The emotional intelligence of music - Jacob Collier

jacob welcome to ways to change the world could you explain you know how you came to music i know your mother's a musician but how have you come to this place where you are now i think um for me it was almost like a second language growing up and i was given an immense amount of freedom just to play around with things and i wasn't given particularly instructions as to what to do with it it wasn't like you've got to practice you've got to make this you've got to do it like this and if you don't do it my way then you're doing it wrong it wasn't like that at home uh it was it was very much a space to play and i was i was encouraged to listen to all sorts of things i would press play on the cd player back when they were cd players and see what would come out and it would be you know stevie wonder and earth wind and fire and and then it would be bjork you know and beck and then it would be bartok and stravinsky and and for me i saw no reason why any of these flavors were inherently different from one another and so i sort of came into into the music industry a staunch non-believer in genre because for me it was just one massive language with all these different dialects and i was given i guess the time and the the space to play kind of on my own terms i've always believed in not not rushing things i'm not rushing through ideas but you know i i focused on making the the best music that i could at all different portions of my life where i've been releasing things and i think that that's my job as an artist i think it's almost like there's a there's a myth about artists which is that we sit around deciding what to what kind of music we want to make but i think the truth is that artists make the kind of music that they need to make and i think one of the things i'm most grateful for when i look back is that there was a realm a space for me to explore that kind of on my own and so when i came into releasing youtube videos and eventually releasing albums and and then eventually going on tour and things like that i felt like i had kind of a strong foundation of it doesn't matter what happens it's not about the the destination it's not about whether people love it it's kind of about that i'm that i'm doing it at all and that was the thing that i fell in love with the most and so when it comes to something like the grammys it feels a bit like a bonus to a process you know when you were doing videos like don't you worry about a thing years ago that got you noticed were you aware how different what you were doing was not really i i was doing it i was i was doing music the way that it felt right to me to do it i was definitely stretching stuff i was stretching the musical harmonies a lot and i was stretching the musical rhythms a lot that was the stuff that was getting me really really excited especially at that time but i didn't think of it as hugely different from the things that were out there i was just kind of doing it my way i guess how important is the theory because actually what you do is very technical it is i i would always um i i guess i hated theory for 20 years and i fell in love with it when i started to apply it to stuff and realized that i liked it because it was part of what i liked about music i it's completely secondary to how the thing feels but i do think what's quite fun as a young musician or as a musician of any age when you become interested in something is kind of uh zooming into how something works and the properties of something and how it works and kind of increasing the resolution of your power to wield that as a as a musician so you know there are all these different chords all these different rhythms and and you can say oh well it's this and this and this and this is how they fit together and these are the right ways and the wrong ways but there aren't really any right ways and wrong ways i think there are just forces and if you if you learn how to wield them then i think you're able to tell better stories as a result so i came to music theory from falling in love with the way music made me feel and for that reason it has an essence of truth in the stuff that i create jacob anyone who's seen you play knows how effortless you make uh this thing that is incredibly technical and complex look but you look like you you're having a ball all the time thank you only you is it as effortless as that well i think that there are different levels to that i i suppose uh i always seek out the edge of the thing i understand um and i think i think the challenge and in some ways the joy of it is learning how to be effortless with something you don't quite know i i think i'm my least effortless when i get deep into the skill set and start thinking on the level of the of the skill but when i jump out of the skill and i think okay music big big terms music that that's where i feel like well i have a language for music even if i don't have a language for how this exact thing feels and i remember when i was younger you know learning piano and learning bass basically just by listening to people play and by imitating them um there was one school of thought that said you know the best way to do things jacob is to transcribe them and when i say transcribe them it's to you know say for example listen to a a bill evans recording i i love bill evans very much he's a jazz piano player take every note that he plays learn every single note exactly as he plays it and then play along with him in such a w with such a uh with such accuracy that you know those notes basically disappear because you're being bill evans now that kind of learning is it can be profoundly good and very important um but for me i think that listening to the the bigger gestures of how some how someone sounds when they play can be even more valuable than that so take stevie wonder for example i'm never going to be stevie wonder you know i just i'm never going to be him the guy has so many different dialects of his language which i really love and that come from where he's come from so you know there's there's the soul aspect there's the jazz aspect there's the