Pushkin. Today's the first of two episodes featuring a musical genius multi instrumentalist, Jacob Collier. In twenty eleven, when Jacob was only seventeen, he began posting videos to YouTube of himself singing and playing music. They were a massive hit. His breakout video, a rendition of Stevie Wonders Don't You Worry About a Thing, received millions of views and praise from musical legends like Herbie Hancock, David Crosby and even Quincy Jones. Since then, he's gone on to release five albums, including his twenty sixteen debut In My Room, and in twenty twenty two's Piano Ballads, an eleven track album of improvised piano pieces he played at various shows during a recent tour. Throughout his career, Jacob's collaborated with artists like Sissa, Coldplay, Hi Dollar Sign, Tory 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 Hellam 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 masterclass. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchell. Before we get into the conversation, here's Jacob Collier's live rendition of Can't Help Falling in Love? Wis males only fools rushing? But I can hell falling in love? Over shoot? I stay? Would it be onon VI? Con hell falling in Love? Year like the river flows surely to the sea Doe and so he goes somethings are my take, my take, my horse life to because I can falling in love? Jacob Collier, thank you so much 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 which 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 seventy 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 ballad was totally improvised. 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 ballots 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 just kind of see what happens. And it was very interesting to follow my energy throughout the tour and see which ballads kind of ended up connecting with me and connecting with the crowd. And I really loved the experience so much that I thought it would be nice to share a kind of vignette of my most favorite ballot. So I released this album about a month ago now, and it's eleven of the seventy and it's my absolute favorite ballads thus far. I'm going to keep on doing this throughout the rest of the year of touring. But that song, which I always think of, it's been called wise men say it. 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. 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 vocoda. 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 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 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 wise, and then in Vancouver they saying man, and then in Seattle they sang say like this, and it went on like this, and it just so happened, by complete coincidence that by the final show of the tour, which was in Columbus, we've done every word of the song exactly to the number, which is completely unplanned. But 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 one hundred thousand 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 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 ten thousand submissions of different videos, and in total the number of things, as I say, about one hundred thousand. And I spent a lot of time editing all of that audio together and worked with an incredible video team whose name is Light Sale, and they and I edited all these little faces. So if you if you watched the video, there's all these little mosaic tiles of these audience members, each from each city, singing 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 really listening to it despite your technical skill, which we're going to get to in a minute. There's something very old fashioned about people singing sitting around at piano. What happens to be you at the piano. But there's something very and maybe there's a post pandemic feeling, something very comforting about it. Well for me, I definitely feel comforted. I think to me, I've spent much of my life and career making these kind of multilayered 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 yeah, it felt like an important thing on the tour, just to have a moment in amongst the chaos of the full production, because tours it is a vast thing. You know, there's six of us in the band, there's lights, there's staging, there's about one hundred musical instruments on the stage and we're all hopping around between all of them. It's 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, an intimate, comforting 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 tremendous release for them. Yeah, yes, I think so. 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 start playing, and I'll play for a couple of minutes, and sometimes I haven't even decided what song I'm going to play, you know, until the end of that introduction, I think, do you know, I think I'm going to do How Deep is Your Love? Or I think I'm going to do Caledonia or whatever. Yeah, and the other thing I'd like to do it 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 keys as the song continues. If I'm taken there, so one thing you were 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 reharmonizing. That's true. Can you just briefly explain what that means? Yeah, sure, I'll hop to the piano. So modulating is the idea of moving the gravity of home, right, like musical home. So with this song. If I do wise men say this is my home, I'm a F major today, if I went that's a different key that's in D flat or I mean a right. So on the piano, we have twelve keys, and there's all sorts of ways to move between them. But one of the things I'd 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 bigger lift when you change key. What's the hinge you use to move from one key to another? You know, in modulation they heard at the end of songs, you know Willie Nelson goes up a tone, right, 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. 