Top 40 Jacob Collier Quotes

I think of what I do for work as playing/jamming. Music for me is so much fun so I don’t take my work very seriously in terms of not being humorous, but I take it absolutely seriously in terms of taking the time to make it as rich and glorious as possible.

I was given this music programme called Cubase, one of the first multi-layering programmes, when I was seven, and I graduated to Logica at 11, and that became my primary instrument.

I want to write orchestral music. I want to get a group of singers together and sing William Byrd songs.

So the language of musical harmony is an absolutely extraordinary one. It’s a way of navigating one’s emotional frameworks, but without the need to put things into words, and I think that, as with many other languages, it doesn’t matter how much you know about a language.

In my experience, my music has drawn people of all ages, which is a real wonderful thing. And at my gigs you get everyone from six year olds to 90 year olds. And I find that really quite moving, actually.

Making music with other people feeds spontaneity, and lends ideas to your solo work.

It was a challenge with ‘In My Room,’ because I was the only person in that room making the record, to maintain perspective.

You can get people to follow very intricate pathways of musical information, but it feels like a nursery rhyme or a children’s story.

The whole life of a song doesn’t end with the way that it sounds on the record. How does this song grow? What works live? What do people like to sing along to?

The thing with music education is that it is good at teaching technique, but not texture. You only learn about that from listening to music and experimenting on your own.

There are a whole bunch of instruments I’d like to build.

I always wanted to, at some point, sit down and consider how to plot out one piece of work, one album, from start to finish.

D is a wholesome key. It’s not bland, like C. It’s not neutral. It’s probably on the bright side.

I grew up in this room filled with musical instruments, but most importantly, I had a family who encouraged me to invest in my own imagination, and so things I created, things I built were good things to be building just because I was making them, and I think that’s such an important idea.

I suppose technically I could say I’m based in jazz, just because it’s the school of thought that I’ve been encouraging myself to operate within.

For me, jazz is an understanding of music, rather than an end in itself.

I have lots of strange ideas in the back of my mind.

It’s funny, I guess when I was growing up, I didn’t really think about being an instrumentalist, per se. I didn’t think, well, I want to be a piano player, or, I want to be a guitar player, or even, I want to be a singer. I just wanted to be a musician.

With the Internet you can research anything.

My mother was this force of nature when it came to both communication with people and the whole of learning music. She’s a champion.

Even if nobody was listening to it, I’d still be making music.

I suppose for me, with ‘Djesse,’ I realized fairly early in the process that I also needed a character to walk this path, which in some ways is me, and in some ways is not me. I think of Djesse a bit like the infinite child who can see everything and walk into everything as light as a feather and just alchemize.

Music is one whole force. And I think the Proms have always represented very clearly that music is a universal language, one that everyone can speak. I’ve just followed my goosebumps in every direction and have found a recipe for what my music feels and sounds like.

The only reason I create something is because I’m chasing a feeling. You can use a bunch of musical or psychological operations to achieve that result.

I’m a huge fan of voice memos. I put down many ideas there and sometimes I even use some of those audio files in my actual recordings. You get this really raw energy from voice memos that you can’t get when you sit down in a studio with a microphone. There’s this sense of immediacy, which I’m really drawn to.

The Proms are everything life is all about: people coming together, and joy and music and celebration and togetherness.

I just became accustomed to being all the members of the band. That was something that was really exciting to me.

The whole ‘Djesse’ project is, like, the paramount example of something that has evolved alongside me creating it. It started as one album, and then I realized that I had too many ideas for just one album.

There’s an amazing power that music has, and it definitely had its power over me as a boy. I just saw fit to keep exploring it.

I can support my sound from the diaphragm, I can project and I can enunciate and things like that. But I was definitely singing from a lot younger than that.

Djesse,’ essentially, is this spirit. It’s this sort of character, very much with some childlike energy, which permeates all of this music… The first album represents kind of pre-dawn, to that moment at the end of the morning when everything’s very much alive.

I jumped into a world of musical learning that was very much led by myself and then I drew from the music that was all around me.

Music is like cooking for me: you mix the ingredients together in one big pan and see how they end up. Through experimenting, you find what you really like and stick with it.

Really, I was brought up with music as a second language. My mother was extremely encouraging of the sensitivities of my brain. It was this sense of curiosity but never pressure.

I love songs with, like, six or seven or eight different things going on at once, and that’s just me.

It’s a really interesting situation, because when you make music at home all the energy goes into the process, and touring’s all about the energy going outward. I had to learn how to do that transition, but once I figured that out it’s so much fun.

I’d say that I’m a really quite a joyful person in general, but I think the idea of joy can be extremely complex, and rich and varied.

I love to zoom in and study why a chord is making me feel a certain way, but then I’ve learnt to zoom out again. Because if I’m not actually feeling it, there’s not much point making it in the first place.

I always created things, layered things on top of each other. That hasn’t changed at all. With this first album, it was basically a celebration of that process of inventing and building sounds.

It was what I did after school. I’d learn a song in choir that day and I’d sing it, all the parts.