Elvis tune yes indeed and that's from your new album piano ballads sure would you first tell me just a little bit about the album and then I have many many questions about what you just played but first tell me just the idea behind the album sure thing okay so I've just been on tour this year which has been very cathartic especially after covid and I've done 70 shows so far one of the challenges that I set myself in order to kind of keep myself on my toes was in every show I was to play a different piano ballad and that the rule was this piano was totally improvised but as long as I know the song I let whatever comes out come out and that is what it is and so many of the the battles on tour I'd actually never rehearsed or played ever before and I sat on stage in the show and I thought right I'm going to do a rendition of X or Y or Z and um just kind of see what happens and it was very interesting just to follow my energy throughout the tour and see which which ballads kind of ended up connecting with me and connecting with the crowd and I I really loved the experience so much that I thought it would be nice to to share a kind of vignette of my most favorite ballad so I released this album about a month ago now and it's um 11 of the 70 and it's my absolute favorite ballads thus far I'm Gonna Keep on doing this throughout the the rest of the year of touring but that song which I always think of as being called wise men say but actually it's called Can't Help Falling in Love it's a yeah one of the greatest songs that I've ever encountered I performed that on tour actually using my vocal harmonizer which is an instrument that I had custom built uh I collaborated with my very different Ben Bloomberg and we built this instrument together and there's a performance of the song through that instrument it's like almost like a vocoder but I thought today I would play it on the piano because I've never done that before so that was a spontaneous rendition do you remember the first time you heard that song I can't remember the first time I heard that song it was probably a few years ago it's such a classic tune and so many people have reinvented it with such Vigor and and personality so I've always been drawn to the song but I've never really thought to do it until now but that song was special on tour for another reason which is that across the the US portion of the tour in every show of the tour I had the audience sing one word from that song and so in Portland they sang um wise and then in Vancouver they saying man and then in Seattle they're saying say like this and it went on like this and it just so happened by complete coincidence that uh by the final show of the tour which was in Columbus we'd done every word of the song exactly to the number which is completely unplanned but um what I then did when I got home was string all the cities together and you have this great big long rendition of the song which is about 100 000 people singing together which is such a philosophically dreamy and Sound Idea in my mind and so I actually just I released the video of that about a week ago now because I I actually had every member of the audience record themselves singing the word with their phone and there was a QR code hanging above the merch table at every show and so at the end of the show the audience members would scan the videos into the QR code and send them to me at home and when I got home I compiled it was over 10 000 submissions of different videos and in total the number of things which has to say about a hundred thousand and I spent a lot of time editing all of that audio together and work with an Incredible video team whose name is light sale and they and I edited all these little faces so if you if you watch the video there's all these little um Mosaic tiles of these audience members each from each City seeing each word of the song there's something I think in that song that everyone can connect to you know there is something listening to this album and re-listening to it despite your technical skill which we're gonna get to in a minute there's something very old-fashioned about people singing sitting around a piano what happens to be you at the piano but there's something very and maybe it is a post-pandemic feeling something very comforting about it well for me I I definitely feel comforted I think to me I've spent much of my life and career making these kind of multi-layered tapestries of sound and for me it's always been such an important place to kind of learn but also to share just by sitting at the piano and playing and so um yeah it felt like an important thing on the tour just to have a moment in amongst the chaos of the full production because tourism is a vast thing you know there's six of us in the band there's lights there's staging there's about 100 musical instruments on the stage we're all hopping around between all of them it's a lot of fun but this moment in the show where I just sit and play a song on the piano feels as you say kind of intimate comforting and and rather old-fashioned the anticipation of the crowd you can feel when they recognize the song firstly and then they're invited to sing right of course tremendous release for them yeah yes I think so I I love it when everyone sings together now I want to ask a little bit about when you sit down at the piano in one of these concerts and you think I'm going to play this song Do You Know the key you're going to sing it in when you sit down no I normally decide at the end of the introduction so I'll sit and play a few notes and it's like following your nose you know you think oh I'll play you know oh and then and then suddenly I'm in F sharp I don't know why but that just fell out you know so so oftentimes I'll I'll start playing I'll play for a couple of minutes and sometimes I haven't even decided what song I'm Gonna Play you know until the end of that introduction I think you know I think I'm going to do How Deep Is Your Love or think I'm gonna do Caledonia or whatever yeah and the other thing I like to do just because it's fun and sometimes it really helps tell the story of the song is is change key throughout so you may start in one key and then move to a different key as the song continues if I'm taken there so one thing you are doing and I'm not sure if you did it this time you're modulating yeah from