Be flat, it's like this, what do you mean by a rival in the project?
So this is my home, if I'm in F, this is my home, right?
I can exist in the key of F for a while. And even if I go with someone else, like to enter a flat, when I get home, you still feel like, "Ah, I remember this feeding from before." So the idea of a rival, you could say,
“comes from being not F, something that's not F, like, C, arriving at F, right?”
And then you can kind of augment that a rival into something much more. And the joy of music is how to make the best, most satisfying kind of tension, and then resolve it. Creativity is about breaking something. Nope, it's about building something.
No, it's breaking. No, it's building. Or maybe, just maybe, it's both at the exact same time. But how can you build and break something simultaneously, Simon? Well, enter Jacob Collier.
Oh wow, thank you so very much. Jacob is a Grammy winning musician who has an uncanny ability to turn anything around him into musical instruments, including his audiences. If you've seen any of the viral videos online,
he literally turns his massive audiences into his own personal choirs. I invited Jacob to join me in a music studio in Los Angeles while he was in town for the Grammys, where his album Jesse Volume 4 was nominated for album of the year
“alongside Billie Eilish, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift.”
Get comfy, because this is a front row seat to his wildly beautiful genius. This is a bit of optimism. So you're nominated for album of the year for the Grammys, congratulations. Thank you. You are nominated alongside some musical legends.
Trojans, feelings?
I heard the other day that I'm the first artist actually in history
to be twice nominated for album of the year without ever having charted. So none of my albums have ever been on any charts. I'm personally deeply proud of this. I was going to say, I love that. It's kind of a cool stat.
I mean, there's no such thing as album of the year. This made up. Someone made that up. I'm deeply honored to be included in the number alongside such luminaries. I'm not taking it to serious.
I mean, you've already won. I mean, to be included amongst. Yeah, oh, absolutely. You know, none of us really know what we're doing. We're just playing around.
I don't sit around thinking, you know, I'm bloody brilliant in a barrel of so much as just one interesting time to be Jacob. You know, and what needs to be time to be making music. Because I've made a very unconventional album
that is deeply irreverent in many ways. And for it to be counted as, you know, one of those is it's just kind of a thrill. So I'm just taking each day's accounts. Love.
“How old were you when you were sort of folks started to realize that there was something there?”
That wasn't. Let's call it normal. I think I had an interesting mind as a child. I think when I was small, my mind was interested in things in a certain kind of a way. Do you have brothers and sisters?
Two little sisters. Did you have family dinner every night? Yes. By candlelight. Still.
Yeah. What was the motivation for that? It's just nice. I do think that was an agenda. It's just nice.
And when your parents paid the electricity bill. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's something about that. And is your whole family artistic?
I would say so. I was fundamentally brought up by single mother. And I'm elders to three. So we were like a core tech growing up. And there was a deep sense of...
I suppose like introversion you could say. We all saw star energy from within each other. And the thing that was interesting to me when I was growing up was how much I was encouraged to look within myself for answers or inspirations that might arise.
So for example, say I come to the dinner table by kind like one evening. And I feel like I can angry. But I don't quite know why. But I'm not feeling angry in a sort of scaled up way. I'm feeling angry in a small way, like a knotted way.
Like a way that talks on itself. And also it's a definitely like my tummy hurts. So say I feel like this, I come to the table and I say guys, I'm feeling like this. And the first thing I met with is that's interesting. So like how did this come about?
Why did this come about? And how is it that we can untangle this together? Because we're all here together.
And so never in my memory did I come to the table with something,
a feeling or an experience that was met by judgment.
You could say well why would this, why would this, why would that?
And I think that what I learned through music is just the sheer breadth and power of it to, as one of the more fundamental unravelers of my inner space. If that makes sense.
“What I find so interesting about that is and who goes to your mother, right?”
For affirming your feelings and wanting you to express them in a constructive and healthy manner. And you know, I mean I guess this is a good question, which is when you think about art. So much emphasis is put that artists have to be tortured to create. Yeah, you know, more songs are about breaking up and loss and you know, and stuff like this.
And painters, they always talk about the torture.
But in this case it's the opposite, which it was healthy expression rather than a torture. Yeah, well I think music like other art forms at its best is a sort of alchemy of sorts. You say I'm going to take the world as I experience it as it is and I'm going to morph it into something of value of light. David Lynch, who passed away just a couple weeks ago, said that beautiful thing about how negativity is the enemy of creativity, which I really adore. And David is someone who I think had a fair amount of sort of in a demons and struggles and forces at play.
You know, the way he described it was you know, you think about someone like divinci who lives this life of absolute polymathdom and sort of mental intrigue and struggle. But actually when he's when he's working is when it flows as best and as calm and certain.
“I think there's something to that I've never really subscribed personally to the idea that you need to put yourself in a big mess in order to create things.”
I think that through the creating of things you can solve a lot of life's problems.
I mean, I think music is quite extraordinary place to do it because if you look inside music, kind of every force at play is in a sense or reflects of life in some way.
So in music you have, you know, symmetry and balance and maths and physics and history and, you know, geography and the body and all these things that make life possible. So when you explore it or kind of studying yourself. - At least this is how I was brought up. - When you classically trained, I wasn't know. - So this is talent.