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 other keys besides, so for example, D R a ism in D major and in F major. It lives in both both worlds, right, So there are all sorts of ways you can move between keys. But if I end up singing an A, if I go faalling right, then I've moved changed. But the A was my bridge from one to the other. You know, It's almost like visualizing 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 imbroise happened by chance. And if you're too contrived about it, or even too thoughtful about it, then it can it can remove 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 turn off the more deliberate part of your brain to do that well, 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 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 a third. I could describe it as a third, but it's also just the note, you know. 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, all the ways it can move, 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 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 shit and just play exactly. Yeah, I couldn't put it better myself, So that's modulating. We didn't talk about reharmonizing, which is something you do. When I say you're remaking Western music, you're essentially reharmonizing 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 reharmonize that tune. So this dude goes right. It's very simple tune, Slae because every note I've just realised, every note from that song is actually in one scale, the major scale. It's very lovely and welcome sound to most ears. So when you think about harmonizing and this, I might get a bit nerdier, 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 most sound neighbors to ff fs are called one, you could say, is called four, which is B flat just around the corner, and called 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 you 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. It's slightly more it's like it's perhaps on its waist somewhere. It's still grounded, but it's it's it's it's moving. It's it's not stable because the third, the A is in the base, right, so maybe it wants to go there, right, it wants to move. And then the final one it's actually I really this inversion. This is called second inversion, and it's when we have the fifth in the base. And I really like this in 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 purging, right, You're you're you, you've arrived, but you're you haven't fully arrived. And so when I think about these chords and harmonization re harmonization, I'm using these chords as kind of emotional devices to tell stories. So the idea of how home you are, that's a concept that it's not that's not musical in nature, that's human. So human concept. I'm this amount pulled home, or I am this amount safe or this amount stable. You know that these are things that we understand as people. And so 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 or I could just do, which is a slight, sweeter version of again not really going anywhere. But if I went, then I've moved somewhere, and that's a bit drastic, 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 flat major is actually it's quite foreign to F. It's quite far away key. And so what you can do when you harmonize is you can really take people by surprise. Right, I mean a chord like that, it's very austere. It's a kind of bitter sweet chord because these notes are tugging on each other and these notes are stable, and that note is sour, you know, compared to the sweetness of this, Right you think, oh, and I mean again, it's it's just storytelling. Tell me, what's the chord you're playing now? This chord, well, it's you could call it a B a B major seven sharp five, so it's a B major with a seven and a six. But the fifth, which is this is actually sharpened, so it's it's what we call like an augmented chord. I suppose an augmented chords are naturally quite quite stretched and open. It's like an unnaturally large open gap. But if I were to do that, oh, I've ready made some contrast. And now when I go and you start 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, you're, okay, what are these core? How do they fit together? What are my common tones? But when you sit on stage and improvise, you're just painting a picture from from your mind, you know. So it's a split second decision. Sweeten, it up lead at home, away from home, heading towards home, and I'm not going to change key because I feel like it, 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 kinds of things happen not only when you have you've acquired at a language of sorts, but also mainly when you're just fearless enough to give stuff a go. You think, oh, what would happen if I did this? And then you try and sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's 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. It's I'm not keeping this to myself or it's just for me to hear in my practice room or 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 how to do this freely and truly be comfortable with whatever kind of gets thrown at me. Whether it's something in my own mind or song or something from the audience or whatever. It's it's a practice of being very present and kind of awake to yourself. We'll be right back with more from Bruce Endlum and Jacob Carlier. After a quick break, we're back with more from Bruce's conversation with Jacob Carlier. Reharmonization, particularly chord substitution, is a big feature of jazz. Yeah, were there players you listen to that inspired your interest in chord substitution. Was it 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 being 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 them. Sure, they're just an unbelievably killing a 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, the kinds of thirteen chords 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 Americ Christmas. I think it's called It's a great title for a Christmas album. And they would take songs that I knew as a kid, but they would put a spin on the songs harmonically 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, Twink 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 melody and harmonizing and crazy ways. And there's one arrangement I did of a Stevie tune called Don't You Worry About a Thing? You know? That's ad And there's a bit in the middle where it goes right and I remember thinking, oh, man, that would be fun to rehrmonize because it's just a chromatic scale, you know, how does he harmonize it? He sort of goes right right, And then I so something like that. The fun of that was thinking, 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 on a journey that's very dense harmonically. But for me, especially at that age seventeen eighteen, when I was really getting into this, this was so important for me to do this kind of experiments because I was discovering cause I didn't understand my ear would find a chord like even this chord. It's not really a name for that chord. I mean, you could say it's a cartal voicing that's made of fourth, or you could say it's like a C major seven over the made I mean, it's a strange chord basically doesn't really have a name. But I 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, I mean that again, it's quite a foreign cause it's a flat minor over f. 