key to key yes and you're also re-harmonizing that's true can you just briefly explain what that means yeah sure I'll hop to the piano so so uh modulating is the idea of moving the gravity of home right like musical home so it with this song If I do wise men say [Music] this is my home I'm at F major today if I went [Music] that's a different key that's in D flat or [Music] I mean a you know right so on the piano we have 12 keys and there's all sorts of ways to move between them but one of the things I really like to do most is yeah as I said to find a way from one key to another and it can feel really like a big lift when you change key what's the hinge you use to move from one key to another you know in modulation they hear it at the end of songs you know Willie Nelson goes up a town yeah are you just looking for common tones between the notes because you don't you don't just modulate up a tone like you're just not there for like slightly higher yeah you're you're like there's a different degree of difficulty yeah so when you're when you're moving from one key to another what's the signal that you can do it what I found myself doing is Building Bridges from one key to another so say for example if I'm an F which I am this note a right a exists in in other Keys besides F so for example d [Music] a is at home in D Major and in F major it lives in both both worlds right [Music] so there are all sorts of ways you can move between keys but if I end up singing in a if I go [Music] with you right then I've moved changed but the a was my bridge from one to the other you know it's okay it's almost like visualizing yeah different different kind of tributaries away from the river that you're sailing down and then kind of having faith that you'll find a way there because a lot of the things that happen when you improvise happen by chance and if you're too contrived about it or even too thoughtful about it then it can it can remove the the natural storytelling of the thing when I spent many hours of my life sitting at the piano and thinking about these different sounds and how they connect to each other but when I sit on stage and sing a song I'm not thinking about any of that stuff I'm just singing the song and it may it may end up that I find myself starting in F and ending in d flat you know it might just be one of those days and you can you can turn off the the more deliberate part of your brain to do that well it to me it's a bit like talking the English language I'm not consciously thinking as I'm talking to you about grammar or spelling you know even though those things are helpful to think about when I'm learning how to put my language together it helps me contextualize things but when I'm talking to you now I'm I'm improvising based on my syntax my sort of internalized syntax which comes from people I've listened to talk and time I've spent thinking about words and writing words and practicing talking a lot at home when I was a kid you know so it's a similar approach I think to playing I can tune into what the chords are you know I know for example that the a is is a third I could describe it as a third but it's also just the note it doesn't have to be called a third or have a name at all but I understand the kind of emotional properties of that note and all the ways it can move foreign and and you can follow those things so it's Melodies harmonies rhythms all these things kind of connect but yeah I don't tend to be particularly thoughtful on stage sometimes there are days where I am and I think those are the days where I'm I'm in I'm in myself you know I'm within my own world and it's it's sometimes harder in that space to really tell a story and connect with a room I think there's an old expression in jazz now it's time to forget all that and just play exactly yeah couldn't put it better myself so that's modulating we didn't talk about re-harmonizing which is something you do when I say you're remaking western music you're essentially re-harmonizing western music as far as I can tell it is one of my hobbies yeah show me one of two of the things you did to re-harmonize That Tune so this tree goes [Music] it's very simple tune it's nice because every note I've just realized every note from that song is actually in in one scale the major scale it's a very lovely and welcome sound to most ears so when you think about harmonizing and this I might get a bit nerdy here but when you think about harmonizing you're essentially departing home and arriving home that's like in a nutshell that's what you're doing with a song like this so basically I'm going that's what I'm that's the journey in a very very crude sense so there are all sorts of ways you can depart from home right and when we think about harmonization it's easy and pleasurable to think about for example the idea of localities you know keys that are neighbors to F and I think that the two most kind of um most sound neighbors to F uh if f is our chord one you could say it's chord four which is B flat just around the corner and chord five which is around the other corner right and actually you can play chord one four and five you can play almost every song that's ever been written because so many songs are made from those chords and there are all sorts of permutations of these chords so even if we just take the chord F major if you reorganize the notes in that chord then you have what's called inversions of the chord which are like different Sensations different ways in which that chord can feel so we call this one root position like it's most grounded form this one is slightly more it's like um it's perhaps on its way somewhere it's still grounded but it's on it's moving it's not stable because the third the a is in the bass right so maybe it wants to go there right it wants to move and then the final one it's actually I really like this inversion this is called second inversion and it's when we have the fifth in the bass and I'll rewipe some version because it's like you you are arrived you are here but you're not really you're not here you're just kind of perching right you you've arrived but you haven't fully arrived and and so when I think about these chords and harmonization reharmonization I'm using this causes kind of emotional devices to to tell stories so the idea of how home you are that's the concept that's not