- Well, I think in practice. - In practice. - In a sense, I mean, there's a distinction between practice and play. Practice being, you know, when you organise a state of play
to solve a particular problem, yeah, like I just wanna learn to go,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
thing. I think when I was small it was language let me up a lot. What do you mean? In the sense that the way my mind perceived a particular chord was similar in a sense to the way it perceived a particular relationship between words. I remember being obsessed with just the idea of like what are many contexts within which you can put a human finger. Like you know you say linen on finger or doorbell on finger or hummus. You
imagine the collisions. And it's not the name of your new album. Hummus on finger. Yeah, volume four. But no, I think there's something that I learned through my love of words. It's like you have these miniature explosions that happen in your mind when you when two things collide that maybe don't usually collide and you can do this with vocabulary and it's kind of one of the more relatable ways
I've found of explaining this because you take these two things and you kind of, you know it's like flint. It's like you make a spark out of these two unlikely things and spark will illuminate something new. Anything. Oh gosh, where could that take me? That's that strange interesting. And so, musically, that started as you know, I'll take these two notes and I'll go there. But then it became, you know, genres. Because I think genres are
an interesting and slightly outdated principle. But you know, what happens if you try to put a banjo and a dubstep drop? You know, to me, it's just interesting. It's like, oh, it's almost like a level of disgust that to me is kind of like wired into entry creatively. One of the things that I love about you, the way you approach the world and even taking music out of it, I think creativity and inspiration exists in all of us.
“Yeah. You know, I think everyone's an artist. You just have to find your medium. Right?”
And I think what we're talking about or at least talking around is the idea of being hyper focused towards something. Yeah. And finding beauty or inspiration or interest or curiosity, whatever it is, in something. And as you're talking, like things as sparking in my head, I love the sound of the list. The sound of a list. If someone could pull up on their phone for me, the it's the shell silverstein of bendable stretchable man, and I'll show you
what I mean. And there's a Shakespeare sonnet, you know, like, Shakespeare did this a lot in his sonnet's where in the middle of his sonnet, he would, there would be a list of like and this and this and this and this and this and this. And I love, I love reading a list.
I don't know what it is.
I don't know what it is about my brain that I enjoy the sound of a poetic list. You have it.
“I'll show you what I mean. Oh, cool. Okay. You're great. I haven't read this in a while. So bear with”
me. And it gets where it gets brilliant is the end. Okay. So it's called Twistable Turnable Man by Shell Silverstein, right? He's the Twistable Turnable Squeezeable Pullable Stretchable Foldable Man. He can crawl in your pocket or fit in your locket or screw himself into a 20-volt socket or stretch himself up to the steeple or taller or squeeze of himself into a thimble or smaller. Yes, he can. Course he can. He's the Twistable Turnable Squeezeable Pullable Stretchable Drinkable Man.
And he lives a possible life with his squeezeable, lovable, kissable, hugable, pullable, tugable wife. And they have two Twistable kids who bend up the way that they did and they turn and they stretch just as much as they can for this bendable foldable do what you're total will easily model. Will buy what you're soldable, washable, mandible, highly dependable,
buyable, sellable, always available, bandsable, shakeable, always unbreakable, twistable,
turnable man. No. Fantastic. That's very, very good. I love the list.
“Tumbles off the tongue. I love the list. And the bits in between are just me getting to the list.”
Yes, of course. You know. And so as you're talking about this, this idea of hyperfocus. The reason I want to talk about it is because I want people to be able to see that they are more like you than they think they are. Yeah, right. I feel very similar to this, actually. That is a beautiful poem. And the thing about that list is it's like you have a series of miniature chemical reactions. They go off in your brain. But the thing about it is that
everybody who's ever perceived language or you can say music as well has experiences of version of this. And the thing I always try to emphasize to people is how similar making music is to listening to it. It's the same exact thing except the other way around. So when you listen to something, you might be in a particular mood. You might say, and I'm trying to reverse engineer the emotional remedy to my mood. And I know that the right song will hit the spot right
on. It might be like a Bonnie Verde, a only Bonnie Verde can hit the spot or Sofia and Stephens Day or Earth in a fire day, whatever happens to be. But your job is a listener in a sense is to find the right component that matches your energy that will sort of pull it out in that gorgeous way that you want to emphasize or get away from. I either want to be sad, I'm going to play myself sad music, or I want to get away from sadness, I'm going to play happy music. Well usually the
thing that's right for your space will meet you where you are and then modulate you slightly to somewhere else. And so I guess that the thing with making music is it's similar, you know and it kind of comes back to the candle at dinner scenario, how you think today and whatever you say is actually fine. But it's just like a song. So you start to how you feel where the rest of us let make a playlist for how we feel. Exactly. It's that's beautifully put. And I think the
thing I've learned to do, you know, I'm not great at reading the dots and the notes and all sorts of things like this. But I think that for me, I've tried to learn how to be as fluent as possible in music as a language, in general. So if I sit down and play how I feel, yeah, something will
come out that's of some kind of value based in my experiences first as a listener and then
secondly I was at Maker and the whole thing goes around in a circle and the surface you provide to an audience hopefully is one of meeting them where they are and modulating them slightly, you know. I'm so curious like, you know, do you make time to play or do you find yourself just playing? I think because when you started as a kid, it was something you did for fun. You weren't taking classes. You weren't like you had homework to do and you had to prepare for the piano teacher.
