Jacob Collier can make anyone sing

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm Songwriter Charlie Harding. Jacob Collier is a rare musician. He's an expert in so many musical languages, Western harmony, negative harmony, microchonalism.

And at the same time, he's a phenomenal communicator about these complicated topics. He's kind of the ambassador for music.

“He goes around the world getting thousands of people, non-musicians and musicians alike”

to sing in his audience choirs, conducted with very little direction. There is only had the unique opportunity to sit with Jacob at the piano, at on AirFest in Brooklyn, to conduct an audience and song. This conversation caught Jacob between projects. Last year, he released the Light for Days, a comparatively minimalist project of beautiful

songs written on his five string guitar. It was, quite a turn after his massive Jesse quadrilogy, where he had over 50 collaborators from Herbie Hancock to Anishka Shankar, and literally hundreds of thousands of singers with his audience choirs, who were layered into the album. And given that Jacob gets to work and often improvise with the very best collaborators,

I decided I wanted a collaborator to for this conversation. Just five minutes before the show started, I saw that Sam Sanders was in the audience, co-hosts a vibe check and host of the Sam Sanders Show on Case here at W. And so I asked him on stage to join for the interview. Sam is a musician, and one of the great music

interviewers, and he showed me how improvising in conversation is just as essential as

it is in music. The whole thing was caught on tape and is available on YouTube or right here in our feed. Here's my conversation with Jacob Collier and Sam Sanders at On Air, about how we are all singers, whether we believe it or not. I'm really excited for this conversation, Jacob, because so often, as journalists, we often

get to chat with musicians when they're just putting a project out. And right now, we

“get to catch a kind of in the middle of life. And I think that's often the best place”

to catch somebody, and things are processing. Obviously, music is happening in the background. I want to have a conversation today about how you listen, what you hear, and how that inspires you to make music. I think you're one of the few people who is equally as virtuosic in your playing, as you are, and being able to describe to anybody about how music works. So I want to start off with asking, just like right now, right here, how are you, what are

you hearing?

Amazing question. Hi everybody. How are you? It's nice to see you. Yeah, I've heard

a lot of snow this week, a lot of squeals of delight. Children with trays and sleds and all manner of joy. And I've been in New York for a month, actually, which has been a while. It's the longest I've been in one place since COVID. And yeah, I've been listening in intently, sort of within and without. And New York is one of the noisiest, most co-coffinous places in the world. And that's a special thing. So I'm happy to be here, and I'm happy to be here

this festival. Musically, you're correct. I'm between. I have completed this quad, these four albums, Jesse, volume 1, 2, 3, 4. Thank you very much. And I've toured those, sort of, very kaleidoscopically around the world for about eight years without a break. So this is my first break in a while. And it changes the way that I feel and the way that I perceive myself and the way that I perceive the world and music. But the delightful moment I'm in now is not

having an agenda in a plan. So that's who you're meeting today, a Jacob without an agenda in a

plan. And I've always been a very ravenous listener, you could say. And that's a perpetual thing

I feel. And now I'm just on the lookout for new things to grab my attention. Something I heard and loved to listen to that comes to mind in front of mind. I was last week I was hanging out with a group of musicians called Sandbox percussion. Have you come across those? Anyone who knows that Sandbox percussion? Oh, you're in for a treat. There's so special. Therefore, extraordinary, classically trained percussionists who do the most mind-blowing, mind-bending,

crazy, polyrhythmic, emotional music that I've come across in my long life. And they are

I invited Sam up about five minutes ago. Same thing occurring to you that you'd like to

share with yourself. I have a follow-up question on this, like, what are you hearing right now

“in your relationship to sound? I think a lot about how the rise of streaming has changed the way”

music functions in most people's lives day-to-day. You know, when my parents were picking a record to put on, there was a conscious choice to listen to this. And they had to listen to no when to flip the record. And you were more attuned, I think, to what you were listening to. And now what's Spotify? For better or for worse, I'm not knocking it. You can set these almost ambient playlists. You set it and forget it. And the music becomes a utility that exists in the background.