that's not musical in nature that's human it's a human concept I I'm this amount pulled home or I am this amount safe or or this amounts stable you know these are things that we understand as people and so you you as a harmonizer have all sorts of devices as to how how you want to move people so stay with these first three notes well I could just do and that doesn't go anywhere really but all I could just do [Music] is there's a slightly sweeter version of again not really going anywhere but if I went [Music] then I've moved somewhere and that's a bit drastic from perhaps the first phrase of the song but F which exists in F major also exists in D flat major which is where I just went to and that's cool because d flat major is actually it's quite foreign to F me it's quite a far away key foreign and so what you can do when you harmonize is you can really take people by surprise right [Music] I'm in a chord like that it's very austere it's a kind of Bittersweet chord because these notes are tugging on each other and there's no sustable and that note is sour you know compared to the sweetness of this right [Music] you think oh and I mean again it's just storytelling tell me what's the chord you're playing now this chord was you could call it a b a b major seven sharp five so it's a B major with a seven and a and a six but the fifth which is this is actually sharpened so it's what we call like an uh augmented chord I suppose an augmented chords are naturally quite uh yeah quite stretched and open it's like a sort of an unnaturally large open Gap but if I were to do that oh I've already made some contrast and now when I go [Music] got to really paint pictures you create tension and you release tension and so you know this obviously when you're practicing this and sitting at the piano you're thinking about okay what are these cool how do they fit together what are my common tones but when you sit on stage on improvise you're just painting a picture from from your mind you know so it's a a split second decision [Music] sweeten it up leave it home away from home heading towards home and I'm not going to change key because I feel like it [Music] sweeten I've changed key change key again so I actually started an f and then I went to d flat and then I would end up in E flat which I didn't really plan but but these these kind of things happen not only when you have you've acquired a language of sorts but also mainly when you're just Fearless enough to give stuff a go you think what would happen if I did this and then you you try and sometimes it's great and sometimes it's horrendous you know but I'm kind of here for all of it and I think that one of the joys of touring in this way is that all the imperfections of figuring this stuff out in real time it's all shared as an experience I'm not keeping this to myself or it's just for me to hear in my practice room or in a closed environment I think you always learn most when you put yourself in the real world and learn a skill and I think that for me this experience on tour was almost like a determination to learn this how to do this freely and truly be comfortable with whatever it kind of gets thrown at me whether it's something in my own mind or a song or something from the audience or whatever it's it's a practice of being very present and kind of awake to yourself re-harmonization particularly chord substitution is a big feature of jazz yeah were there players you listened to that inspired your interest in chord substitution was just something that you always had yeah I mean there are so many people even if you think of someone like Stevie Wonder You Know Stevie Wonder is one of these extraordinary humans who writes these really Universal songs but even within his own songs are really dense colorful chords and he's really kind of been able to bridge the gap between this this dense emotional harmonic language and kind of just this Universal songwriting but when I was a teenager there's a group called take six that I'm sure you're familiar with and sure they're just an unbelievably killing group of it's like a six-part gospel jazz singing group and the kinds of chords that they would come out with you know a chord just like you know this kind of 13 cores and stuff like that I hadn't really heard anyone do what they did until they did it you know and it wasn't just their own original music it was the way that they reimagined songs like they got a Christmas album called We Wish You a Merry Christmas I think it's called it's a great title for a Christmas album and they would take songs that I I knew as a kid but they would put a spin on the songs harmonically that just completely blew my mind and so I think that gave me permission as a child to think oh so it's cool to do that then I can I can take a song like you know Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Isn't She Lovely or whatever happened to be and work out a way to do this in my own harmonic way so when I was a teenager I got so deeply kind of really really into and obsessed with the idea of taking a a melody and harmonizing in crazy ways and there was one arrangement I did of a Stevie tune called don't you worry about a thing you know they said [Music] and there's a bit in the Middle where it goes right and I remember thinking oh man that would be fun to reorganize because it's just a chromatic scale you know how does he harmonize it he sort of goes right right and then I have what I said but something like that the fun of that was thinking if if you remove any idea any concept of functional Harmony like you remove the idea that we're in any key or that any chords need to belong within each other's families you just take every note [Music] on a journey that's very dense harmonically but for me especially at that age of steps of 1718 when I was really getting into this this was so important for me to do this kind of experiments because I was discovering chords that I didn't understand my ear would find a chord like even this chord and it's not really a name for that chord I mean you could say it's a chordal voicing that's made of fourths or you could say it's like a C Major seven over the major I mean it's a strange chord basically it doesn't really have a name but it has a feeling and I love that feeling and so if every one of these notes moves to a satisfying Place regardless