“But now it's a career. Now there's expectations. Now you have to play at certain times in certain”
reasons. You have to prepare for things. Has it become a job? Where does job and joy intersect or separate? That's a beautiful question. I think it feels very much. Because you don't want to be singing the same songs 40 years from now. No. Well, so the funny thing about my performances, the things I prepare for are that they're not designed to be the same each time. So the preparation is as much of an internal emotional space one as it is a fingers one. You know, I kind of spent a
concentrated period of time towards the end of my teens really getting that language together and understanding. Okay, so here's how to create tension. Here's how you release tension. Here's how you ask a question and give an answer. Here's how you twist or turn or whatever you have with the things. And so I think that now when I want to sit on the stage, I'm not thinking so much about the grammar of it. This is the syntax of how do I put this thing into words as well. I'm more
thinking what, how do I best articulate the thing that I'm feeling or the thing that's in the room? How do I best turn that into something that can be accessed or related to? So that work, that practice is less about, I play, I practice for two hours this morning. So I'm ready. It's more like I've tuned in enough to know or I, I'm just kind of, or I can laugh at myself enough to know, you know what, that that kind of, as an improviser, those principles end up having more of an impact
Than, than any particular skill or thing that you might have.
about you, and I find remarkable is your ability to use the audience. Aha. And I've been in
“audiences where musicians have attempted to get us to do this thing and I'll be totally honest,”
it sounded terrible. Right. Right. Right. And I admire the attempt, but it has always failed,
your work is the opposite, which is I'm amazed with these huge audiences that you are making good sounding music with people who don't necessarily know how to make good sound music. At what point did you realize this actually sounds good? Yeah. It's not just, it's not just doing something, you know, community-wise. It is an ongoing process of like deep fascination for me. I mean, to take you back to when I was like two, some of my earliest memories, as a kid,
those really half memories that you have at that age, were of watching my mother conduct, especially she's a conductor. So she would race her arms on roof of body and it was like casting a spell. You know, suddenly the room would be transformed into this thing that had many arms and legs and was just running around and making these paintings and it was just create. It's
like, yeah, it was literally magic. Right. I was obsessed with it. Right. How can you do that? That's
interesting. You're like this and something happens. Yeah. And the thing about it is people would leave the room not just having played the right notes, but they would leave them just feeling better about themselves and life. They would have been like lit up or lifted up. And I, I didn't really question it. I just thought this is what music can do. This isn't that cool. And two of students come over to the house and they would come in and down trodden and they would leave the house
and they would be uplifted. But this is, this is worth double clicking on. Which is, your two years old and your introduction to understanding music was not somebody sitting at a piano. It was your mother, as you said, it was like a magician. Your mother raises her hands and music comes out of her hands. Yeah. Well, she was playing music through other people. Yes. She was, she was, she was, like, so you see the hands moving and the music comes out. So this is your introduction to the magic
“of music. Exactly. Kind of beautiful. hugely important. But I never thought I wanted to be a conductor.”
That sounded super stuffy. You know, oh, I got to get my bat on out and sort of read the parts and, you know, order people around. No. But then, you know, as sometimes is the case, what your parents do and the way that you see them behave just ends up coming out through you. So it was, I could, I can specifically remember the moment where my audience interactions graduated from kind of the Freddie Mercury call and response type thing to like a three-part polyphonic organ. And it was in San Francisco,
at the very end of February 2019. And what had happened is, I've been singing Blackbird, the song for the Beatles, which is a legendary song, Bangor. It was one of my favorite means to then to get the audience to sing because everyone knows the song. And so I'd got that these loops going at the end of the song through the audience, because audiences like to be loops, just one of the things they enjoy. So I was, I had got the middle group. I sort of divided ones,
this is the three normally into three, because three is a nice, nice number for audiences. So the middle group is going singing in the dead of night, singing in the dead of night. And on the left, they're going singing in the dead of night. On the right, they're going singing in the dead of night. So it's a lovely like tri-art, we call it a three-part chord. And round around around it went and I slowed them down and slowed them down as I'd like to do. And at the end, they just went, so singing in the dead of
night, and they sang, like, "That's my big F major chord." And it was great. And then I just kept them there, and then I suddenly realized, "Hey, you want an A, you want to see an A?" So I can just, "Why was if I just point?" So I just looked at the group and I pointed up and it all went, "Ah, like this." And then down. And so we played around a bit with it, and it felt crazy. It felt unbelievable,
because first of all, I knew at that moment that I was continuing the line that my mother had to
draw on. But it was different because these people had no music parts. They had no instruments. And they had, there was no plan. There was no rehearsal. It was just the intuition to know how to
“operate within a container that I'd given them. And the container was the key of F. That was essentially”
it. So you know your NF. That's where your anchor is. That's where your imagination feels. I'm at rest, harmonically. So you know how to operate in and around F. Everybody does. Everyone who's ever heard music does, because being in a key is I was saying inherent to us. It's extremely deep as a concept. So the idea, though, that I could navigate or move around in and around a key center through them without uttering a note was deeply moving to me.
There is something, as you're talking about it, I mean, and I'm thinking about it, and some of the videos of yours. You know, when you're going like this, and then you go like this, everybody knows how far to go down. And if you go like this, everybody knows how far to go down, moving your hand, you know, very low down, moving your hand just a little bit. And and everybody gets it right. That's a strange, like we take direction. But to your point about
the music is in us. We may not know how many keys on an octave. The point is that you may know nothing about music, but you know the distance between notes, because we've all listened to music, our lives. Exactly. And you're playing with that. In other words, the music is in us,
Even if we don't all have the facility to get it out of us.
something about music. It's very, it's very simple and it's hard. And the audience quiet, as I looked to call it, has been, I was saying, my greatest teacher in simplifying music. Because there's no rehearsal and there's no planning, and you're working with what people don't know that they
already know, but they actually do know it, which is always, always more than you think it is,
musically and otherwise. People are not silly. People really tuned it. I love to think about this. Music really is, you can distill it to very, very simple axes. For example, the axis of high and low, right? Everyone understands it. Everyone gets it. Everyone, children, grown-ups. Everyone. It's like, here's a high note and there's a low note. Okay, God it. Because it's speech. We will speak. We understand the contour of speech. And then there's loud and quiet. Everyone gets it.
