You Are More Like Grammy-Winner Jacob Collier Than You Think
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What do you mean by arrival and departure? So this is my home. If I'm in F, this is my home. I can exist in the key of F for a while. And even if I go somewhere else, like to A flat, when I get home, you still feel like, ah, I remember this feeling from before. 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 good.

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. Jacob is a Grammy-winning musician who can break and build at the same time. He has the uncanny ability to also turn anything around him into a musical instrument, including his audiences.

If you've seen any of his viral videos online, he literally takes this massive audience and turns it into his own personal choir.

I invited Jacob to join me in a music studio here in Los Angeles while he was in town for the Grammys, where his album, "Jesse Vol. 4," was nominated for Album of the Year alongside Billie Eilish, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift. We had multiple pianos in the room, so to truly appreciate his mind-blowing creativity, I recommend watching the video version of this episode on YouTube. But either way, 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 your Grammy. Congratulations. Thank you. You are nominated alongside some musical legends. Trojans. 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. It's just made up. Someone made that up. I'm deeply honored to be included in the number alongside such luminaries. I'm not taking it too serious. I mean, you've already won. I mean, to be included amongst. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It's a fun thing. I'm just excited for the day. I'm excited to go and hang out with this because I know a lot of them already. You know, none of us really know.

what we're doing. We're just playing around. There's not a roadmap to get nominated for album of the year. It's this weird thing, but I'm very, very proud of, I guess you could say the values in the album being leveled with those other albums. I mean, it's just so cool that all those people, all the collaborators from all the corners of the world, that their energy and my friendship with them, just the kind of audacity of the thing

being accepted by those people to me i think that's just kind of like it really tickles me and i don't i don't sit around thinking you know i'm bloody brilliant and you know so much as just what an interesting time to be jacob you know and what an interesting 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 i'm just taking each day as it comes love

How old were you when your 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 to this day. By candlelight? Oh, yeah.

What was the motivation for that? It's just nice. I don't think there was an agenda. It's just nice. I mean, your parents played the electricity bill, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's something of a motivation. And is your whole family artistic? I would say so. I mean, so I was fundamentally brought up by a single mother. So I'm eldest of three. So we were like a quartet growing up. And there was a deep sense of, I suppose, like introversion, you could say. We all sourced our energy from within each other. 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 candlelight one evening and I'm feeling kind of angry, but I don't quite know why, but 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 tugs on itself. And also incidentally, I'm like, my tummy hurts. So say I feel like this, I'll come to the table and I'll say, guys, I'm feeling like this. And the first thing I met with is, oh, so that's interesting.

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, something that was met by judgment, you could say. Well, why would this, why would that? And I think that what I'd 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 kudos to your mother, right, for affirming your feelings and wanting you to express them in a constructive and healthy manner. 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. More songs are about breaking up and loss 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, OK, I'm going to take the world as I experience it as it is, and I'm going to morph it into something of...

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 inner demons and struggles and forces at play. The way he described it was, you think about someone like Da Vinci, who lives this life of absolute...

Polymath them and sort of mental intrigue and struggle But actually when he's when he's working is when it flows at its best and it's at its calmest So 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 and

kind of every force at play is in a sense a reflection of life in some way. So in music you have symmetry and balance and maths and physics and history and geography and the body and all these things that make life possible. So when you explore it, you're kind of studying yourself. At least this is how I was brought up. Were you classically trained? I wasn't, no. So this is talent.

Well, I think it was... And practice. It was, 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 want to learn to go...

really well and really fast that's a particular thing i can practice i can work on that right but i think when i was when i was small i was somewhat resistant to like liturgical practice you know i'm going to sit down and do this for this much time my brain's never really behaved in that way particularly well so i think my approach to learning and practice was to kind of follow the thing that felt interesting and felt like it lit me up yeah which yeah i think when i was yeah when i was small was quite varied i was brought up with so much different kinds of

Just music, you know. Did you paint? Did you draw? Or was music always the thing? I think when I was small, it was language lit 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,

for example what what are what are many contexts within which you can put a human finger right like you know you say linen on finger or doorbell on finger or hummus you know whatever you imagine you imagine the collisions and i think isn't that 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 like it's like you have these miniature explosions that happen in your mind 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 found of explaining this because

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 to 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 does it's almost like a like a level of disgust and

that to me is kind of like wired into intrigue 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. 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. Mm-hmm.