of your key Center [Music] foreign cause a flat minor over f [Music] you know every note has a pathway like a journey so when you re-harmonize that part of that song you weren't actually thinking in terms of chords you were just moving your fingers until you got the sound you wanted I would say I was thinking in terms of chords but I wasn't thinking in terms of tonality I was thinking more in terms of voice leading which is like a name that we give to the idea that every voice if if this chord is a five Voice chord and every note within that chord has it has its own pathway you know so it going back to wise men say if you think about it being soprano Alto tenor and bass right as Bach would think about it right then every one of those those paths needs to have its own Melody so for example the the outer part goes [Music] [Applause] [Music] and the Baseline is always the most important if you've got these two things going in motion and that's always very sound um and so yeah each of these voices has its own pathway so so if I do this crazy complex kind of course it's the same principle every every note within the chords kind of needs a satisfying destination if one part's going then it's not fun to sing and you don't emote with it if every path has a journey and a destination then you can you can emote with it and I don't think you need to understand all these notes and their momentum to feel it you know because when I know when I was a kid I would hear these chords go past in you know Stevie Wonder songs and I wouldn't know I don't know what the chords were but I felt I felt them I felt what the chords did and I think my my sort of passion Fascination to this day is how how do I reverse engineer that those kinds of emotional reactions to music that I experience as a listener how do I reverse engineer that as a creator of music and and it basically just starts with being curious it doesn't start with knowing everything or being aware it just starts being open to figuring stuff out tell me about growing up your mother's musician she's the violent your grandfather is musician yes also a violin player yes for sure okay it seems you broke the family curse you don't play violin yeah I started playing violin when I was two and I I gave up by the age of four no I thought that's wonderful I was too impatient yeah I wanted to go and have a result you know but the thing about the violin um I mean it's the most beautiful instrument in the whole wide world but if you pick it up and go it doesn't sound good for about a year you know you have to just sort of play open strings for ages before you can even make one note sound good and I think as a child I I was I didn't have the patience for it I want I wanted to hit the drum and for it to go back and that was so kind of instantaneous you know so what was your first instrument after the violin I suppose my first real instrument was that it was it the Casio Ocasio keyboard so I think I played something called a ctk 11 I think it was cool but it was just a bog standard but but excellent keyboard with 200 sounds and 100 rhythms you know so The rhythms you go through all these different genres you have sort of you know bossanova and and um poker and uh rock and roll and stuff like this and it was it was great you know you skip through the things and it would go and you go through and and I learned kind of learned how music worked through that thing and then you have these sounds trombone timpani you know vibraphone violo it sounds like I wouldn't know these sounds in the real world unless I'd had access to that instrument nowadays I mean man it's crazy now what you can do in in something like GarageBand or logic there's all these extraordinarily well-recorded samples of you know full Orchestra synthesizers drum machines it's really kind of overwhelming and amazing and I think growing up now as a musician there's so many things you can play with which is both thrilling and also troubling because one of the great things about that keyboard is there were just just 200 sounds I didn't have any more than 200 now there's infinite it sounds any sound in the world so I loved having that as a device or exploration there was even a little sampler inside where you could layer things up so I would do like a drum a drum beat and then I would on the second one I would do Baseline you know then I'd do a piano thing or a trumpets or whatever I'm just playing around and music was going in to my mind because my whole family was was Musical and there was all in every corner of the house where someone was either playing or listening to music so it wasn't like there was a shortage of material but the crucial thing for me was having a keyboard an instrument where I could actually throw paint and for it to stick and when I was seven years old I actually got um this recording software called Cubase which is a way in which you can layer tracks in the computer and that was very exciting for me you know little kids pick out Melodies on Tiny keyboards were you always interested in harmonizing those notes yeah for me it was chords for chords first I don't know why but I mean melody was was was inevitable but but Harmony was the thing that I really got got my rocks off on it was like whoa you can that's crazy oh man that's an unbelievable sound there's so many things going on there yeah for someone like as a kid for someone with musical ears to get my ears around wow this there's five sounds there and but they are together one sound and there's also within that this sound and this sound which are two different worlds and they rub against each other oh and just like the rubbing I mean that's such a special part of music for me it's just like the way that notes interact with each other but as a as a kid I mean I would sit at the piano [Music] foreign just doing this and then I'd move one note it changes everything [Music] right note by note it changes foreign I feel myself moved by them I'm moved by the way that these interact and feel and um and so yeah I think as a kid you can take any melody in the world so that's fine but it's the way that you clothe it that that is really what Thrills me the most I'm assuming just watching you you have perfect pitch I do yeah do you think that helped you sort of figure out the relationships between them I think so yeah I mean if you take