I'm wondering if you have thoughts on how the way that we listen now and the way the algorithm can just feed us whatever, how it affects the way people hear music. Because I wonder if it is making the actual relationship weaker? You understand? I do know what you're saying. Okay. Yeah, so listening to an album is like a duration of activity. Like, okay, I'm in this for a 45-minute train ride or whatever it is. And the tracks are in that order and you're going to hear. Yeah,

yeah, I'm going to be read a story from A to B to C to D to E, etc. That was my childhood as well. Like, I grew up with that psychology. I loved it so much. Still do, I'm I'm holding on,

“but, and yeah, it's a whole, it's a different world, it's a changing world. I think there are”

many valid distances from which to listen to music. I think it's valid to go in intentionally and holding it close and studying it and being in that journey. I also think it's valid to put it on when you're cooking or put it on when you're running or whatever you want to do with your life. And that's a valid distance too. I think there's, I would say that listening to music and making music are more similar than people think. I think that the process of creating music is very similar

to the process of listening to music. And if you have the skill set, which many of us don't give ourselves credit for having, to be able to, you could say, like, diagnose your mood and say, "I know what I want to listen to right now. I want to listen to open a fire because I need to push." You know, I want to listen to Bonnie Verk because I need Paul. I know one is to freak flocks. It's because I want to, you know, whatever. That process is very similar in my mind to the process of creating. Because I think what, what do I wish existed right now? What do I want to feel? What do I want to hear? And that feeling of

kind of flipping the direction of taste. To me, it's like one of the most important and crucial

relationships the build is that with yourself and your taste with yourself. Now what I notice in the streaming era is a sense to lose that, how do I feel what I need? It's kind of just here's what we're given. If you're not careful, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And we all have those, we have this place. I've started to try and get more intentional about my playlist titles. Give us some examples. So yeah, I have also so weird playlists. Like I have a world building playlist that's just worlds, like the vividest worlds.

I have a playlist for upwards energy going upwards. I have a playlist for downwards. Do you share these publicly? You share this one, a public one called Optimum Jacobs Optimum Music Feast, which you can go and find. And it's like 20,000 songs are something ridiculous that I've had since so I was, you know, 19 or something, but but the upwards and downwards plays are interesting because because I'm a curator as well as a creator where I I curate my experience as a listener and I think at my best as a creator, it's similar to that.

I'm also one of these strange artists for whom no genre is off limits. I don't identify as being any particular genre, so I don't think genreically. And it's a fun process to curate. There's really diverse bunch of music, but put them under the headings of a sensation of feeling a direction of travel, a texture of energy. Like I have some plays that just emojis. And it's like, or what song feels like it's a lines with the emoji that's the pink, the purple

“devil head or the bubbles or whatever. And that's how I think about this direction and this direction of making music that makes.”

You said that we might put on different things to enhance how we feel, whether we want to feel excited, an hour, or inward and cold. I'm told. Is as a curator or as a musician, do you feel that music's primary role as some kind of mood medicine?

I think it can be used like that. That's a valid way. It's something I've always turned to music for.

It's a sense of you could say like catharsis or what I love with catharsis. Oh, there it is. Wow, that's the feeling. I think, you know, as a child when I was growing up, my the relationship I was encouraged to have with the world was that it was constantly at play. Everything was constantly at play with me. And I don't necessarily mean musically at play,

And you know, growing up we were kind of all introverts in the family. And I was kind of encouraged to,

you could say study my sort of internal emotional world. And that was like the the crucial foundations for

the stories that I went on to tell. But if I found a gathering had a story, you know, and, and that was an interesting experience. You know, we'd sit at the dinner table with the pepper grinder, the candlestick, the yogurt pot, you know. And the question would be, oh, are they friends today? You know, are these, are these, are these, no, they're not friends. Pepper grinders going over here. Okay, yogurt pot, all the spoons, you know, whatever. And it sounds kind of trite, but it was so beautiful for me as a kid to have a relationship with the world in that way.

“Everything was like, well, I can move, I can break, I can bend, I can play. And as musicians, we play for a living. That's what we do.”

We play. But to me, playing is a state of being in the world. It's not, it's not a job or a task. It's a, it's a bi-directional

experience. And, and yeah, I think I've taken that into my adult life, too, in a sense. You talked about building these emotional worlds through music. You know, I think a lot of us as, especially maybe laeless sinners who might not identify as musicians, but maybe we can upend that later on. Maybe we're more familiar with lyric, melody comes to us, I get stuck in our head. I was wondering if we could invite you to the piano. And, um, I'd love to see if you could share with us

how harmony creates emotion. Yeah, my favorite. That's a big ass. That's a big ass. Okay, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll try my best. Okay. Uh, whoo. So, um, put this high. So, so how many people play the piano here? I'm just curious. Well, that's, that's kind of awesome. Like, 56% solid. Um, so your math was or two, I had no idea. Yeah. Um, harmony is about tension and release, right?

