Interview: Jacob Collier “I’m Just Expanding As Much As Possible”

He’s been called a “Beethoven for the 21st Century”. Mentored my Quincy Jones and inspired by Stevie Wonder, 25-year-old Jacob Collier has been astounding music lovers with his multiple talents since a homemade YouTube clip of his went viral in 2012.

Now, New Zealand audiences will have a chance to see the phenomenal Jacob Collier up close as he heads to Auckland and Wellington for two shows next week.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Jacob Collier just after he touched down in Australia and found the young musician to be buzzing with energy as he prepared to make his NZ debut.

Click here to listen to the interview:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

M: So is this your first time down under or have you been down under before?

J: This is in fact my second time down under and the first time was kind of miraculous. It was very, very much unforgettable. So to be back so soon is such a thrill, I’m amazed to be here.

M: Why was it unforgettable the first time?

J: Well in some ways it was the very final leg of a two year tour. I did this tour with a one man show or I was on stage with a number of musical instruments at once and I would build these loops and I’d run around the stage like a mad chicken and it was all rather crazy and fun. And the last ever one man show was actually down here so it was almost like the icing on the cake of all of those years of hard work I suppose. So it just stayed with me I suppose and the audiences were wild and so I’m really thrilled to be back.

M: Have you performed in New Zealand before?

J: Never once. That is perhaps the most exciting thing of all actually. It’s gonna be thrilling. I know that everyone in the crew, in the band are raring to go because there were so many adventures to be had down there.

M: Are you an adventurous kind of guy?

J: A little. Very much so I would say.

M: So what kind of things are you thinking of doing when you get over?

J: Well I was gonna ask for some recommendations to be honest because having never been down there before, I’m not quite sure. But from what I’ve seen, just the landscapes look ridiculous. That part of the world is so utterly beautiful so I’m hoping to just kind of run around a bit and see where I …

M: That’s probably the best thing to do, just go for it. So you mention you did this one man tour before, now you’re touring with a band right?

J: I did

M: And I wanted to ask you about the difference and your preference between working alone because there’s a big deal made about how you can play everything and you can just layer things one on top of another, but you also collaborate with lots of people, so do you have a preference? How do you decide when you want to do one thing over the other?

J: It’s a very important question. I mean for me I created my first album, In My Room and I created that all on my own, and that very much felt like the right thing to do at that moment just because I suppose it defined my learning process as a teenager, I had and still have today this beautiful room in London in my family home which is just packed full of things that make sounds, musical instruments and weird saucepan lids and badminton rackets and all sorts of weird stuff. So I would spend just so many hours in there and I knew that for the first album I wanted to push myself within that field and play all the instruments myself and produce it and mix it and release it. And so I did and so in order to tour that music most honestly, I felt like this one man show, which at the time was quite a new thing for me, touring at all, but also the thing of having six different loopers on stage and ten musical instruments and having one person onstage was also a little new and so I had to work with this incredible guy called Ben Bloomberg in order to make this technology capable of doing these weird and wacko things. I felt like for this new album of mine that I’m creating, which is in fact four albums, quadruple fifty song record, it’s tonnes and tonnes of music, tonnes of work, it’s rather extraordinary, I’ve been travelling and collaborating just so much and it felt like I needed to step up a little bit in terms of the live show or at least it felt like it was time, and so what I did is rather than start the whole thing from scratch which felt kind of strange, I essentially expanded the one man show into a four person show were there were four multi instrumentalists on stage including myself and we all rotate around these different instruments. For example, if I’m on bass and Robin (Mullarkey) is on piano, then I can switch to piano and Robin can switch to bass. The whole thing is kind of dynamic for that reason I suppose. It’s extraordinary, I guess it doesn’t feel different enough for me to be able to be able to necessarily be able to make a conjecture about which one is correct, which one feels good, which one doesn’t, I guess all I’m doing is following my musical intuition and at this moment in my life, the music very much feels like my sound and my music but all these different musicians that are coming to visit me or I’m travelling around the world to collaborate with, feel like they’re bringing such extraordinary ingredients and so for me I think that this whole era of my life, these two or three years or so, are very much to be focused around joining forces with others. I’ve got fifty songs worth of music to perform and play and improvise with and so one thing I would say is that it’s a lot easier to improvise as a group …. from one’s own, especially when there’s all these crazy loops lined up. There’s always that wonderful moment when I play a song solo on the piano and sing within the band show, but rather than the other songs being based around an almost mathematical structure at times with regard to when to play what instrument and how all those different ingredients for together, now we can just play and that concept of being spontaneous and taking risks and re-harmonising on the spot and all sorts of things like that which is hard when you’ve got something that’s been planned essentially collaboration with a computer is so much more fun and I guess in lieu of my sort of adventurous spirit. It’s really amazing just to push these songs to the limit with a bunch of musicians who are capable of pushing me I suppose.