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 so you had the sound you wanted. I would say I was thinking in terms of cause, 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 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 ound base right as Bark would think about it, why right, then every one of those those paths needs to have its own melody. So for example, the alter part goes why dude, I can sing that, the tene goes Whisey, right, base goes Wis and the baseline is always the most important if you've got these two things going in motion, and that's always very sound. 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 it a satisfying destination. If one part is 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 what. I don't know what the chords were, but I felt I felt them. I felt what the chords did. And I think my passion and fascination to this day is how how do I reverse engineer that those kinds of emotional reactions to music that I experienced as a listener, How do I reverse engineer that as a creator of music? And it basically just starts with being curious, you know, it doesn't start with knowing everything on being aware. It just starts with being open to figuring stuff out. Tell me about growing up. Your mother's a musician, she's a violent er. Your grandfather is a 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 gave up by the age of four. No, I thought that's wonderful, too impatient. I wanted to go and have a result, you know. But the thing about the violin, I mean, it's the most beautiful instrument in the whole wide world, but if you pick it up a go, it doesn't sound good for about a year. 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 was I didn't have the patience for it. I want, I wanted to hit the drama and 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 the cassio, a cassio keyboard. So I think I played something called a CTK eleven. I think it was called. But it was just a bog standard but excellent keyboard with two hundred sounds and one hundred rhythms, you know, so the rhythms you go through all these different genres you have sort of you know, Boston over and and poker and rock and roll and stuff like this, and it was it was great, you know, you skip through the things and it would go, you know, and you go through and I learned kind of learned how music worked. Through that thing, and then you have these sounds trombone, tympani, you know, vibraphone, viola, or it sounds like I wouldn't know that 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. And in something like garage band or logic, there's all these extraordinarily well recorded samples of you know, full orchestra, synthesizers, drum machines. It's it's really kind of overwhelming and amazing, and I think growing up now as 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 two hundred sounds. I didn't have any more than two hundred. Now there's infinite that sounds any sound in the world. So I loved having that as a device or exploration. There's 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 bass, you know. Then I'd do a piano thing, or a branch, trumpets or whatever. And just playing around and music was going in to my mind because my whole family was musical and there was in every corner of the house that 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 this recording stuff I called cue bass, 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. You always interested in harmonizing those notes. Yeah, for me, it was chords chords first, 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 a that's an unbelievable sound. There's so many things going on there for someone like as a kid, for someone with musical ears to get my ears around. Wow, there's there's five sounds there, 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 that, the rubbing, I mean that that's such a special part of music for me, is just like the way that notes interact with each other. But as a as a kid, I mean, I would sit at the piano for hours just doing this, and then I'd move one note. It changes everything, right, note by note it changes and each one of these is a different universe. It's just a different world, and I feel myself moved by them. I'm moved by the way that these interact and feel. And so yeah, I think as a kid, you can take any melody in the world. That's fine, But it's the way that you clothe it that that is really what thrills me 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? Thinks? So yeah, I mean, if you take this sound, you know, being able to hear, be able to ascertain that there's a D sharp and a G sharp I any is helpful. I don't think that you need perfect pitch to become interested and very good at this, but it's like a sort of cheat code kind of it's like an ease of access, you know, being able to say be flat, like I know that's a B flat, but without having to check an instrument. It mostly helps with with audience singing actually because I don't have to refer to an instrument to get the audience to sing a chord, which maybe that safe for example, of the introduction to a song came. 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 okay, you know it's it's not I can kind of plug 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 the particular way of thinking and working. So there was clearly classical music in your house for sure. Growing up. One of the kinds of music was it you mentioned Stevie Wondering. Where did you first hear Stevie Wonder? Oh my mom is like the biggest Stevie Wonder fan, and she's 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 may called Hotter than July, and the first song on that album is called did I Hear You Say? And it starts with this like oh, and it was so exciting. I remember dancing as it, just dancing as a child, thinking I'm 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, underrates that. 