songwriter aspect there's the motown aspect there's the political aspect all these things and for me as a musician listening to him the best i can do is i can hear myself in what he's doing and i can i can show the world or i can show myself how i listen to that thing so sometimes when i sit at the piano if i think oh am i keith jarrett yet or am i brad meldow yet or you know am i daniel barenboim yet then i'm going to be paralyzed from expressing something effortlessly if you use the word effortlessly whereas if i say you know what it doesn't matter if i play the wrong notes because there's no such thing as a wrong note what matters is that i play the gesture the shape that i see and over time what i found is you know you're you're you're kind of the the resolution of your understanding of that thing can can can improve and will improve as you learn to pay attention to this to different depths of different aspects of the thing that you're making so i i guess effortlessness is about fearlessness more than it's about skill is there really no such thing as a wrong note because we all think when we're listening to things that there is it's a very human thing uh to to have this idea that this is right and this is wrong you know if i if i play a say i play a c major chord which is this chord all right and i play this note you might think oh that doesn't sound very good that sounds like a wrong note it doesn't fit within c but if i'm very careful if i put this if i put that note up here and i spread the notes out a bit i can actually make that sound kind of interesting there are all sorts of interesting contexts you can put notes in and and that's when for me it gets thrilling because it's about kind of emotional problem solving you know and uh i have a dear friend whose name is herbie hancock and he's a very legendary keyboard player and he used to play with it with a very legendary trumpet play called miles davis and herbie tells a story i believe where he's he's playing they're playing a show together they're playing a gig and they're in the middle of i think miles of solo and herbie plays this chord and the chord is he thinks ah it's completely the wrong chord you know what have i done this is horrendous you know miles is going to kick me out of the band sort of thing this chord is just it was just the wrong chord at the wrong moment and he says well what miles did is he turned around and he played a note that made that chord the right chord it's almost like alchemy you know so what you can do is using the power of choice and the power of context you can validate anything with anything else in music there are no two things that cannot go together if you put them in the right context and so for me i think as a as an arranger for example somebody puts notes together a lot of the time i find that thrilling what's the relationship then between chords and emotions you know and are chords that you think of as minor or diminished always in that vein or can they make you be happy and positive how do you how do you manipulate them that way it's so it's a really it's a great question and a deep question i think i think some people like to say well you know major chords for example are happy chords and minor chords you know they're quite sad but i think the the truth of the matter is minor chords can be very joyous indeed and actually major cause can be the most heartbreaking sounds in the world and again it's it's about context and so even keys different keys uh i've been thinking about this a lot recently they can feel very different depending on where you come to the key from and i guess just quickly too late to lay it out in traditional music there are 12 possible keys there's c and then c sharp d and then that's another c so there's lots of different c's um there's lots of different c sharps lots of different these and each of these notes is not just a note but it's actually like it's like an anchor point like a a tonal center you could say a gravity so if i'm in c major then i can go away from c major and come back or like that or you know and so music we think about resolution a lot of the time i'm resolving to the key of c and how you resolve to somewhere i think that's where the emotions come in because if i go that's quite royal quite you know quite genuine quite wholesome if i go then that it's really colorful it almost feels a bit sadder you know you've got this interesting deeper i mean this is a minor called an f minor chord to see and it feels like the sun's coming out a little bit you know because it's a bit of a dark it's a bit of a flat key and it opens into this brighter key whereas if i do g to c then it has a bit of a kind of steadfast certainty about it and these are all words i use i mean it's completely subjective you know everyone has their own ideas about how these things feel but i can think of hundreds of ways to arrive to see that all feel different if i go then that's very different from you know that's kind of that's like a jazzy thing or all of these different things they all have their own power and if you make a chord by which i mean put lots of notes together each of those notes has a different property and a different momentum and so learning how to control those i think that's when it beca that's when it can become emotional when you know the power of a certain motion and then you use that motion to tell a story i mean there's so much subtlety to what you're saying and it's wonderful to hear but i mean i wonder whether you brought your emotional intelligence to music or whether you've discovered emotional subtlety and intelligence through music oh yeah i wouldn't say that emotions are particularly integral to music and this is something else i've been thinking about recently because some people say well you know music's very emotional it's it's it's yeah it's very emotional thing but i actually think people are very emotional and music is one of the ways in which we can express that you know yeah you can say you know vibrations and frequencies and all these things you know they're very very meaningful but but in some ways they're no more