M: So who are these folks that you’re touring with?

J: Well, essentially there’s a drummer, a bass player, and a guitarist, vocalist, pianist. But the bass player also plays other things, keyboard and guitar and floor tom and all sorts of things and so we all rotate. The bass player’s called Robin Mullarkey, the drummer’s called Christian Newman, and the singer guitarist is called Maro and she’s an artist based out of Portugal and so we’re quite an international bunch of people I’m touring with, our front of house guy who’s from Gran Canaria Spain, our monitor engineer from Italy, and so it’s just this crazy bunch of people really but luckily for me they’re willing to go the distance so to speak just to make this experience as beautiful as possible.

M: So what kind of discussions…do you talk much about what you’re going to do with your fellow musicians on stage beforehand or do you kind of assume that something is going to happen onstage?

J: Bit of both I guess. There’s always that period of time at the top of a tour when it’s my job to think about what kind of music I want to play, what songs I want to play, and much as if, at this point in my career, I’d love to go onstage and just play, improvising 100%, it’s always good to have some basic idea of the kind of experience that you want to curate and then to bring that to life I guess. So one thing that we did at first was just learn all of the songs, learn all the ins and outs of the songs and my songs happen to have quite a lot of complex details to them and so there’s most certainly value in spending time with those and figuring out which bit of the song is in seven beats of the bar and which part of the song is in five beats in the bar and if there’s something strange that happens harmonically, how best to understand that and all those kinds of questions and answers. But once you’re on the road and once you’re touring, those songs being their journey of growing and I think for me that’s one of the most exciting things is recording a song…well I suppose first it’s writing the song, imagining that song, the way that song feels and then going out and finding someone to potentially sing all the song, and if not then sing it myself and then recording all of the musical instruments to the song. Once that song has been mixed and recorded and released, that song has been born. But the lifetime of that song is still to come and so for me, touring is one of the greatest spaces to grow things musically and for me it’s been crazy just over the course of the last eight months or so, which is the amount of time I’ve been playing with this band, just seeing the songs grow and learning from them I suppose.

M: I’m guessing that’s why you also cover quite a few of other people’s tunes because I assume, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, that you hear the tune, the original version of say Here Comes The Sun, and then suddenly your brain takes it in another direction and you go we could do this, we could do that, and the same process kind of goes on, is that how it works with you?

J: For sure, I think that’s absolutely right. I would never cover a song that I didn’t love and so for me I’m always drawn to a song that has something about it that inspires reinvention and I’ve always been one of those musicians with endless ideas for how to approach a song in a weird and wacko Jacob-flavoured way and for me all I really need is a good song and then license to be myself I suppose.

M: So, what is the creative process for you? Do you have a typical day, other than when you’re on tour or whatever, that you go through that makes you do what it is you do? Cause I get the feeling that you have a very creative life and that it’s just one thing after another after another.

J: It is, I would say that’s a good way of explaining it. For me there’s not much separation I suppose between making music and creating things and actually just living a normal life. I’ve always been one of those people where there’s endless things that I’m excited to create and I reckon it’s one of the things that makes us as a species most unique, is being able to imagine things and it’s something that other species can’t necessarily do and believe in things that there yet, it’s this strange idea that we have. But for me it’s hard to say that there’s one particular design for a day that always works, and if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s whenever I make a plan, the plan goes out of the window. I reckon for me at this point, trying to juggle these four albums in the midst of juggling a tour that’s taking me all around the world and trying to collaborate with all these musicians at once, it’s really a matter of gut I think. It’s following my gut as to what the best thing to do is, how the best way to approach a problem is and I think just being willing to listen and being willing to learn in the whole thing. I think it’s easy to believe that one is powerful when one is juggling all of these things at once but actually it doesn’t necessarily feel like that’s the case.  I feel like I’m learning the most that I’ve ever learnt at once and so in some ways I feel like I’m opening my eyes to a bunch of new ideas, new sounds, new concepts. So I would say that a day well spent in the creative process, is one where I’ve learnt a tonne, rather than one where I’ve sat down and done something to plan or done something that I would expect I could do. I think for me, being someone who’s so hooked on that feeling of doing something brand new and something that I’ve never done before, pushing something harmonically or rhythmically or melodically into a brand new sphere, I feel like those things aren’t necessarily things you can plan but all you can do is stay as open as possible I guess and just say I’m willing to push this, I’m willing to take risks and I’m willing to listen and learn and I’m willing to not be alone in the process. I think that if you put all of those forces sort of out into the universe in your life, then things do come along which are rather inspiring. So I think for me rather than thinking ‘I’m working from nine to five and then I’m gonna stop and have a break and then I’m gonna go on a run,’ I think for me it’s about thinking ‘well what tickles  me today? What would be an honest thing for me to be explaining today if I were to explain something?’ And I’m lucky enough to have a moment to do so.