I know, I, I, I intuitively understand what you mean, loud and quiet. It makes sense. And then there's
like many and few, right? Everyone understands those principles. You get it. It's a thick chord,
like this. There's a thin chord, just like that. And everyone understands, okay, I, I, I get it. It's like looking at a landscape because it, it reflects the world so well. And then the, the DPU go into, to music as a process of, you know, learning or play, you kind of like increase the resolution of these axes. Yeah. So, you know, it starts with every kid. I think I was going to say,
“I think we, what do we do it? Go to the piano. So, okay. So, you got, you got high and low, right?”
Yeah. It makes sense. And you got, you know, wide and narrow. That makes sense. You got loud and quiet.
But then, then, for example, there's this idea of like a rival and departure. Everyone actually
understand, everyone has departed or, or arrived at, so what exactly? So, if I'm an F, which is the key, I was just talking about. And, within the key of F, I have, like, look, calories you could say. So, I have, like, next to me, but so, that's one neighbor. V-flat. So, what do you mean by a rival and departure? So, this, this is my home. If I'm an F, this is my home, right? I can exist in the key of F for a while. And even if I go somewhere else, like to their toy flat, or like, when I get home,
you still feel like, ah, I remember this feeding from before. So, the idea of a rival,
“you could say, comes from being not F, something that's not F, like, C, arriving at F, right?”
And I'm home. And then, you can kind of augment that arrival into something much more. Colorful. And the joy of music is how to make the best, most satisfying kind of tension, and then resolve it. So, even the most gnarly sounding like, you can call it this, like, that's a weird sound. But, you do careful. Then, all those notes can move into actions and go, ah, I see. It's like, the temperature of the shower is changed. Oh, I get it, you know what I mean? So, this idea of, essentially, movement in and around axes is so
interesting. And, and, yeah, if you think about, you think about departure and arrival, or you think about inevitability. There's such a such a beautiful, very subtle thing to describe. One of my favorite things to do with the audiences, I'll get to sing one note, I'll say, sing apple. And they all go like this. And then, I put them in all sorts of context, like, context. Right? That's weird.
And you know in your home, but the exercise that's so beautiful with that, to me, emotionally, is, you understand your position in things. The beautiful thing that the audience acquired, that I found in the last few years, is that it works kind of regardless of whether you're a musician or not. I mean, the more musicians are in the audience, often, the faster people can learn. But the challenge really is, you need about, you need over 50% of the people to know what's
going on. The rest will follow. It's like, like, my narration. They'll kind of follow, but, um,
“I think the main thing about my audience now is that they are kind of just that they're open to it.”
I'm so curious how you explore different emotions, like real emotions that you have, they're than happy side. Like, when you are angry, yeah, whether it's that, you know, not that burst anger, how much to show up when you sit down to let it out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So as I'm playing, I'm like, oh, I see, oh, oh, okay, oh, I get, oh, I see, because you start,
I don't know where I started somewhere down here.
What's up with you? I think we all have our way of, and I'm going to go back to your mother, you know,
“you know, trying to get you to express yourself and affirm your feeling. Yeah, yeah. And I think”
if you look at so many of the struggles that people have, we don't know how to express our feeling. So it goes out in frustration or anger or burst or we say things we don't mean. And even harder than knowing how to, as hard as learning how to express our emotions, it's trying to help somebody else express theirs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think to find one's own therapy, some people go to the gym to get it out. Yeah, go for run. Yeah. Whatever it is, you know, go outside and have a primal,
primal yell. Do you use your piano as therapy? You know, love sick, you know, angry, homesick. Sure. You know, is it your, is it your therapist? I would say so. Should we, should we go around the show? I'm so curious, if it's, and this is where I'm getting it, like, you know, poets write poetry, yeah, even if it's not for anything. Is it the kind of thing that you just do all the time? Is it that you're like, like, I'll give you an example, right? I've had a busy week,
you know, I'd be like, oh, I haven't gone for a run in a while. I need a run. You know? Is it, is it that for you, like, I haven't been on a plane, I haven't, I need a plane. It just needs a plane. It's a bit like that. Yeah, it is a bit like that. There's an added layer when you're in front of an audience, because there's something that happens as you do that, as you explore how you're feeling through, especially when you go through other people and back to you, and just, you kind of just
learn how you're doing. Oh, I see. I'm, I'm feeling like that. But yeah, there's, there's a feeling you get when you haven't played in a while. And you can, you can sort of play, you can go,
you can play shows. I mean, you can always tap it. You tap your fingers to things. You can do that,
but there's a particular kind of play that I was kind of getting into there, which is more about, you take a starting point, and often a starting point is a strange place, or maybe it's a pleasant place, or a 90 place, or whatever. And then you sort of, as you untangle it, it's like, it's an immense
“video of, of catharsis in the sense, you see. I think, oh, that is, that's the human in the singing,”
you know, and, and doing the thing. But there's an interesting thing that happens as a, as a songwriter, because improvisation is one thing, right. You, you refuse, and all the great composers, someone like Johann Sebastian Bach, was he was like a master improvised on the organ. I wish I could have had an improvised, but a composition, or a song, or a piece, or a production, is like composition in, in, in, in stop time. So I'm going to play this. Oh, okay.
Now I play this, I'll play this. Now I'll kind of collide it together and make it, make sense sort of on the canvas. And so there's a funny thing that happens, I think, as you, as, as a songwriter, where you, you, you kind of deliberately put yourself in situations where interesting results, or you try to put yourself in situations where kind of interesting results will come out that hopefully can crystallize. But that can be a kind of a hard thing to do.