Harmony is about the combination of things with other things. You take a thing and another thing, put them together. That's harmony. Harmony is more relationships. It's a human experience. It's not just a musical experience. So, when we study harmony, or, I say, study, I sort of mean, just wiggle around and find stuff. Um, we are controlling tension and release, we're controlling resolution and, and that, the feeling of closing and opening and, and density, speed that the whole of harmony is built out of things that you already know about

intuitively because you're a human with eyes and ears and mouths and noses and brains and bodies. Everybody understands the idea of high and low, right? We, we know that. We know about that. High and low. We know about bright and dark. We know about thick and thin. We know about rough and smooth. We know about many and few. We know these things. So, we recognize them in ourselves and others. So, if I play a chord like this, you have a sense of, ah, you know, it's like a corollary for us.

Like a bumblebee cloud or something. You know, um, many high dense. These are the, these are the principles that play. Um, if I play a chord like, um, that, or maybe even that, suddenly we're in a whole different world. We're, we're in like a cavernous piece that's more as low as darker. It's low

“down. The distances between the notes are bigger. It's more like, oh, like this. That's how I have”

experienced that chord. Um, and every sound world has its own kind of sonority and the journey of being in a range of or harmonious to piano player or singer, whatever, is, yeah, to sort of create relationships with, with things. And so, one of my favorite things to do with this and maybe a helpful way to answer the question is to take a song that you know and to give it different forms of harmonic context to maybe help you understand like what's possible harmonically,

because the melody's not going to change, but the harmony can change. What's a song that I could work with, or anyone, what's a song that I could work with here that twinkle twinkle little star, Bangor, uh, in what key? F, I hope so if you can say F. What happened at the end there?

“Something happened at the end there. The truth is, F, can you sing an F, or can you sing that?”

Yeah, so that F is perfectly comfortable, keep singing in this chord. Keep singing as this chord, right?

That'll do for now. It's not an amazing feeling being in F and seeing your context,

with the note F, for example, finding every single possible chord that works with F.

This is an unlimited chord, right? So, when we play the song Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, we're trying to create these relationships, and what I'm playing with really is your expectation,

“because that's what's already there, your sense of what feels inevitable, what feels natural,”

what feels, kind of, you know, what feels, what does it feel like? Suddenly everything's really quiet. So, for example, if I keep, if I keep the bass note, ooh, this F, I keep that solid, and that doesn't change, but the chords do change otherwise. There's tensioner, you're feeling this tension, right? Oh, ah! Right? There's really an alpuff, you know? So, that's one way of making tension, pedal notes,

“notes that go all way through, and then there are so many other things you can do. I can only”

use chords with loads of notes close together in them, and it's like ah, right? Or I could only use notes that are really far apart. , and then there's a lot of things you can do, and then there's a lot of things you can do. , right? Right? Thank you. Hi, I'm Renee Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking,

feeling and questioning. It's going to be fun, we rarely agree. But we almost never disagree,

and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube, or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. You did this thing when you got up here, where you immediately had the whole room, just joined you in singing F. And I followed your career for a long time. You always love to have a

“crowd sing with you. Have you ever gotten a room that can't sing with you, and how do you work that?”

Is that a challenge? No, no, I mean, just because it's like, it's become a part of your life show, singing with your audience, directing them like a choir, or when you're going to do that, do you just assume that every room and every audience can be able to sing with you, or is it a certain calculus? Yeah, it's such a great question, and we could easily spend the rest of the time talking about this one thing. I know that everybody can sing because everybody really speaks.

Yeah, my brother. Yeah. I have not. I know that everybody can sing. The question is to what degree of resolution can they sing in tune? Can they listen to each other? Can they move around harmonically? You know, I've toured now for 10 years, and it's everything from beautiful, pristine, performing arts centres, arenas, concert halls, to like the grungiest of grungy, festival stages, 4pm outdoors, drunk 11pm, super high, or conference rooms with no-one's

paying attention. Oh, so, but here's what I'd say, everyone can do, hey, oh, everyone could do that.