meaningful than another language you know i think that languages are what people use to to express things and i think that when it comes to music the the best i feel when i make music or the most cathartic it feels to make music is to open up that casket and to show so many different kinds of colors and flavors and obviously there is a point at the beginning of learning music where you just have to figure out what on earth is going on you know so what is music well it's harmony it's rhythm it's melody okay sure and then here's some ways in which those things fit together sure and here's some music that i like to listen to and i kind of get a sense of it sure and once i have just a few skills then you can always make an interesting choice with the thing that you know and i think what i've realized is that it's actually it's not about how much you know about anything could be music could be something else it's not about that when it comes to communication i think the more important thing is what you choose to say with what you know and so sometimes for example babies can say the most profound things with with the most rudimentary linguistic awareness because they haven't been preconditioned to think well this is right and this is wrong they'll say something that comes completely out of the blue that reflects a really strange kind of perspective on something which can be really profound whereas sometimes for adults you know saying something that feels like that is much harder because we've learned what's right and we've learned what's wrong and i guess i've tried to anchor my kind of musicality i suppose in a sense of if you could do anything at any time then what's right and wrong well what's right is what feels the strongest you know and and that that for me is a bit of that that's my my north star and and i try to strive towards towards those things because i think they make me they they make my ears perk up they make my mind feel stuff that i've never felt before and if music can do that for me then i hope that it can do it for the people who end up listening to it if people end up listening to it you said that you you were just allowed to sort of discover instruments you would expect the child of a classical musician to be trained and drilled almost i mean how come you weren't it's a really good question i mean you'd have to ask my mom that question i guess but i think you know my mom is the kind of musician who's extremely intuitive and you know she was yeah she was trained at the royal academy music and she's a incredible conductor and she's also a very very good teacher i think that her skills as a teacher were really fundamental to me i used to sit on her lap as a two-year-old looking up and seeing her play the violin above me and i would listen to the things she was saying to these students that would come into the house and how she would get the music out of them and i think you know how how she tends to think about this is that it isn't such a that there isn't such a thing as kind of like people who learn uh from from from a disciplined place and those are the people who have the skills and then people who learn from an intuitive place and those are the people who go off the rails kind of thing i think that the way that she would that she would talk about it and the way that she kind of showed by action that it was possible to be was that actually intuition can lead you to a high resolution skill set but if you come at it from a sense of freedom rather than a sense of rigidness and you're allowed to be who you are in it then the results are way more interesting when ultimately you arrive at a skill set than if you've been forced into one and you know lots of friends of mine were told to have piano lessons as a kid or violin lessons as a kid and within you know three or four years they'd fallen out out of love with it and in some ways you can kind of see why because you know they're not necessarily doing things that they want to do or like to do and the musicality that they're learning about doesn't apply to the things that they like but actually i would say that you know when i when i fell in love with kind of like acapella recordings like you know groups like take six you know or steely dan or people like this with these great big vocal clusters beach boys i realized that the stuff that was going on in those recordings was actually kind of similar to what's going on in bark corrals but i'd always purposed but cross ah barker i was boring and i've got to do that for school but but i came back to it off my own accord later because i realized wow actually if there's one person who really got this stuff together it's actually bach you know bark is like the hippest cat on the scene still i came around in the end but i think because i was given that license to do things the way that i wanted to do them and my own fascinations led me to those doors and then i was able to open them myself rather than other people sort of shoving me through them before i was i was i was ready and how did you discover arranging and music software and what you could do with it when i was seven years old i got a piece of musical software called cubase which basically is a program that means you can layer stuff on top of other stuff and i had a little casio keyboard which enabled me to play all these different instruments in and i didn't play bass i hadn't played drums i didn't play trumpet i didn't play synthesizer but i could find the trumpet preset on the casio and i would play into the casio keyboard and that meant that i guess before i was an instrumentalist i was i was a producer or an arranger of sorts um it was a canvas for me and by the age of 11 i i had moved on to a program called logic logic pro which actually i i still use today it's my my canvas of choice and so literally for the last 15 years in this room i've been i've been interacting with this as a as a work station and figuring out you know keyboard shortcuts for example that work to my own tastes and my own demands and all this kind of stuff and you know it was very integral for me to learn how to combine elements on