I, I guess I'm curious, maybe this is more a question to you, but just as somebody who thinks about ideas and puts them into words, distills them into concrete ideas, whether it's, let's do a podcast, or let's, let's, let's put this on the page, or let's have a conversation, or, or let's put together a presentation, that there's something that happens to me on the journey from raw starting point energy life input to distilled output sensible kind of, kind of, quantifiable, where part of the
energy required to make the idea kind of dice and falls away, because in distilling the idea,
“you have to kind of rid yourself of an amount of the infinity surrounding it. But then you get,”
you, you wit it down to this thing. I mean, from my perspective, in, in, in my line of work,
you could say is a songwriter. That challenge is always interesting. It's almost like you have to,
you have to court the idea and keep it alive for long enough for it to continue to sort of burn fuel as you move through the process of raw idea into kind of whittle-bounded in, to, particularly whittle-bounded in, to sharing the idea. And then, in your case, into maintaining ideas across many, many years, but you've, you've said something at this point, and then 15 years later, someone wants you to give a keynote on the same principle, in the same way that someone wants me to play a song
around 15 years ago. But like, what's your relationship with ideas of old, their gestation, and then their kind of continued life as you have always given. So it's a good question. For years, when I, you know, after I wrote, start with why, that's all anybody wanted to hear from me, but I wanted to talk about new things, and they were very much wanted to force me to talk about the old things. And I, I'm proud of my old work. I still live by the principles
of my old work, but I have zero interest in talking about my work. I'll answer a question or two if people want, I'm happy to do that. But to give a talk, I actually won't do it. And there is a few reasons I won't do it. It's not just, I am a student, and I love to understand things. I don't have to agree or disagree, or even like or dislike. I just like to understand, right? And once I understand something, or at least I have a good framework that I'm like,
I think I understand this.
And it's why I like engaging with audiences for new ideas, because they ask me questions I haven't
“heard before, and then I get to think. That's my favorite thing in the world to do. So yeah,”
I don't want to talk about my old ideas. I only want to talk about new ideas, because I know my old ideas, and I want to know new things. But there's a line from your order, it is, to your new hundred percent. I don't disobey them, and I'm proud of them, and they are the foundations, and all of my work has built on the work that has preceded it. But I want to talk about the new renovation I'm doing on the house, not the foundation of the year. So other things that you would,
anything you would thoroughly disobey, or anything you would say, I really don't start with this anymore. Something that you used to hold dear. There are the simple answers of course. But there's nothing that upsets the whole thing. There are nuances and tweaks and language that has evolved that I better understand my work and going through life that necessarily. So the simple answer is yes, can you can you give an example? Sure. So I define the why as a purpose cause of belief. And
now that I've the work has matured and I've built upon it, and I stumbled upon the infinite game, which was my last work. I now talk about a just cause, and I was like, oh, I wish it didn't use cause to describe. It's just a purpose or belief. That's still true. But I want to reserve cause for this other thing. Mainly to not create confusion because they're kind of different. So like little nuances that make that makes a lot of sense. So here's another question then or another
point to make is for the last three months or so. For the first time ever, I've had this analysis done of my audience. And it was really interesting. And the questions it threw up were kind of
beautiful and profound. And for the first time ever really, though, I've always enjoyed to somewhat do this.
I've kind of been placed in a position of wanting to, or I'll be asked to all want to define what is it that I stand for. Essentially, what is my wife? What is my driving course? Why come to a Jacob show? So one interesting thing about myself, but my audience is that I sell far more tickets than my streaming numbers would suggest. And I think it's because a lot of the things I most enjoy about my work is experiences. I love having experiences with people. I love the audience
quiet. I love conversations at large with people I'm playing, collaborating, maybe with an orchestra group to the band or whatever. I just love it. And often I'll perform things in the shows that aren't even to do with the music on the record. It obviously depends on the show. But the questions that arise with regard to, what is it that drives me? What are my foundational pillars? I have this dual kind of experience with that. On the one hand, I have this deep relief
“of knowing, oh, so that's what was always going on. Because it's like that beautiful Michelangelo”
thing about everything within the sculptures already there. You just have to remove what's not the sculpture, which I think is very much the case as an artist. All you're working with is what
you already have. It's me watching my mum conduct at age two. That's always going to be there.
That's one of my raw materials. But as I've gone on this process of analyzing it all, I can't help but there's a part of me that that enjoys not just inherently will resist it, but will enjoy resisting it because it knows as the creative part of me that there's actually creative juice on the edge of something. Enjoy resisting what? I would say resisting the idea that I can be defined as this one thing. I suppose the question I wanted to post to you was this idea
of the irrational, the completely irrational mind, which as a creative person, all of us have a relationship with them. There is the part of us that can rationalise and I can say, okay, we'll have an even the key of F then I do this. What's the rival? This is a departure I'm making
“tension or here's now the audience works or here's how I think about my next whatever. But still,”
when I stand on stage or sit on stage and do it, there is a part of me that just does not respond to any amount of data or analysis that I've could ever possibly have done about who I am and when I'm curious how you feel about the cultivation of that part of you that is just an animal and doesn't want to kind of be put into a box. But also enjoys, you can almost say, you're almost being disobedient with regard to what it's defined as you. You're opening a Pandora's
box. So I define creativity as finding order and chaos. Finding order in chaos. Right? And so, and I would argue that 80, 80 keys on keyboard is unto itself chaos, right? Because you take somebody a baby who doesn't and they bang, it's chaos and finding order in that chaos is what we call music. I create the creative expression. And I think artists inherently
Have a comfortable relationship with chaos.