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 big is not the deepest you can be. You know, big is big is a scale question, not not a breadth or depth question. And so Stevie did achieve the biggness of scale. But I think the thing that he achieved that was more important. And I think the thing that has stayed, the that 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 on such a global scale is huge. But it's funny when you say, yeah, he's underwater. I think perhaps it's because people think, oh Steve, oh yeah, he's really famous, isn't it. You know, he's a really famous musician and he does lots of songs that everyone knows, which is very true. But the deeper you go into Stevie, the more you feel, and I think that's like a real sign of greatness. Is that? Also, don't you worry about a thing that the song that made you famous because you did a YouTube version of it. That's from his best side of music. I think the second side of Interrovisions. I think it's like the best side of any It's higher ground. Jesus, Children of America, you haven't done. Yeah, that's fulfilling. This Oh man, that album is just crazy. Yeah, it's album. It ends with the mister no just oh yes, such an incredible god. It's just it. I mean, such a statement, and I think you can also you hear when he's you here, 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. Can He's just so desperate to play around with with stuff, and and you can you can feel him being and he's twenty one 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 and 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. They thought he'd peeked. And then I think he produced that great Spinner's 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. That, yeah, how did he do that? No, I know for sure that the thing that I think with Stevie 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 twenty 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 gnarli and it's it's not you know, it's not amongst his most palatable work, but he needed to make that album. 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 album. If he tried to make a hit record at twenty, he wouldn't have done it because he needed to go into that depth and the depth of music of My Mind and Talking Book before he managed to get to something like Inner Visions, 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 if someone doesn't make popular music at one point in their career, you know what, it's all over for them, and it's all going downhill. I think it's a 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 musically in favor of things to which people, which are more people will like and relate to. And you know, I think this is a problem that's it's 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 can 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 we've got all figured out. It's 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 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 part either 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, I'll just make some videos and it'd 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 staff 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 childoed heroes, and and that was closely followed by an email from Pat Matheny, who was not one of my heroes, and then following that it was Herbie Hancock, and then finally it was Quincy Jones and and I think that's when I sort of 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 of myself as someone who is eternally fascinated and playing around. And I'm a musician for sure, But 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 made this album called in My Room, which is the first album I made, and I made it on my own, in this room in London. That's when I really thought, Okay, I'm going to 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 twenty years before, with 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 Jacobean thing. And 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 when I did every single thing for that album myself, because there were all sorts of people who thought, oh, can I produce it or can I mix it? Whatever? And 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 exploration. And I definitely took my time, and I'm very glad that I did. And I would credit not only Quincy 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, always got 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 or you're sorry, you're wearing a sweatshirt. It's your mother's name on it, right that this Yes, Susie Collier number one fan. Right, yes, says Susie Colliers number one fan. It was given to some of my mum by a found out my mom's that should be the only thing in your merch table. Yeah, totally. I'm 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? We'll be right back after a quick break with more from Jacob Collier. We're back with the rest of Bruce Ellen's conversation with Jacob Collier. 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. Could you've 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 zero point five dB, or I could I could equ out a little bit of two hundred and forty hurts 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 over them. Because everything you hear in your own music when you're making 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 would be more emotional, it would 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 is the miracle 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 need a deadline to work against, you know, so so that things get done or things can be born int the world, because if there is not a deadline, it'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 challenges of my life creatively, there are immense reliefs to be found when you ground yourself in a particular form. I'll get thank good as I found a form. It's one of the reasons I love playing these songs on the road so much is because 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 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 awakes to the music, and a certain amount of time in the set that I need to feel