And the first thing that I do when I go on stage is usually that, and I diagnose from that,

you can actually hold a three-part chord just about fine, that you're going to be able to move up and down pretty good. You might not go full chromatic, which is my, like, the wrist thing, which we can try later, but if I go, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, sounds just slowly, and then if you all of you over there go, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, yeah, that's pretty good. I also feel like you, what you do when you do that, you are kind of showcasing how I think everyone wants to sing? Yeah, yeah.

And we don't sing enough, but as soon as someone says, saying, you're like, I would love to do that.

“I would love to do that. So, here's the thing, permission is more important than skill.”

That's the thing. And it's crazy. It's so overrated, the idea that someone is qualified, someone is, you know, whatever, someone is qualified, someone is not. The thing with singing is so inherent to us that if you're just given the opportunity to participate and you're invited, you step forward and you're in. And my job is to make you feel comfortable and make you feel confident and not to put you in position where you feel unsafe and to challenge you. And this is a model of leadership that I believe in very

strongly, and I've operated in for many, many years now. And the same thing I'm going to move back to my chair. The same thing goes, the same thing goes in the studio. You know, there are producers in this one, music producers who I won't name names, but who kind of feel the best possible route to galvanizing a good emotional result out of a collaborators to just intimidate them.

You know, they say, "Oh, you, I know way more than you do. You don't know the first thing about

love. Do you know what I've done?" You know, and even in small and more subtle ways, just bit little and just, you know, elbowing around. It's so not how I was brought up. It's so not what

“I believe it. It's so doesn't work on me, you know. And so I'm only as powerful as I make you feel”

as your producer, as your conductor, as your performer. And so that to me feels like the ultimate thing to focus on, as a creative person, and the audience choir would not work if I told people to do things. I show them, I show them what's possible, and then I push them, and they show them what's possible, and they leave the room thinking, "God, I did that. We did that." And if people focus their energy on one thing and love one thing, as a room they tend to love each other as

well, and amazing things happen after audience choirs. Like people, there's all these bonds that have been made, just through trust, you know, just through the simplicity of that. Jacob, in addition to working as a music journalist, I also move in line as a music educator, and one of the things I just run into so frequently with my students, I like you close too.

It's nice to be closer to you. Rub heads always happens when we present songs to each other

for feedback is, "Well, every excuse of why this thing is not good." And I hear from my music students, I feel like I hear it even more from people who are so quick to not identify as a musician. You know, maybe they play piano when they are a kid, and they gave it up, and I'm not a musician. What do you say to that voice? Well, I mean, first of all, that is, unfortunately, a very common psychology. A lot of people, I mean, everyone's a musician because we have bodies and voices

and rhythmic and constantly at play, but a lot of people have music kind of stained by education at the young age, and the wrong kind of education teaches like this. Like the thing I was saying before, wrapping you over the knuckles, and this is the one way to do it. So the first thing is,

“like, you're not alone, you know, and I think someone said once, you know, the creative adult is the”

child who survived, and I've always kind of thought, "That's very true." Because there are so many

forces, as you grow, that try and close you down, shut you down, strip you of your confidence, of your individuality, of your sparkle, of all the stuff. And music is one of those, it's one of those languages that is revealing of a person, and I think if you're made to feel unsafe or you're made to feel small or you're made to feel irrelevant or whatever, which is not to say that you're not pushed in challenge by the way, but if that's the emotional

constitution to the teacher, whatever, it's hard. Like there are like unhealable wounds or often often that happen there. But, you know, the thing I think with that, and there are even artists who didn't quite have that experience, but have just gone into the music industry and got burnt out by

what I say to people in any of those situations is just to find and hold onto what you kind of first

“loved. What was it that you first was drawn to in first, first loved? Because I think that I know for”

me, the music I loved when I was two, five, eleven, sixteen, nineteen, that that still is my whole. It's still Stevie Wonder, it's still Bob McFerran, it's still Freddie Mercury, yeah, you know, it's still Johann Sebastian Bach, because they were my first heroes. And so when I get deflated and worn down and I, what do I do? How do I combine this? Ah, what do I, what do I do, what's worth building? Does this even make a difference? A lot of the time it's just finding it's, it's the thing

we were saying before about diagnosing what it is that I feel like I, I need, I wish, what did I, what I wish existed, what I wish I could listen to. And sometimes it's going back to those early things that Rickindles, that's bar. Can I follow up on that just in terms of like hearing you work with this room right now, I feel like you are and would be in a classroom, a very empathetic music educator, but I think about a lot of the folks that taught me when I was growing up.