chaos is irrational. You know, we seek order, we seek rational, we seek, we seek rules and structures
and explanations. That's all that rational stuff. And the irrational, the emotional, the uncomfortable,
“the unscripted, the unknown, the uncertain is where the artist plays. And I think great artists”
understand that what they do is play. Yeah. Fundamentally what we're doing is playing. We're playing with pieces of a puzzle. Mine might be words and ideas, you might be keys on a piano, somebody else might be colors. And we become fassal in our own language. Yeah. And the example I'll give is, have you ever hung out with dancers? Don't say so. Yeah. So if you hang out, I've gone to watch friends choreograph pieces. And the choreographer will be like, they will demonstrate
something. Like, do this and this and this and this and this and this and I want you to go here, pop, pop, pop and I want you to do this. Actually, no, don't do this, do this, do this and do this. Yeah. And all the dancers, the whole room does it exactly after they were shown once and
there was a change in the middle. And I can maybe remember the first two. And I was like,
"But what, how, huh?" And you realize it's a language. Yeah. You know, if you say to me, repeat the sentence, you know, three balloons flew up into the sky and one of them burst and fell down to the end. And I can go quite a while and repeat it up because I understand the language. You understand the context for all the nuggets. So I know how the pieces relate and I can, yeah, I can put them together without any rehearsal. So here's one thing I'll say to that then. So
if we take languages example and you can say words or music, whatever happens to be dance. So you speak that language, I speak this language. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. I would say, you know, you spoke about creativity is finding order in the chaos. But I also think an important part of you could say making, making art, this, this is a different thing from following the instructions
of the, the choreography, or playing the parts as an orchestra member. Yeah. This is more about
as the maker of an idea, as the source of the why you were on a certain, is this, this concept of making or finding chaos in the order. And we all have this varying, I think, or going through rules, regulations, self-imposed, you know, getting keepers, things, our own structures that we're trying to resist, other people's structure, we're trying to resist in my situation, the music industry, which is a very strange, not stating place at times. You think, okay,
I'm going to take this rigidity and I'm going to scuff it up. That's creativity. So you're almost finding a way back to the chaos. Yeah. But I think one thing that people do when it gets to order you have to break it. Well, exactly. Yeah. And to me that, I guess what I'm wondering out what I'm challenging, does the nature of creativity also go the other way? Yeah. I think that's a great insight. That's a great insight. I think that's a great insight. And I agree with you,
I think it's a cycle or a circle, right? Because if you take the infrastructure that exists, you take the system that we reject and we rebel and we break it. It's not enough to break it.
“You have to then rebuild it back. Exactly. So I think you're right. I think it's the duality of chaos”
in order. And the artist, when there's a set of orders, seeks chaos and when there's excessive chaos, finds order. Yeah. And it's that. I kind of like that. But I would also say, I mean, and here's an interesting analogy that's to do with creativity, but but also different is AI, right? So AI asks us to ask questions. That's our fundamental way of investing with it. The more interesting the question is, the more interesting the result you'll get. And it's kind of interesting
process of of whittling away through deeply uninteresting things, like motely uninteresting results, to get something that's actually interesting. I've spent so many hours, you know, for example, just generating images. I spoke before about colliding on usual stuff. I love it. It's a beautiful place. I've made so many different kinds of stormtroopers. Oh, God. Yeah. Like dressed as Vikings, interested. But the thing I used to do, you know, my favorite era of is so funny, the era, the
era is of AI or so new. My favorite era of AI was mid 2022, because Dali too had just come out, but it was before it got really good. It was before it got a bit really obedient or extremely appropriate or reasonable. I remember drawing it to ask you to draw a picture of children escaping from a garden by a torchlight at night. And because it wasn't quite good enough yet, but it kind of understood the nature of what I was saying. It drew the feeling of children escaping a garden by torchlight,
but none of those things were present in me a bit. Wow. But you look at the image, you think,
“if that kind of a day, if that's what it feels like to be a chart. Yeah, it's sort of like,”
so earlier AI was actually better. Oh, what are your feelings? But this is a thing of this interesting thing about music and high resolution. People think when you learn music, and the more you train, the better you're going to get, not true. Because whilst your technique can be refined, the friction between understanding exactly what a thing is and not something what a thing is. That's why the most creativity happens because the most amount of change happens between order and chaos.
This is brilliant. So the whole Malcolm of Edwell, 10,000 hours. Yeah. Right? And this is what we're touching on, which is the more you gain mastery. What ends up happening is ausification. Yes, you
Classify.
40 years, they are the best. And you realize they're stuck. You realize that they're bored, stuck-mated. You realize that they're either afraid of change, don't understand how to change, or the money or fame is too good and they don't want to change. Yeah. Threatened. But generally, the feeling of like boredom is there because they've done it so much. The joy was the figuring it out up to 10,000.
“Right. Right. And so I think you're 100% right, which is, which is mastery is, I think,”
probably creative is a devil to a true creative. There are different kinds of mastery, though, I would say. Like, you can master, for example, the technique or something, the execution or something. You can also exhibit mastery by your ability to create containers. And this is the thing,
I'm currently obsessed with, with mastering. Because I've always required the right container
for my creativity to feel safe within. Because if you pour creativity into their open air, just goes, ah, and fizzles and disappears, or it's too much, there's too much infinity. So what you need is a, is a container that holds you together. And, and this is a, I think this is something you can imagine. What's your container? What could be a song? Could be an album? Could be a stage? Could be a lyric. Yeah. I think this, but I think this is, I think this is right, which is,
though creatives are comfortable in chaos. They don't reject order until it's time to reject the order. So this comes back to the irrational thing, though. Because you can't just improvise forever and have that be satisfying to you or the people, without input. We do want the container to your point. We want the song to be, you know, three minutes, it's, you know, that's a better right. It's good time, you know. Well, yeah. So I'm sure everyone who's listening, who's, who's ever sat down
to write a song or, or read, I mean, a whole host of creative activities knows this, understands this feeling, but it's like, you're, there's a part of your brain that just won't do the thing that you are telling it to do. Yeah. I remember being at school and studying for exams, which is something I really didn't like to do. And I would, I would kind of have to engineer through some kind of strange trickery that I would be revising to these am. By tricking myself that
it was in fact procrastination that I was revising. So I would, I would say, here's the task.