the sound you know being able to hear be under ascertain that there's a d f sharp and a G sharp and an e is helpful I don't think that you need Perfect Pitch to to become interested and very good at this but um it's like a sort of um cheat code kind of it's like a ease of access you know being able to say B flat like I know that's a B flat and but without having to check an instrument it mostly helps with um with audience singing actually because I don't have to refer to an instrument to get the audience to sing a chord which may be say for example the introduction to a song I think I can then sit down and play a song and they're already in the key that I was in but without me without me having to check or oh okay uh you know it's not I can kind of pluck the notes out of my mind and and that that's actually very handy there's nothing crazily Supernatural about it I think it's just it's a type of memory that you can develop if you're very familiar with a particular way of thinking and working so there was clearly classical music in your house for sure growing up what other kinds of music was there you mentioned Stevie Wonder where did you first hear Stevie Wonder oh my mom is like the biggest Stevie Wonder fan and she's just she's all about Stevie and I think yeah as a kid it was just it was so many so many parts of Stevie's discography would just be in the house I remember there's an album he made called hotter than July and the first song on that album is called did I hear you say and it starts with this like [Music] and it was so exciting I remember dancing as a just dancing as a child thinking it's so exciting you know it's so so fun he is one of those artists that even with all the gold records and all the Acclaim he's still strangely underrated yeah I would say so I mean yeah underage is it's a funny word but I think that I think the thing when you're when you get as big as Stevie has gotten is that you're taken at face value as someone who is just big only and big is big is not the deepest you can be you know biggest big is a scale question not not a breadth or depth question and so Stevie did achieve the bigness of scale but I think the thing that he achieved that was more important and I think the thing that has stayed that has stood the test of time and the thing that I Revere and all of my peers Revere is the depth of what he was doing sonically harmonically vocally tonally lyrically politically I mean he's just so in touch with everything and so you know I think the idea that he was able to scale that depth onto such a global scale is huge but it's funny when you say yeah he's underrated I think perhaps it's because people think oh Steve oh yeah he's really famous isn't he you know he's a really famous musician he does lots of songs that everyone knows which is very true but the deeper you go into Stevie the more you you feel and I think that's a like a real sign of greatness is that also don't you worry about a thing the song that made you famous because you did a YouTube right version of it that's from his best side of music I think yeah second side of innervisions I think it's like the best oh it's unbelievable side of any it's higher ground Jesus Children of America you haven't done nothing yeah that's fulfilling this oh man that album is just crazy yeah this whole album is the whole thing it ends with uh Mr Know It All just like oh yeah such an incredible uh God it's just it I mean such a statement and I think you can also you hear when he's you hear when he's thirsty and so from I think my favorite currently my favorite Steve album might be talking book and it's not because it's his most refined album or complete as a thought process it's it's that he's so he's so thirsty to figure it out he's like he just wants to write songs he's just so desperate to play around with with stuff and and you can you can feel him being I mean he's 21 when he's doing that up he's discovering it before our ears you know before our eyes he's figuring it out on that album and I think that later on in his career he'd figured it out already more and I mean nothing he's ever made has not been tremendous but I think that there's a youth and an experience of Gathering and being moved by something in the present about that early stuff where he's he's just he's just ravenous for it and you can tell that as a as a listener it's interesting reading back about him at that time because there was a point in which Motown sort of thought it was over for him that he was a child prodigy you might sympathize with this because you were so young when you started yeah they thought he'd peaked and then I think he he produced that great spinner song It's a shame and I always thought that was so unfair because he's not a guitar player primarily but it's one of the greatest guitar licks of all time how did he do that yeah how does he do that no I know for sure but the thing I think with stevia was so cool and I think we need to remember is you know he made that album called where I'm coming from right he was 20 years old when he made it and it was kind of his first record after the Motown years where he thought okay this is a statement and it's a weird album man it's dark and gnarly and it's it's not you know it's not amongst his most palatable work but he needed to make that album I mean it's there's some amazing stuff on there and I think that the amazing thing is that he was given the chance to make that album it's like of course you of course made and we'll put it out of course we'll put it out because if he hadn't made that up if he tried to make a hit record at 20. he wouldn't have done it because he needed to go into that depth and the depth of music of my mind and talking books before he managed to get to something like innovisions you know or songs in the key of life I think that there's this kind of disease that you know you have to make a if someone doesn't make popular music at one point in their career you know it's all over for them and it's all going downhill I think it's a really tragic kind of thing because people under fulfill their potential as experimenters by negating some of the darker or more gnarly interesting strange ideas um musically in favor of things which people which more people will like and relate to and um you know I think this is a problem that is deeper than the music