And it's like I have this archetype or trope of like the mean piano teacher who would like wrap you over the hand, or like whatever teacher taught the kids poetry and made poetry not fun. They made you memorize it and recite it. And like, you know, these art forms returned into ways in which an adult could be strict to a child. What would you change? The biggest change you'd make in the way that we teach our children music. If you were in charge of it all.

You know, the tricky thing with education is that everyone needs a little bit of something different. It's it's so hard to find a one-size-fits-all. Everyone needs to be tickled in a certain way to get, to get the best out of them. And so it's like what's the, what's the form of mass tickleage that the genuinely works for? Is there even such a thing? And I don't know if there is.

“I think we need empathetic human beings to be in these positions. There are many reasons why.”

I mean, I grew up in England and seeing the state of the England arts funding situation right now is a little dire. You know, it's a teacher has every reason to lose faith in their ability to feel confident and safe and expansive and creative in a classroom. I think it's such a, it's such a, it's, it's a much more systematic problem than than, hey, here's, here's just a, what business, a bed of rulebook for you. Just teach these rules and stay because it's not going to work for someone.

You know, I won't work for me as a kid. Simply doesn't work for another kid. Well, work for you as a kid. A lot of space to wiggle around. Clear limitations and boundaries.

And then like forgiveness of me going over every line possible, which I always did. I would break

everything I was given and eat everything I was given musically. And, you know, but that's because I have a particular type of bread. Like that's, I have a particular type of brain. And some people would much rather be told exactly what to do and to be, it's about consistency. And it's about being, yeah, just being, uh, much more, yeah, much more systematic. But, you know, and I think, yeah, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, maybe a strange case. But in general, we need, we need empathetic human beings.

We need, I mean, as someone said this about being a musician anyway, you know, the world doesn't need more good musicians. Um, the world needs more good people. But being a musician is a great way being a good person. Because when we study music, we're actually studying all the best parts of being a human. We're studying empathy and trust and risk and physics and mathematics and balance and form and language and leadership and syntax and grammar. Like literally the whole thing in history,

geography, you know, is all in there. I, I would, I would hope that a music teacher is an ambassador for life and, and it's a verb and, and not a noun. My, my favorite teachers are verbs. They show it. They don't tell it. They don't sit there saying, this is the thing in theory. It's this. It says, it's like, we're going to start to leave by, I'm going to play you something absolutely love. And I want to, I want to hear what you think about it. And then, and then you listen and you play,

“and you, you experience that. And because the, the best thing you're teaching can do is build,”

give you the conditions to build your own relationships with music. It's not a super-imposing the teachers relationships music. But that does come down to being a human being with an open mind and, uh, and communication skills and a sense of not knowing everything. That's, that's the one thing I do feel is I don't know. I'm not qualified to tell you exactly what everything is, but I can show you what I absolutely love and why I love absolutely love it. And that's a good place to start, maybe.

Yeah. When I first started playing music, I really loved improvisation. That was the thing that

first got me. And it took me many, many years to get into the world of melody. So I was wondering if we might be able to put you back into the role of educator for a second. And, uh, to share a little bit about what this sort of, what is the minimum amount of information that is necessary

I'll give you, uh, I'll give you three things. The first thing is, I'll tell you a lesson I

was taught about melody that I, because I asked a teacher of my own. His name's Mike Walker, it's a beautiful guitar player from England. I said, "Hey, Mike, how do I make a good melody?" And he said, "Well, it's plenty of melody." So I played him something. I was like, "Okay." Then he said, "Sink now, sing me a melody." So I went, "Oh." He said, "Okay." And I said, "Now I want you to listen in your imagination." And imagine a girl

comes up to sings you a melody. And I want you to sing back what she sings to you. So I, close my eyes, went to imagination, girl appeared lovely, great. And then I sort of waited for this character to sing this melody. And there was so much rhyme and balance and order and poetry and symmetry in the melody, they came out. And he said, "Well, that's the end of the lesson."