I was going to do this thing on the side. I was going to make some music for one second, and I'm
going to say, and then if I managed to trick myself into thinking that the music was the task,
“and then actually I was going to do a quick bit of revision before, you know, it's like, you have to,”
you're, you're dancing with this really abstract part of you. It's like, this chim, there's just like, you know, and it will react to kind of anything you give it. But I think this is such an interesting conundrum in terms of creativity. And it goes back to the thing I was saying to you before about how do you, what's your relationship with your old work? Because I'm grateful. That's how, if, if you made me sum it up, it's gratitude. Yeah. Well, I, I would, I suppose I'd say, I'd say the same for
your work and my, my old work. But, but I would say, like, what, what is it that keeps you being tickled? It's like, it's like, you, you, how, how does one stop? I guess the question is, how does one stop entry into that thing that you described just now of stagnating or getting stuck and getting bored and of just sort of recycling the same on it is, how do you keep someone sharp? And I think to my mind, it's, it's something about changing the container. You, but it goes back to the
conversation we had before and I have gone through periods of boredom. Yeah. And stagnation. And, oh,
“my God, I'm out of ideas. Yeah. I've had all of that. And, and so how have you, if you have to say”
it, and, and, and reductive terms, how have you got out of those? It's what you said, which is I, I have to break something. Yeah. Exactly. I have to break it. And if I go back and look at my whole career and I was in the corporate world, you know, my career would move well. I'd get promoted to a level where it was boring and I'd quit. Yeah. And COVID was a gift. I think I was at a period in my own self in my work where I was bored. And COVID was this magical disruption where I didn't
have to break it, it got broken for me. And then it was so much chaos. I was, in such a, I was in, I was thriving. Yeah. Yeah. You know. Now, notwithstanding the sadness, the fear, the uncertainty, all, all, it was a humble, but from a, it was strictly creative standpoint, it was absolute magic. Yeah. And the stress of it was fuel. Mm-hmm. Is there something you've done, an album you've worked on, a concert you've performed in, just anything specific that was what you would consider
the pinnacle, the ideal. Like when you look back, you're like, I wish every concert was like this one. I wish every album was like this, like, or every experience I've had was like that, like, if one was the stands out in your career, which one would it be? It's so hard to say, I would say, I'll start with album. There are two albums that I think sum up for thing, really the thing, because we're all chasing the thing. Mm-hmm. And you get close to it, sometimes the, oh,
that's the thing I've, I've almost got it. So at the first time, my memory was called in my room.
And I made it in my room in London, in this very, in this tight room, filled with instruments. And I made it by myself. And it was really exciting. I toured it by myself with a circle of 12 instruments in a circle on stage. And there was this visual element where I would sort of loop my skeleton in 3D using connect cameras. And it was this multi-media thing that was really, really fun.
That was like day one in the office.
And the metaphor of the room, I stand by today as being a huge one for me, massive. Everyone's got a room of some kind. I was lucky enough to have a physical one. There are my just released, this time last year. It's called Jesse Volume 4. It's the fourth album in a series of four albums. So this was my reaction to, of, to the, to the solitude of my roommate was like, I'm going to collaborate drastically. I'm going to go big. I'm going to amass it. If I'm going to
really experience what it's like to work with as many people as possible. The first song on Jesse Volume 4 has over a hundred thousand people on it. Wow. And that's because not only
are there, I mean, there's an orchestra that my mom actually conducted on the album, which is amazing.
There's also some choirs, individuals, artists, and things. But I recorded audiences, specifically from 22 to 23. And I didn't tell them I was doing this really at the time. But in, I was, I would end up in a key and I'd be, I'd be getting you on to do something, seeing you up and down, whatever. And in my mind, I was playing the song. I was half, half written. In all these different parts of the world, every continent of the world. And then I took
those audiences home. And I organized them into this kind of like Anthem and the song. That philosophically to me, it really thrills me because it's made out of people. But it's not, I didn't go in with the direct end. I didn't go in, knowing exactly what I wanted to get. I went in with it, with a container, with a concept of what would it sound like to have a hundred thousand people on one song. And then I figured it out. Oh, it sounds like this.
So, of those two experiences, what was the reason you decided to talk about? I mean, you've
had many concerts. You've done incredible collaborations. You've written some brilliant songs.
Like, there's many things that you've done that are magical in your career. What was it about these
“two specifically that you want to talk about them now? Well, I think that they both contain the thing,”
which is, which I think maybe is about the human voice. I think is about being a voice and having a voice. I think that the first, my first contribution this album in my room was about me exploring my own voice and being like, what the hell is this? What's the first I could stretch this? And the result, though, obviously I listen back to it now and I'm like, oh, let's just little Jacob just figuring it out. You know, it's just just getting started and stuff. And I would,
I guess, to second up what I'm, I say, I'm very grateful for the album. But I, I so appreciate the thing that I was catching, which was this, this idea of like, what, what if I close my eyes and listen to music in my head, what does that sound like? What is that? What is my inner world feel like? That was what it felt like. And I'm so proud of it. And I still go back to it and think, there is something of this that is in everything I ever do that is the truth.