M: So you’re kind of halfway through the process of putting out these four albums.

J: Yeah halfway, for sure

M: And so does that give you an opportunity to take pause and look at what you’ve done and then re-think of what you’re going to do for the other two?

J: Yeah a little bit, in fact that’s what this month has been about. It’s been the first month this year when I haven’t been touring very intensively and this trip to Melbourne sort of is the very first trip in a few different trips in this first Australasian tour. But for the first few weeks of this month I did have a little moment just to pause and figure out what’s important moving forward. I’ve learnt so much between making the first two volumes of Djesse that I feel like the way that I imagined volume three at the top of the project had changed drastically since then. So I think the cool thing and the challenge is to take those ideas, build them out and just see where I am now, because obviously I’m moving pretty fast at the moment.

M: I get the feeling that you are moving fast just the energy coming through the telephone is intense. Do you find that it takes a special kind of person to be able to keep up with you? Do you have to look for that quality in people that you collaborate with?

J: I’m not sure. I suppose in some ways for me I’m most inspired by the people who are most different from the way that I am. I’m always going to go fast, I’m always going to have a million ideas and so in some ways if there’s somebody who is very slow and very certain, that’s incredible to me. I’m often indecisive about which way to turn just because the sheer number of possibilities are just endless all the time. So when somebody brings me down and grounds me in one specific idea or one specific sound, then that for me can be some of the greatest inspiration I can receive. But I guess I’ve also worked with people who are really dear friends of mine across this album and people whose processes are similar to mine and so I think for me I’m just expanding as much as possible and rather than saying ‘It’s this kind of person or this kind of person that works best,’ I think the challenge is thinking how can I make magic out of all these different scenarios in some way and get that journey to feel coherent.

M: I’m curious how you feel about the record industry in general at this point in time, I mean I know you’ve just turned 25 years old so I don’t know how much you know about how things were back in the 60’s.

J: I’m a veteran in the field!

M: Right

J: I would say that there’s never been a more exciting time to be recording music and creating art full stop as a creative person than 2019. However, I would say that the reason for that is that people can be independent and people can be free thinking and people can do things in their own time, and for me as a musician growing up, I had no idea of having a career, I didn’t even think about it, I didn’t think ‘Oh I’m going to release albums and tour’ I just thought how can I get my understanding to be as great as possible? How can I make things I’m most proud of, how can I push myself to the limit? And that’s where I came from, I didn’t come from the industry, I came from my own fascination of music, music is a language and so I think the extraordinary thing was that I was able to be that little mad scientist I suppose and push the music forwards and explore and I began by arranging and covering other people’s music and other people’s songs and I would invent with them and accidentally I suppose, started to accrue an international fan base and eventually I realised that I may as well be having a career and I didn’t even think about it and that for me is the biggest blessing of all because I didn’t have to make a business plan, I didn’t have to have those meetings where somebody would be wondering whether what I was doing would be scaling or would be worth people’s time or worth investing money because I had my space, I had that space at home and all I wanted to do was record stuff and invent things. I guess I’m still doing exactly that and that I think is why nowadays is such an exciting time to be creative if you’re willing to be. Because it’s also easy to make music that people will definitely like and music that’s easy to sell and you can sign any old record deal. If you really want to I think most people can be a musician so to speak but I think to truly play music and to learn about yourself from the music that you’re playing, takes a very different kind of psychology from the psychology that seeks to have a musical career and one that comes out of the music industry. So I guess I don’t think too much about the industry in terms of stylistic thinking, I don’t aim to be anywhere in the industry per se and to get anything from the industry, I’m just gonna be creating the music that I love and if people are listening to it then that is all the better.

M: Now I’m curious, what is the first music you can think of that really connected with you that you heard?

J: Stevie Wonder. Absolutely. I remember being two, three, four years old and bouncing around like a mad chicken as I say around the house just thinking that this music is so joyful and it’s still so joyful and so memorable and I guess I realised about fifteen years later that actually it’s Stevie Wonder playing all of those instruments. I think at first it was just ‘This feels really good.’ And so I think I learnt so much from that music and those songs.

Jacob Collier brings his Djesse World Tour to Auckland’s Powerstation on Monday, September 2nd and Wellington’s Opera House on Wednesday, September 4th. Click here for tickets.