“Like, that's everything you need to know for a melody. And it really stayed with me. This was 15 years”

ago. But there's this sense that a good melody was already there. You just need to unlock it. And that you also have to get rid of the crud and the crap in the front of your brain. And sometimes work through the sort of cobwebs of front-of-mind stuff and get to what's really going on. Here's the kind of teacher who's saying a player called that's your mother, you know, or... Well, what's which chord is that? No, that's a personal question. Sorry. Oh, or um, you know,

like, I remember talking to Herbie Hancock about his piano teacher. He started with this guy called Chris Anderson who was blind and had this kind of bone disease where he was kind of, it was constantly

like this. And he was one of the most amazing piano players of all time. And Herbie speaks about,

you know, he'd play a standard for Chris and Chris would just be like, "Add salt," you know, or kind of like, "Let's purple," you know, stuff like that. And I really, that's totally my thing. As you can probably tell, that's totally, that's totally my thing. So anyway, yeah, just that this

“sense that, that uh, you're behind underneath the, the, the mind is the heart and actually underneath”

the heart is, is the gut and they will power each other in this direction. And Mike's exercise went from here to here to here and the melody just got better. So that's one thing I wanted to share. Another exercise I was taught as a child, which was actually an improvisation exercise, as you mentioned improvisation, was that of a, a fun way of, of improvising a melody is to do one note and then to add one note to the note and then add one note to those two notes and one notes to those three notes.

A bit like that game where it's like, I went to the market and I bought a fish, I went to the market

and I bought a fish. Can you share us? Yeah. Yeah. So um, uh, trying to think if, it's say we say we say we're between good, good, good, good, good, good start. Tweet, good, good, good, good start. The chords, between good, good, good, good, good start. Is there this kind of? So actually let's just do this. Let's do this. If I go... No...

No... No... And I still like him. Oh... Right. The exercise is...

I know. I had something to say. But um...

“Do you get the sense of how, like, you can follow what's going on a little bit?”

It's like... And a certain point. Um... You're following threats. And that...

I think the best melodies do that. They're not constantly reinventing themselves. I mean, you kind of have a cool melody that does that. But that was a really helpful exercise for me. Um... in... in... in melodic development.

You could say. You're not like pick a certain number of notes and only work with that number. So three notes. Like if we do a bit of a cool response thing, because I know you want to sing. Um...

If I...

[music] [music] [music] Who well done everyone. That was great. That was a rule. All my phrases are short. I went into that saying, "Oh, every note will be every phrase we three notes like I accidentally did like five and six."

But I like the idea of limiting it to a time frame. You have two beats. I have two beats. And it has to be singable. These are all good principles for melodies. We're having this wonderful conversation that feels so alive and walking into your worlds in your mind is just phenomenal. But I know that as soon as everyone leaves this environment, they'll be in any number of musical spaces that are increasingly being touched by AI. That will make the melody and make the song and sing it for you and make the artist. There was a Christian

artist who topped the Christian Billboard charts for a few weeks a few months ago. All AI. No. Dude has a bio, photos, he's cute, it's weird. I'm wandering for you. What part of the rise of AI if any gives you the most pause? Particularly when talking about humans making melody and music together.

“Yeah. Whoa. You know me enough to know how much I love human beings, right?”

So the first thing to say is that we've never needed humanity more than we need it right now.

So where does that leave us in this crazy moment of generative models, large language models, predictive models? Here's what I think seems to think about a prediction model. You have a model that has been trained to satisfy your expectations. And there's this thing in the back end of AI is called the top K. I don't know how much you know about the tech of AI. So the top K is the is everything likely to happen in the order from

most likely to least likely, right? So the top 50 in the list of top K is like, if I say,

then the large language, large language will always say, you know, went, feel, think.

Well, all the most likely things mean to say. If I go down that list of top K into the least likely stuff, I get really weird words. You know, I truncate is not probably not in the top thousand, but I do. But so so when I my all-poses of learning music was about understanding my

“relationship with expectation and like how to break it and how to twist it. So is AI interesting?”

Yeah, it's very interesting. I think it's our duty as artists to explore it so that we know what parts of it to truly condemn. Actually, if we condemn the whole thing off the bat, AI bad, then I feel like I feel like that's like a low resolution response, which probably you condemn right now, if any. There are a few. One is the way these models are trained and the fact that they're trained on us. It's theft. They're trained on us. Ask musicians without

permission. We're not paid. They are filled with our hard-earned experience, tastes, contributions, and then they can squeeze out these little weird impressions of those things, which is absolutely

“bizarre and very strange. The thing I think I condemn almost even more is just the frickin'”

predicts it's so generic. I hate generic. I can't stand it. I would never trust a human

who had a top care of ten or something. I would never trust an obedient, creative person.