Because it's, I mean, I, I learned to walk in that room. It was my ultimate foundation. And then the, this album I did last year was kind of like the same principle in the opposite, which is the voices of everybody else. But it kind of felt as faithful to the thing,
“which is very mysterious. And I'm curious how you've defined the thing for you. But I think to me,”
there's something about really being a self and through the voice. And then accessing that through other people, that, that, that, that, that feels like the thing I'm chasing to tell me in early specific, happy childhood memory. A specific, specific that I can relive with you. There was a moment when I was, I've probably about two years old as well. And as a main memory is that you had memories from two years ago. Yeah. Well, I have kind of two
main memories from what I was to. One is the memory I already gave, right, which you already read at the
right me. But the second is, I remember sitting on my mother's lap and she was playing the
violin, she's a violinist. And I'm looking up and seeing the violin above me and being like, I'm the violin. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm the music that's being played. Like, it's me that is the, I'm the source of the sound because the violin was going into me. And then that, to me, felt very, very exciting. And I mean, yeah, like, many memories of that age, it's sort of in this
“weird dream, half dream state there. So I think that's where the truth lies. And because all those”
three stories that you describe, the two albums and, and this experience of you sitting on your mother's lap, I think is, is the discovery that we are all instruments, right? And in the first album, you're the instrument and you're looking to compose through the, you know, the different sounds of you. And now, basically, you're, you're your mother and in the first example, you're sitting on your own laugh. And the second example, the audience is sitting on your lap. And it's, I think the
idea of, of being a vessel, the idea of being a container and the word containers come up a few times. But I, this idea, I think of being the messenger for some sort of expression and discovery, I think is, is, is your genius. You've, you've touched a lot of a few times, which is, you make musicians out of people who didn't know they were musicians. You make music out of people who aren't musicians. You said, you know, if, you know, half the audience is musical, it just goes
quicker. They just learn quicker. But, and I think that your music itself is so exploratory, formful and formless. Thank you. That I, I think that what you give us is, is a megaphone.
Like, you're the megaphone weirdly and not the sound going into the megaphone.
Oh, I think that's so, I think that's who you are and I think amazingly, but I, I love, I'm just in listen to your progress. I love that moment at the end of the progress when you say
and his, and he basically hears the container. And the, the reason I love it so much is because it's,
it's a, it's a thrilling thing to be kind of nestled into one concept. And as, as a person who is the person that they are, it's, it's something that's hard to see it. But I, I love the way that you put that,
“and I, I think it's interesting to me that I feel it in, in some ways, the most myself or”
when I'm that megaphone for others. But there's something about that being that megaphone, which also feels like it is me, but it's also not me. Yeah. And there's that, there's that funny dance between, yeah, being, being one pixel in the image. And yet also being the, being the image. Well, I think I think it's a healthy relationship with ego, right, which is, if the music comes through you or you the music or you just the vessel for the music, and it's healthy to
not know, it's healthy to go between the two. Hop. Yeah. You know, it's healthy to have an ego, but it's healthy to be humbled. And I'm, I'm just a megaphone for them music. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. One question I have for you, off the back of that. I think it's, it's regard to catching ideas. Because you are, like, a, a master of, of ideas, but you're also a, a kind of distiller of them. And I often think about this
idea of being a surfer. It's kind of the, one of the best ideas I've ever, one of the best images I've ever encountered to, to, to try to describe what's going on here. People talk about ideas coming to them from above, you know, some, some, some divine places. Yeah. And, and they're just completely a vessel, this idea of, I am just a vessel, I'm hollow, come through me. That's not who you are. I come in.
I've never experienced it in quite this way. Nothing you've, nothing you've explained or said here,
“has that metaphor. Well, the way I think about it is, it's, it is partly that. I mean,”
there is certainly a mysterious source, but there is not enough surfing as an energy. Do you surf? I don't do anything on boards. Really? It's not that I don't want to. It's just, I don't, just, I'm not good at boards. Fair play, skateboarding. I mean, I also don't do much, I don't do much on boards either, but I've served a couple times, and there's an amazing thing about it. It's mostly patience. You're mostly just waiting for the wave. It's been like, okay, when's it coming? And then
right? And then when it, but then there's technique required, psychological, physical technique required, when it comes to know how to catch it, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm right it out correctly. I think that's, that's the difference. So what you and I do that similar, people ask me what's my creative process,
and I always say that it's, um, it's days of guilt and self-loathing, punctuated by
hours of sheer brilliance. The problems I don't know when the hours will show up. But the part that I never talk about is when they do, I know how to write them. Exactly. And I walk, I carry a note, book in my back pocket, because I don't know when it's going to strike. I used to keep a dry erase pen in my bathroom, and if I had an idea, especially when I'm working on something, because, you know, once you're working on something, it stays with self-scoring. It starts going,
and if I had an idea in the shower, you lose it as quickly as you have it. You're like, oh, I'll
“remember that later. You don't. And so my bathroom wall was covered all the tiles with ideas.”
And I'd stand there and brush my teeth reading all these ideas. But the point is, is the difference of what you and I are doing. I think everybody has the moments of inspiration. Yeah. What everybody's not doing is capturing them. And I think that's, and maybe the artist is the one who learns to catch it. Mm. Love it. Would you know any bar-talk bag hotels? Do you know that BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM. I don't think I do know that.
Okay, so I heard a concert, and I'm going to play it for you, and then do whatever you want. , so beautiful. God, that sucks the man. All right, so that's totally a selfish request. I'm got a Grammy artist with me, and instead of asking you to play your music and asking you to play by a tuck. Is that wrong? No, that doesn't. I don't think that's wrong. So it was like.
[Music]
, [Music]
[Music] [Music] , [Music]
“goose bumps. That was very generous. Thank you very much. I've never been on that in my life ever before.”
The bar-talk is the man. So good. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much. Really a joy, joy.
Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