industry I think it's it's a human tendency I think to kind of disregard or think of parts of ourselves the non-palatable or darker parts of our personalities themselves as kind of weaknesses you could say or not things to be discussed or shared but I actually think those things those things make us so much even even more sometimes than the parts of us that we've got all figured out is welcoming those parts of yourself in that makes you a deep person and a whole person and a real person because you can't just be the good stuff you have to welcome in all the stuff and Stevie is such a shining example of someone who musically really got in touch with the depth of an experiment and through that came right came around to these totally Eternal Universal songs which borrowed from and learned from and gleaned from the kind of experiments that were stranger and had he not done would not have informed those experiments and I think would not have made that music quite so deep now as someone who started so young and was popular so young is that a journey you're conscious of making I would say so I think my career started almost by accident I didn't think of myself as starting off a career when I was making those YouTube videos at home I thought oh I'll just make some videos and it'll be really fun and mostly I really I just wanted to push myself musically as far as I could possibly go in every direction because I was so ravenous for understanding stuff and for playing around with stuff and so I did that stuff and it was it was almost this kind of this accidental symptom of those experiments that people started to listen to the music and I remember I got an email from take six my childhood Heroes and and that was closely followed by an email from Pat Metheny who's another one of my heroes and then following that was Hobie Hancock and then finally it was Quincy Jones and and I think that's when I thought gosh perhaps there is something in what I'm doing that you could describe as having a career being a musician or being an artist you know I thought myself as a someone who is eternally fascinated and and playing around and I'm a musician for sure but I I don't know if I thought about myself as a as an artist for a little while yet and I suppose it wasn't until I I made this album called in my room which is the first time I made and I made it on my own in this room in London that's when I really thought okay I'm gonna I'm gonna write some songs which I hadn't really done much of before and I put this music into the world and I think that's when I'll feel like this is my story at the beginning you know even though my story had been going for 20 years before with all the experience I've been doing it felt like that was the first time I'd kind of thought okay this is a statement that I'm making as a cohesive Jacobian thing and uh I felt really strongly that I wanted to kind of produce the album myself and mix it myself and I played every instrument on the album and I I did every single thing for that album myself because there were all sorts of people who thought oh I'll kind of produce it or can I mix it whatever and I I was I was quite firm about doing it myself in some ways it regardless as to whether that was even the right thing musically I think it was definitely the right thing philosophically for me because I was able to learn how it felt to be the author of all the different parts of my experience and my my exploration and I definitely took my time and and I'm very glad that I did and I would credit not only Quincy who who at that time was he became a sort of Godfather slash manager figure to me but also someone like my mum who was just so present in the process and very much encouraged me not to rush I think my mum's never really cared about the idea of oh gosh you know Jacob's a big star or he's got a celebrity it didn't really feature in her mind I was never put under any pressure we should point out you're wearing a t-shirt are you sorry you're wearing a sweatshirt with your mother's name on number one fan it was given to my mum by a fan of my mom said they gave it to me that should be the only thing on your merch table yeah totally I'm sorry I'm so here for that she truly is the greatest and I think she had a way a meeting since I was very very young of not not put me under pressure to be a thing it was a question more than an answer it was how do you see the world Jacob but how do you hear this how do you experience this did you have trouble letting go because sometimes people who go into Studios this is the myth of I don't mean the myth that it's not true but I mean the mythology of Brian Wilson he goes in to do smile and it can't get finished yeah of course you have trouble just saying at some point it's got to go out in the world it has to be done yeah I have I definitely experienced trouble in that way I think when you have awareness you're awake to all the different elements of something or I could just make this I could turn the kick drum up in 0.5 DB or I could I could EQ out a little bit of 240 hertz from the vocal or oh I could just nudge that drum Thing by a tenth of a second you know those kinds of details when you when you're aware of them it's really hard to let go of them because everything you you hear in your own music when you're making it it becomes those kinds of zeros and ones if it was just a tiny bit this way then it would be more it would be better it'd be more emotional it'll be more a more concise statement and sometimes as well it's like it's loosening oh it's too tight I need to make it sloppier let me just make it a little bit sloppier and then it's gonna be just right and all this is possible now in a way that wasn't available yeah I mean this is the thing because it's the miracle and and the disease of our time is that these tweaks are endlessly possible so I mean exactly as you say I think there is a there's a certain point where it's like well I I need a deadline to to work against you know so so that things get done or things can be born as well because if there is not a deadline there's just this utter infinite thing that it could always I could always do a new thing or a fresh thing or a tweak or whatever that said there are certain things I think that I that I make and have made over the years and I'm experiencing now I'm making where I know