as a creator is to try and break it. As I've broken everything else, I've been interested in

chords, harmony, rhythm, people, whatever. I haven't really broken any people. Not recently anyway. But I love the idea of investigating what it's good at and what it's bad and it's bad at a

“lot of stuff and it misses the point in a lot of ways. I think our freedom increasingly in a world”

of algorithms and AI is actually our unpredictability. I think that's a little bit of a superpower that we have. It's because we're biologically limited and we're limited by our need for a love and and our weirdly faces and our low resolution language and our slowness and our inefficiency. It's beautiful. I love it so much and there's this myth of efficiency. The faster the thing is achieved the better, but in music we know that silence is not inefficient. It's not like who gets the

end of the piece faster. Those aren't the competitions here. I have conversations with a lot of tech-minded people and when I say that to them, they have this moment of recognising, "Oh, right, because in the world of tech, like silence is inefficient." If I'm going to take a moment now before I play my next phrase, it's like, "Well, waiting, we're on the clock." But in music, it's like going to get a dance to get to the end of the other side of the room. That's not

why we dance. We dance to go around in a circle. And so when we think about human art and the value of art and beauty in the world, it doesn't come from efficiency. It doesn't come from competence. To me, there's something joyous about recognising how, how much of a wrecking ball things

are that are created through sheer competence and nothing else. I've never, it's never made me cry,

competence. I love that because she was so competent, I was just wept, you know. I've never said, but that's, but that's AI. It's so competent. And so, yeah, we need, we need to hold on to the all the inefficiencies. And I also think it's important to explore, explore what's there,

“and, and understand it for yourself. And I think I've learnt a lot about myself and my”

taste through poking it and trying to get it to be interesting. Artists are question askers, they're master question askers. AI only works. It's only as good as the question you ask it. And so if you ask it a generic question, you get a generic answer. And once, one thing I would say, I've enjoyed about it is that it demands, I asked non-generic questions. And the muscle of asking non-generic questions, I can take into anything I do on a stage in a room of collaborators with

10,000 audience members with a bit of an musical instrument. So it's helpful for getting to know my, myself and my taste, but God, it's a really hairy moment wherein I would say that. Yeah. Well, you're speaking to, it's something I struggle with. Sometimes the, maybe you can help me unlock some creative block that I've got that I think maybe some other people in the room might have as well. You know, as a journalist, I come and I over repair,

I listen to everything, take all my notes. Sometimes I have to invite some chaos into the whole process, just to let myself loose. Because conversation has to be improvisatory, just like music, in the same way that it also has to be prepared. Yeah. And so I appreciate you joining, and bringing, and bringing some of the energy to it. But so, I sometimes find as someone who is required to do a lot of preparation, I'm often required to my job to be highly analytical.

I often think about music highly analytically. Then I have to go be a creative person. What are some ways that I can turn that analytical brain off and go back to the child mind? You spoke about it. Yeah. Yeah. Great question, man. Yeah. I want to know the answer to that too, sometimes, for sure. You know, Quincy Jones used to tell me, follow your goosebumps.

That was his big thing. Follow your goosebumps. That never lead you wrong. Follow your goosebumps.

goosebumps are not cerebral. They don't show up when you think about something really hard. You know, it doesn't happen. goosebumps happens when they want to happen. They're like they're northern lights or something. Oh my god. So when they show up, it's like a sign that it's this brain talking rather than this one. To go back to the triage of brains thing.

“goosebumps come from like the bottom of your feet. I'm grounded. I mean, so sometimes you have to”

recognize the response your body is already having to something emotionally, because feeling moves faster than thought, right? You feel quicker than you think, even though even if I imagine you're probably quite a quick thinker as I am. So sometimes it's like, but it's still quicker. It still gets to you quicker. So the flame of emotion before a thought. Yeah. Yeah. There's something to that. You know, when I really hit a block and I'm thinking too much

poundas. Does that mean anything to you? Math? Yeah. So in the UK we have beard masks because

divide at the track? That's the thing. Wow. My man over here knows his pad-pid pedmasters.