my own terms in my own in my own way and i think that really the sounds that come out of a a sort of experimentation process like that are often quite unusual which in some ways perhaps has worked in my favor you know i don't know how to record the perfect hand clap but i would stand in all corners of this room and clap in different ways with different parts of my hand and sometimes i move around the house with my mic and just get interesting sound saucepans and buckets and you know badminton rackets all sorts of things and that that would be my my drum sample library you know and so really what i ended up making was music that sounded a bit like my life which was fun and felt in some ways like i was doing something that was relevant as well as interesting and i mean on on on don't you worry about a thing it says all recorded on one sm58 microphone so you don't need an orchestra to make beautiful things no i think you do need some patience from time from from time to time but yeah i had this one lesson 58 microphone which is you know the microphone that you find at any any open mic in london you know walking around you'll find someone seeing into an sm50 it's not a crazy advanced microphone it's it's on the cheaper side but i i don't know i i fell in love with it simplicity and it was all i had so i would put it on top of a drum kit and record a drum kit with one one sm58 which is a funny thing to do you know people tend to record with lots of different microphones and you know but it was it was enough for me to have an idea and almost accidentally i started having a career you know i didn't really plan to have a career like this i i plan to get you know more and more uh i guess skilled or refined at doing the things that i like to do making these videos making these arrangements learning about music and stuff like this and i put these videos out and slowly but surely they they they gathered all this attention and and it was really inspiring and interesting um but in some ways it was also quite strange because i've been doing this stuff on my own for so long and i'd never really thought you know one day i'm to be up for album of the year at the grammys or one day i'm going to be you know something something something i just thought well one day i'll be better than i am what happened when quincy jones came to you and how did that completely surreal i mean quincy was one of i was i would say one of my teachers in a funny kind of a sense he taught me so much musically through the records i was listening to and everything from you know arranging for people like frank sinatra and alif it's joe and billy holiday to obviously going to produce you know off the wall and thriller with michael jackson and i mean every single decade he seemed to revolutionize something and i didn't i actually didn't even realize it was all him until i've gotten to know him i just thought well this is a bunch of great music oh quincy jones was in the room for all of these all of these sessions you know crazy but uh you know i got this email from him right after i released the video for don't you worry about a thing and it was so so weird so surreal and i did think that my friends were just messing with me i thought that you know someone was just having a having a a joke or something you know pretending to be quincy jones very funny you know but it turns out that it was actually you know it was actually it was actually cue and so we got on skype and we we we met and it was really cool and and he said hey hey you know where where'd you get those chords and i said well you quincy you're the one who who taught me that and he said what do you mean i don't know what you're doing i think well yes you do and and it's it's a real privilege to talk to someone who is so sort of entrenched in the literature of this music that we make and and all of us i think at some point who are alive now who make music have been in some way inspired by quincy and so we became friends and i flew over to switzerland i went to the montreux jazz festival i think it was in 2014 to meet the great man and we hung out a little bit and fast forward about two years or so um i i signed with his management company and there are amazing bunch of people based out of los angeles who have been really helpful just in getting my crazy crazy increasingly crazy ideas off the ground and quincy has almost taken this kind of godfather role in my life where he's just kind of this omnipresent force who um still teaches me so much just just by listening to him and then obviously when you talk to him you hear these crazy stories you know i was hanging out with picasso or i was hanging out with stravinsky and you think wow you really did that quincy there's a there's a tweet you put out saying happy 2021 that you played um and the letters magically appeared on the screen what was going on there it's it's a good question and a fun challenge um part of this musical software logic that i described before is that uh how can i put this basically there there are two ways to record into into computer software that are traditionally done one is through audio and audio is physical sound like i'm recording audio in order to talk to you right now through my microphone and the other is through midi and midi is um media is what happens when you play notes uh with a keyboard or a midi controller into a piece of software and they appear on almost like a grid based uh what's called a piano roll system so you visualize the notes on this grid and low notes are low on the screen and high notes are high on the screen and long notes are long and short notes are short so what i figured is why can't you paint pictures with this stuff you know and if you go then it will just draw a line going from from low to high over time because obviously the axis of time is you know x x the x axis or whatever so um you know i started to experiment with this and i realized that you can you can actually write stuff using this you know you can you can write the letter m by going because that's what the term looks like if you play it on a keyboard and you think well that's all very well