that I can't do the thing I did better than the thing that I just did I think when you're faced with Total Infinity which is one of the kind of Privileges and and challenges of my life creatively there are immense reliefs to be found when you ground yourself in in a particular form okay thank goodness I found a form it's one of the reasons I love playing these songs on the road so much is because I'm I'm it's it's totally unlimited but I'm held together by the fact that there's a song with words and a beginning middle and an end and a crowd in a room there's just the right criteria for me to feel actually very free because if I were with a song at home with no audience in my own spare time it's a way for it to gather form because there aren't the confines of a listening crowd an audience who can sing and who who are aware and awake to the music and a certain amount of time in the set that I need to fill you know all these things that make that possible I think for me yeah one of the the creative quests of my life is ways to contain my ideas and my Essence and when I do it well I think it's you know a concise expression of infinity that's kind of what I aim for and uh it's much easier said than done because I find that that yeah there's so much in the world to express and explain and there's so many ways to say things but there are those times even say with the English language where you say something with a sentence in a way that it could not have been better said than the way you've said it that's like writing a song where you think what I don't need to try and write that song ever again because I've already written it it's done and that's always such a relief thing oh gosh it's done I've finished it's good and and those moments are very uh kind of seldom and very very welcome to me you know you're making me think of the famous psychologist Stephen Pinker years ago at a conference outraged a lot of people by saying that music had no evolutionary value it was not valuable in the evolution of people and a lot of other uh neuroscientists have said well actually it's one of the crucial ways we learn cause and effect yeah and expectation just as you said every note you're playing it it has a home it's trying to get to and that's something that that actually children learn from songs Oh totally whereas you know pinkers I mean the awful world he was painting I don't mean in general but of music is that it's sort of formless and it does it does go on forever and you can't contain it yeah well I suppose then that brings up the philosophical question of whether something that goes on forever has value in the present or even in in gathering form over say Generations I I would say I yeah I would say music is very very similar to language spoken language or visual language or whatever and I think that as people we naturally have a yearning for and a gift for connecting and and communicating ideas to each other so one of the things we do best and music is is one of the more delicious dialects kind of in which we can do this but you can express by screaming or shouting or stamping or roaring or talking or crying or laughing whatever these things and I think music is a it's like an extended limb of these Sensations in in life and it's a really visceral kind of coloring palette where you can you're able to be very descriptive if we stop communicating in person with each other if we end up being siled within our own languages our kind of digital languages and we don't connect and communicate I think that's when we stop evolving because we evolve from each other with each other by each other's ways each on our own terms but as a Collective and I think that music has a an accelerated gift that offering people experiences that give them access to that I think we've learned that's not what technology provides it's like a mirror in a sense it's an extension of our natural very pure wish to form meaningful connections with each other and you know I would say musically I mean we were discussing earlier on the idea of you know 200 sounds on a Casio versus you know two million sounds and musical software I both sides are real you could say well what a pity you know there's so many possibilities and so so little guidance you know it's hard to make make a start or it's hard to beat whatever but you could also say well what an immense cathartic relief that our children have a way of playing with sounds that truly is as infinite as the world and the only limit is their imaginations and so technology I mean it's enabled me to to have a career to share music with the world to create visual form musical form to collaborate with you know hundreds of musicians all over the world over FaceTime and we transfer and Dropbox and all these kinds of things let alone I'm asking a a digital audience and I think you know being able to share meaningful things with the world just as much as it's distracted me of as the same with everyone else from The Real World and takes me out of the present and all sorts of things but it's a double-edged sword and it's able if we choose to really augment the parts of us that make us really human although for you you have the experience now of playing in concert in which you're bringing all these people into your songs growing up did you play with each other around the house was sort of collaborative music a part of your growing up very much so so we all sing in my house so so my family's like me my mom and my two my two little sisters and and so we we sing as mentioning bark at our own satb so point out to celebrate so we sing four part Corral's Christmas carols like whenever we possibly can whenever we have a day we're at all four in the house which now is actually quite seldom but we'll sing as such a delight it's so so nice and at school you know I started lots of bands at school I wore different hats you know I started like an African drumming Ensemble with a bunch of jembe drums and I started an improvisation group where everyone just improvised and I I played drum kit in my concert band at school and I I did some arrangements for the school choir and I sang in the school quite so I I was kind of trying these different outfits of working with other people and I really had a good time doing it but I found that my fundamental learning happened when I took whatever I learned home and