you know, all these things that make that possible. I think for me, Yeah, one of 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 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 everyone, because I've already written. It's done, and that's always such a relief, think, oh God, it has done. I finished. It's it's good. And those moments are very kind of seldom and been very very welcome to me. You know, you're making me think of the famous psychologists. Stephen Pinker years ago at a conference, raged 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 neuroscientists have said, well, actually, it's one of the crucial ways we learn cause and effect and expectation. Just as you said, every note you're playing it has a home. It's trying to get to and that's something that actually children learned 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 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 gathering form over say generations. I would say yeah. I would say music is very, very similar to language, spoken language, or visual languag or whatever. And I think that as people, we naturally have a yearning for and a gift for connecting and communicating ideas to each other. One of the things we do best. The music 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 it's like an extended limb of these sensations 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 siloed within our own languages are kind of digital languages and we don't connect communicity. 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 an accelerated gift at 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 if you know two hundred sounds on a cassio versus you know two million sounds in musical software, both sides are real. You could say, well, what a pity. You know, there's so many possibilities and so little guidance. You know, it's hard to 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 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 drop box all these kinds of things, let alone amassing 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 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 her growing out very much. So, so we will sing in my house. So my family is like me and my mum and my two little sisters, and and so we we sing us mentioning Barker on SATV Sopartelebates. We sing four part bark carras Christmas carols like whenever we possibly can, whenever we other day we're at all four in the house, which now is actually quite seldom, but we'll sing. It's 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 gemba drums, and I started an improvisation and group where everyone just improvised, And I played drum kit in my concert band at school, and I did some arrangements for the school choir, and I sang in the school quiet. So I was kind of trying these different outfits of working with other people, and I've really had 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 only over the last ten years or so that I've really kind of learned the skills or I'm still learning the skills 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 really respect, really young and people who blew up kind of over quarantine through videos online. And now I'm faced with this challenge, or how do I what is playing live? You know? How do I tour? It's such such a different thing to do from sending your phone on portrait mode and just playing out song and having nice lighting. It's such a different thing to stand on stage and say not just that I'm going to sing the right notes and play my song, but actually communicate that to a room. And I had to figure that out over about a year or two when I first started touring, because I told with a pretty ambitious set up. I talked with the one man show. So it was me in the center of a circle of about twelve different musical instruments, and I was in the middle essentially playing them all at once. So I would play bass and it would loop, and drums it would loop, and keys and it would loop, and guitar and it would loop. Then I'd sing and I'd play harmonizer and it was and I'd do a piano sol over the thing, I'd loop, then 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 and really hadn't really been done in that way before. And so a lot of it I was figuring out as much as that 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 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 and 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 alchymize it in to 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 stage and 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 set design and the lighting. You know, I've sat with the lighting operator. His name is John John Rodgers, and sat with him and crafted exactly the tone of the green that is triggered when Christian the drummer plays the snare sound, you know, and a green light. 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? And does it take for that green to fade out just to go or 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 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, 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 the real world with with real people. And this still boggles my mind to still now to go to a city and turn up on a stage and and there's two thousand people who somehow they found my songs. It's just crazy feeling. I mean, it's just it never gets old. I never walk out there. Well, of course there were people here. You know. It's why would why would people know myself? Why would they know my songs? You know. It's just it's an astonishing thing 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 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 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. Makes it Jacob Callier 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 call Your songs on a playlist at Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where can find all of our new episodes You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help can Lea Rose, Jason Gambrell, Ben Holiday, Eric Sandler, Jennifer Sanchez. Our editor Sophie Crane. Our executive producer is Neil Reibell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like our show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast. That app O theme musics by Kenny Beats on Justin Richmond