but it's going to sound like rubbish but actually if you just think about it a little bit you can make it sound cool and i i released a video i think it was towards the end of 2020 around when when the uh u.s election was was taking place and i wrote the word vote and i i really enjoyed um i enjoyed the challenge of doing that it was great to encourage people to vote and everything um and so when it came to 2021 i thought well okay i could do 2021 but it'll be more challenging and therefore more fun to do happy 2021. um and so yeah that that's what i did i figured out a way to play h and a and p and and y and two and zero and one and performed it live on camera my sister came in here and and helped me film i think it was about 30 takes it to get it right because it's quite difficult and and then that was that and i think there is in my mind there's this funny world where people can that's possible one day where people can play things in and you'll be able to translate what they're saying and and respond you know with a with a musical phrase of your own and it's almost like this language that could one day be exchangeable in in some way perhaps i don't know so do you think there's a power of music that we haven't quite tapped into yet a power to relate people yeah we're only scratching the surface right now we really really are especially just in in this age of infinite possibility with tech as well you know i think that you know we there is so much music that has that has come before us um and and there's so much music still to come i think there's even more music still to come than we've ever seen before us it's a funny thing you know i can sit here and say well i think this is important and this is powerful and this is whatever but the truth is no one knows that that's what's so great there's no one has a clue why music is so extraordinary and why it does have the power to move so many people and to connect so many people and bring so many people together but whatever it is in music that's doing that i want to do more of that and i want to understand it the best i can and i want to spend the rest of my life just mucking around with those forces because they seem like good forces to be mucking around with i mean vote is a very clear and simple message but is is music political for you as well i think music is inherently political to a point i think that an artist doing what an artist does best is is inevitably to reflect the times um and i think that you know everybody has their own way of doing this some people are on the nose and they like to say things in their music and other people like to purvey things in their music more than more than they like to say them but i think for me you know it is it's very important to look to look around us and to see what's going on and to shine a light on the things that each of us as individuals view as important things and obviously there are all sorts of things nowadays which are full of change and i feel like musicians because they're very sensitive people often they end up being a part of that change in some way and it's really a i guess it's a privilege to to to be alive in this time and and to be able to see these things uh moving past us and to be able to take these forces and to use them and to create with them but you know really i think to to engage a people at a time takes awareness and it also takes some courage and ultimately i think the the courage to build communities out of those messages and out of those forces um which can combine together to do extraordinary things but but really i think music has the power to to to be transcendental to bring people out of themselves into a a higher realm and i think that as many many musicians have said over the course of many many many years hundreds and thousands of years i think that in in that realm you know it it really is all about love and it is all about people being one people and about the all of the differences that people like to put up and all these grids that we like to put people into and and all of these barricades that we like to put up it is it is in essence about those things dissolving and i do think music has the power to overcome a lot of those things and to remind people what's important in the world which is just being alive you know i think i think being alive is something that we forget to be and and i think that music is a very very powerful way of accessing something as powerful and as unifying as that there have been a couple of videos i've seen where you've explained how you are sometimes able to access the essence of a feeling by looking at the opposite and and you've done this in different ways sometimes musically through chords and sometimes by just posing chimes against a sad word yeah in the lyrics i think for me it's about painting with expectation more than anything else um and it's it's a fascinating thing i actually i when i was not to go on for too long but when i was 12 years old i sang in an opera by benjamin britton called the turn of the screw and i sang in a few different productions of this opera as a boy but the one that sticks in my head was in in oviedo in spain and the director was a man named tim carroll and traditionally in rehearsal for operas you move around you are choreographed you stand here and deliver the line you stand here and deliver the line but with tim what we did for ever for every day of the month of rehearsal up until the uh the the dress rehearsals we sat in chairs and didn't move and we annotated the score with verbs and it would be this line is intended to do this so maybe for example a verb i might annotate it might be to horrify because actually the the term screw is it is a horror story so might be i'm going to horrify the audience with this line oh i'm going to horrify you and then what tim would encourage us to do would be to invert the verbs and we'd invert all the intentions of what we were delivering so rather than to horrify i would say charm the audience legitimately charm them i would come come with a musical thing based in um something that was very particular and horrifying and i would