applied that to my own kind of internal introverted tapestries you know and I think it's over only over the last 10 years or so that I've really kind of learned the skills or I'm still learning the skills of of unpacking those internal scientific balanced worlds and presenting them to people in real life you know and it's funny I've spoken to people some artists I I really respect who are really young and people who who blew up kind of over quarantine through videos online and now are faced with this channel so how do I what what is playing live you know how do I talk it's such a different thing to do from setting up your phone on portrait mode and just playing a song and and having nice lighting it's such a different thing to stand on stage and say not just I'm going to sing the right notes and play my song but actually communicate that to a woman I had to figure that out but over about a year or two when I first started touring because I I told with a pretty ambitious setup I talked with a one-man show so it was me in the center of a circle of about 12 different musical instruments and I was in the middle essentially playing them all once so I would play bass and it would Loop and drums it would Loop and keys and it would Loop in guitar and it would Loop then I'd sing and I'd play harmonizer and it was and I do a piano solo over the thing I'd looped and it would change key you know it was a very very kind of involved production and it was it was quite singular from a technological standpoint it really hadn't really been done in that way before and so a lot of it I was figuring out as as much as anyone else was figuring it out but I think for the first kind of year or so of touring a year and a half of touring I was I was just learning how to play music on stage and feel comfortable and be cool with the fact that there was an audience there that was listening in and a part of it and you know I wouldn't say I was but I was you know hugely nervous or anything but I would just say I hadn't figured out how to really enjoy and be comfortable in a situation where I'm under that kind of pressure and and now I mean I'm more at home on stage than I am in many other areas of my life it's like I'm like a fish in water on stage and I think I've just I've learned how to not only kind of survive and cope Under Pressure but just alchemize it into the optimum comfort and creativity and I think that it takes time to do that and I don't think you can just spring out of the box straight from YouTube or Instagram onto the station you know you're fully formed but because I think that all the nuances of how to build a build a performance like that take time I mean I'm very very aware of all the different elements of my show for example that I've been touring this year you know we got as I say six musicians on stage playing all sorts of different kinds of things and you know even down to the the set design and the lighting you know I've sat with the lighting operator his name is John John Rogers and sat with him and crafted it exactly the tone of the green that is triggered when Christian the drummer plays the snare sound you know go and a green light will go but it's like is that dark green or medium green or light green and how much neon is in the green how many decimals of a second does it take for that green to fade out does it go you know and so all these kinds of forms they're all part of the music they're all part of the expression and it sounds kind of cerebral when I say it out loud but actually it's just a natural extension of a communication form that I've been familiar with just by being a human and being watching the world and thinking but it's it's right for there to be a blackout when this word is said or it's right for the lights to go from left to right rather than right to left because the attention needs to be moved to this musician or or away from this thing or and all those degrees I think that as a creator of shows I think I've I've developed and I'm developing more and more skills that the more I do it and I think that that it's the same same as same same is true for everyone I think the same was true for the one-man show I didn't really understand what I was doing at that time but I was learning so fast and so much and what a privilege to be able to learn in you know in the real world with with real people and it still boggles my mind to still now to go to a city and turn up on a station and there's 2 000 people who somehow they found my songs it's a crazy feeling I mean it's just it never gets old I never walk out of course there were people here you know it's like why would why would people know myself why would they know my songs you know it's just it's an astonishing thing and and something I take very seriously as someone who kind of builds experiences and shares things with the world in terms of I want to communicate the best I could possibly possibly communicate about how I feel as a human because that's my duty as an artist I I must explain the world as I see it because if people are turning up I mean what a privilege to be in that position and and I say I take it seriously with the lightest possible touch you know because you could say life is very serious but it's also to be taken very lightly and I think the same is true with music thanks to Jacob Collier again for sitting down to talk to us about his career and about his process and about some insane musical Theory you can hear piano ballads and all of our favorite Jacob Collier songs on a playlist at brokenrecordpodcast.com you can follow us on Twitter at broken record broken record is produced with help from Leah Rose Jason Gambrell bent holiday Eric Sandler Jennifer Sanchez Predator Sophie crane our executive producer is Mia LaBelle and if you like our show please remember to share rate and review us on your podcast app our theme musics by candy beats I'm Justin Richmond

Channel: Broken Record Podcast

Views: 23,569

Keywords: Broken Record, Podcast, Interview, Music, Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Collier, Jacob Collier Interview, Bruce Headlam, Jacob Collier Live Performance, Jacob Collier Music Theory, In My Room Jacob Collier, Piano Ballads Jacob Collier, Stevie Wonder Jacob Collier

Id: XatSXM24oGo

Length: 51min 23sec (3083 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2022