“I think there's like a pedmas to emotions. I mean, this is a whole different talk. But I think”

there is a, when I get into a rut, when I hit a block, the first thing to think about is, did I sleep? Did I eat? Did I have a rest? And I don't judge anything until I've done those things. I'm a fool to say, maybe I have a huge problem with my personality. Maybe I'm like, maybe I need to date someone else. Maybe I need to, I might, you know, it's like, okay, did I sleep? Nope. Okay, I just got to sleep. My sister has a thing, she's like, I don't judge

myself for anything until I've had three consecutive nights of eight hours of sleep, which I'm like,

when will I ever have that? Yeah, never happen. But when you're going into a rut,

please just ask yourself, did I eat? And did I sleep? And have I take it? Have I rested? The second layer of that is like, have I been challenged? Have I been creative? Have I been watered? Like, has my flower been watered? It's also a bit like the, like, Madslow's hierarchy of needs, think the pyramid of needs thing. It's just like, there are reasons why you might be blocked. You know, and sometimes, you know, you have slept, you have it, and you have had

company, you have gone outside, you have done exercise all these things, and, and actually what you need is to cry, or you might need to break a rule, or you might need to, and listen to music, or you might need to stop trying so hard, or you might need to stand up straight. You know, I have a whole list, I have a list of a hundred things, and, and I love it, and it's, it's helpful for me, because it's often not the thing you think it is that's blocking you. If you block

you just means there's energy that stuck, it just can't quite come through, and the mind is like the ultimate ninja blocker, or feeling, no, no, no, I won't let you come. It doesn't go against the thing I think about me, you know, but a, one creative way of getting through a block is to try and make the worst thing you've ever made, deliberately, go in being like, what's the worst

song in the world, and make that one? And, and whenever I do this, I always make it something

interesting, and whenever I sit down and try and make something that everybody's going to love, and it's going to hit the top of the charts, and I'm going to, it's going to, you know, whatever, everyone on this podcast audience is going to love me, whatever. I tend to make things that are less interesting, so, so there's a liberation to recognizing that, hey, what if it's

“fine to make the worst thing in the world? What if you try to make the worst thing in the world?”

And you, suddenly, it brings like, well, I can't help you with that, and then you're, your unconscious things come through, and it gets more interesting. I know we have to go, but I'm going to ask a selfless question. Yes. Based on this conversation and the vibe in this room and of this chat, recommend a song or an album for us to listen to as we leave here, to play as we leave the room or on our days. A song or an album? Yeah. That speaks to this moment that we've had together.

Anything. Hmm. No, it's so many. First one that comes to mind. First one that comes to mind is

Adrian Lincoln's song's album. Do you, do you know that? Say it again for thinking here. Adrian Lincoln. Spell anchor. L-E-N-K-E-R. Okay. Yeah, songs. What a record. Check out, listen to not, not a lot, just forever. Listen to that song. Yeah, I feel like we've been speaking a bit about, kind of like softness actually in general as an awareness in texture. It's a beautifully aware soft gentle textural album. So maybe maybe check that out. And then Sandbox percussion,

who I mentioned earlier on. They have a record called Pillars. There's very different from the

“Adrian Lincoln record, but you should definitely also check that record out because it's incredible.”

We have to leave. We have some listening homework, but we can't just be listeners. We all still must be musicians as well. Could, would you mind leaving us with just a moment of collective singing? Yes. Very briefly. I'd love to. Oh, thank you so much. I'd love to appreciate it, check out. I see trees, green, red roses too. I see them blue for me and you.

And I think to myself, oh, let's go. I see skies, a blue, clouds, a waves, a bright, blessed day.

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky. And also all the faces of

people go by, I see trees, shake their hands, sing out and do, they're really singing, I love you. I hear babies crying. I watch them grow. They'll know much more than I'll ever know. And I think to myself, oh, let's go.

“Yes, I think to myself, oh, what a wonderful, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.”

So much done, pop is produced by Rana Cruz, edited by Lisa Soap,

Engineer by Brand MacFarlane, Illustrations by Roskaleb, Video by Nick Rips, Music by Zack Tonario, and Josie Adams of Arc Iris. Remember of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture,

which is part of New York Magazine, subscribe and ymag.com/pod.

“Again, if you want to see this whole conversation live on video,”

you can go see it over on YouTube. We'll be back again next week. And until then, thanks for listening. [Music] But what I want to say is that you don't want to film your whole studio.

“You're a master-by-tak laptop, you're soft, you're the internet.”

You're a master-by-tak. I'm saying, you can say that you're drunk. Yes, you're a master-by-tak, right? But you won't believe it. EGAL, Zauberwort Verlustvortrag, make the whole thing like this.

And when they then work, he says, "Catching"? That's right. Safe, like this. Hold your money. Now you're ready to try it out.