genuinely bring light to the situation rather than bring darkness so i'd be doing the opposite thing than the music was implied to do and what this made uh what this sort of emotional chemical reaction is created on stage was so extraordinary because you obviously get the sense of the original intention but it's heightened by the opposite overtone that's sort of accentuated by my action so all that to say that really stayed with me as a 12 year old i was completely hooked on this idea and later you know down the line when i would come to make music i would really fall in love with the idea of sometimes if you if you say if you lead somebody in one direction and then you make them turn in a different direction the the the forces that play there are more dimensional than doing the thing which it which is which is implied all the time which i guess goes back to what we were saying later on you know you're talking about major and minor chords and how sometimes a minor chord can be really cathartic and very joyous and can make you very happy it can be a relief whereas major chords can can be really really sad and i think that you know one of the joys in in painting with music is this awareness that actually using expectation to your advantage or flipping the result of certain thought experiments you can achieve really interesting results and i guess just one final thing i'd say to that is sometimes i like to flip my choices even in for example the mixing process if i'm mixing a song by which i mean you know the layers are on the computer software and i'm starting which ones i want to be loud and quiet at different times i'm turning them turning them up and down sculpting the song um sometimes i think well i think the kick is way too loud so that the kick drum is way too loud so i'm going to turn it up even louder and just see how it makes me feel you know and so i i you know anytime i get some kind of creative block or i think oh what is what is about this song that's not working for me sometimes if i if i flip all of my intentions and i do the thing that i wouldn't do what would jacob not do to my song here then the results are often interesting they're often more dimensional and you can have all sorts of interesting fun and games with that sort of emotionally storytelling you can you can really be surprising and you can be angular and you can be yeah kind of brazen in an interesting way do you try that in real life as well i mean you've got to be careful you do have to be careful yeah i i think yeah one way of doing this is with humor you can you can wait for way too long to tell the punchline or you can uh you can be really dry when when you when you when you imply something that you can say very wet or whatever you can you can invert people's experiences and it's great fun and i often like doing it with audiences too you know playing on playing on a moment of awkwardness for example is really fun or um doing something that i would never expect myself doing and just seeing how it feels and it's going back to what you're saying about effortlessness i think that being fearless to try those things you know the things that maybe would be slightly strange or or ill-advised or those things can be so life-giving and i also think that as an audience member i can think of times where i've watched a musician on stage be so themselves more themselves than they even think that they could be and do things that are just on the edge on the edge constantly of their own understanding of their own ideas and it's it's so so freeing as an audience member to think wow so you're giving me permission to be like that too you know i want to be a version of myself or i'm less less careful about having to be reasonable all the time or having to be central all the time i have to do things right or accurately because music is is one of those rare things where it's not biology for example you know there are no rules really it's not like this is the one way music has to be done for everybody as time goes on i mean do you see yourself becoming more center stage a chart performing musician or or somebody who will work with others because you already work with so many stars and being the man who puts it all together i couldn't say i couldn't say there's something very thrilling about putting things together which are bigger than you as an individual for sure and i i love applying my skills to that and i also love the feeling of being on that stage and singing my own songs so i don't know i almost feel like if i plan too far ahead i'm gonna i'm gonna reduce the potential of what something could be but you know i'm in the middle of this this quadruple album right now jesse and i've done volume one two and three and volume four is still to come so i think definitely up until the end of that point you know i want to see how far i can stretch jacob as the sort of leading person in this equation to a certain point but you know really i think music is about collaboration ultimately that's what music started in the world as being and i've come at it from it as from a kind of an into individualistic standpoint being my own producer my own songwriter my own band for quite some time but i am excited to see what's possible with collaboration i think it's going to lead me in directions i i literally cannot foresee at this time in my life can you just explain what why why is this a four part i mean why is it jesse up to four rather than just four different albums i mean what's the difference it's a great question um when i was setting out to do this i wanted to make one album that told kind of one epic story or journey of the entirety of something like my music or the music that i liked or the music that i wanted to explore and so i get it started as one album it kind of spilled into becoming a double album after a while it's like i need more space any more space for these ideas i don't want to put them into a space that's too tight and then two became three inevitably and i realized with three i had these three different worlds volume one was kind of acoustic huge like orchestral you know orchestral size um uh volume two was acoustic small so kind of like um songwriter guitari band bossa nova jazz world vibe and then volume 3 was almost like no no space at all like negative space pop production drums bass hip hop rapping trapping um soulful r b hip you know all things like that um i realized that that didn't have that that didn't have a conclusion so i left for him full blank knowing that i'd want to do something with it at the end of the day i wanted probably to combine all these different forces that i've been exploring and now i didn't really know what it would be like i thought i would have some fun but i didn't think i'd have this much fun making these albums and so you know i guess it became far out of necessity for each individual world to have its own space um and yeah volume volume four is at this point a really interesting thing to to to be making because it could it could still go in a million different directions but um the goal was to tell the whole story yeah i'm writing it like as i'm talking to you i'm actually writing it in my head right now yeah what does that mean um well i i i would say music kind of difficult to turn off in my head it's all it's always going on so so i'm constantly doing something do constantly doing something musical but i am in general in a broader sense in your head now um i think i'm thinking which obviously then leads you to this which obviously leaves you here so i guess i'm in a descending sequence mood which is probably a countdown towards the end of our interview but we always end this podcast by asking people if you could change the world anyway how would you change it what would you do wow that's a really good question um i i'd like to see a world where it's easier for every for everybody to be the person that they are without feeling the need to change into something that other people think that they should be i think a world where people feel liberated to connect to cathart to express in a fearless way and ultimately in a fearless way i think that will be a world that i'd like to live in i'd like to purvey in a in in a technological era i'd like to purvey the human being in some way because i do think that we're also on a bit of a brink of falling into the jaws of technology which has its own agenda that we can't even see right now which is a hollowing agenda and something that we could become slave to and i think that a world where human beings are being what makes human beings important and special which is not perfect and not grid based and not filtered and not organized and reasonable a world where humans can be humans in the maximum sense and not be slave to that tech i i think that would be an important change to see happening and i guess the third part of my answer would be it would just be great to live in a world that is that is feeling more sustainable from an environmental perspective because i think ultimately we're all here based on this tiny thread and we're hanging from this tiny thread it's very very fragile and so really i think the world that i want to live in is a world that is sustainable and and can survive and is being supported and um you know can can sustain life and sustain human life and human connection for thousands and thousands of years beyond our short-sighted plans in 2021 that's a brilliant answer but let me just pursue the middle bit for a moment which is about what technology can achieve by itself because we're actually in a world now where artificial intelligence can already create music a computer can write music itself what is the difference do you think between music created by technology and music created by a human being i think it's about imitation and the style of imitation i think a computer does not know how to listen to the way something feels and recreate the feeling of it it knows how to take the notes that are being played and spit the notes out but i think really music is so much more than that i'm yet to hear anything created by a computer which feels even remotely human which is actually an interesting thing to realize because you know you can say well music is just notes isn't it yeah it's just no notes on a page or notes from a piano but i actually think there are all sorts of things that we can't understand and can't see about music that we as hu human beings just take for granted because we are sort of emotional beings and we are um you know we we we feel things we have empathy for others i think we're able to take feedback in emotion in in emotional ways you could say and then to respond to those forces in ways that computers don't know how to do i think computers know how to imitate things and they can parrot and they can transform and they can they can theorize in grids but ultimately i think that music is it's kind of not about the things that computers will ever think it's about in a funny kind of sense and so storytelling and narrative and these kinds of things i i can imagine computers being helpful for the process of executing them but i think that fundamentally without a human being behind music it is a little bit pointless because what music is it's a it's a it's a communication expression of life rather than an expression of i don't know what what the opposite of life is but yeah some kind of data i suppose data jacob collier thank you very much indeed for sharing your ways to change the world it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you likewise thanks for having me cheers i hope you enjoyed listening to that if you did then please do give us a rating or review so other people can find the podcast our producer is rachel evans until next time bye-bye you

Channel: Channel 4 News

Views: 91,620

Keywords: Channel 4 News, jacob collier, jacob collier interview, jacob collier music, jacob collier grammy, all i need, all i need jacob collier, jacob collier grammy 2021, grammys 2021, ways to change the world, ways to change the world podcast, channel 4 news podcast, krishnan guru-murthy, krishnan guru-murthy podcast, the sun is in your eyes jacob collier

Id: Dn9XqM8PQ2M

Length: 38min 19sec (2299 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021