And as you're talking, like things are sparking in my head. I love the sound of a list. The sound of a list. The sound of a list. If someone could pull up on their phone for me, it's the Shel Silverstein bendable, stretchable man.

And I'll show you what I mean. And there's a Shakespeare sonnet. Shakespeare did this a lot in his sonnets where in the middle of his sonnet, there would be a list of like, and this and this and this and this and this and this and this. And I love reading a list. I don't know what it is. And as you're talking about how you find the beauty in language, I don't know what it is about my brain that I enjoy the sound of a poetic list. Do 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 where it gets brilliant is the end.

It's called Twistable Turnable Man by Shel Silverstein, right? He's the twistable, turnable, squeezable, 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 himself into a thimble or smaller. Yes, he can. Of course he can. He's the twistable, turnable, squeezable, pullable, stretchable, shrinkable man. And he lives a passable life with his squeezable, lovable, kissable, huggable, pullable, tuggable 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-able, easily-modal-able, buy-what-you're-solable, washable, mendable, highly-dependable, buyable, sellable, always-available, bounceable, shakable, always-unbreakable, twistable, turnable man. Oh, 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? Yeah. And so as you're talking about this, this idea of hyper focus. Yeah. 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 similarly 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 that go off in your brain. But the thing about it is that everybody who's ever perceived language, or you could say music as well, has experienced a 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, oh God, 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 Bon Iver day, but only Bon Iver can hit the spot. Or Siffian Stevens day, or Earth and a Fire day, whatever happens to be. But your job as a listener, in a sense, is to find the right...

component that matches your energy that will sort of pull it out in a in that gorgeous way that you want to emphasize or get away from yeah i either want to be sad so i'm going to play myself sad music yeah or i want to get away from sadness i'm going to play happy music well usually the the thing that's right for your space will meet you where you are and then modulate you slightly to somewhere else and and so 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 of how you feeling today and everything whatever you say is actually fine and

But it's just like a starting point. So you play how you feel where the rest of us make a playlist for how we feel. Exactly. That's beautifully put. And I think the thing I've learned, 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 that if I sit down and play how I feel, something will come out that's of some kind of value based in my experiences first as a listener and then secondly as a maker. And the whole thing goes around in a circle. And the service you provide to an audience, hopefully, is one of meeting them where they are and modulating them slightly. Because I'm so curious, like...

Do you make time to play or do you find yourself just playing? Because when you started out as a kid,

It was something you did for fun. You weren't taking classes. It wasn'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 and 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 sort of 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 when i sit on the stage i'm not thinking so much about the grammar of it the syntax of how do i put this thing into words as well i'm more thinking 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 practiced for two hours this morning, so I'm ready. It's more like I've tuned in enough to know, or I can laugh at myself enough to know. That kind of, as an improviser, those principles end up having more of an impact than any particular skill or thing that you might have. So one of the things that I admire about you, and I find remarkable, is your ability to use the audience. And I've...

Being in audiences where musicians have attempted to get us to do the singing, and I'll be totally honest, it sounded terrible. Right? I admire the attempt, but it has always failed. Your work is the opposite. 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 sounding music. At what point did you realize this actually sounds good? It's not just doing something community wise. It is an ongoing process of deep fascination for me. To take you back to when I was two, some of my earliest memories as a kid, those woolly half memories that you have at that age, were of watching my mother conduct. She's a conductor, so she would...

Raise her arms or move her 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 It was just crazy. It's like yeah, it was literally like magic, right? I was obsessed with it. How can you do that? That's like this and something happens Yeah, but 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 I didn't really question it. I just thought this is what music can do. This isn't that cool? I

And she would have students come over to the house and they would come in and downtrodden and they would leave the house and they would be uplifted. But this is worth double clicking on, right? Which is you're two years old and your introduction to understanding music was not somebody sitting at a piano. It was...

your mother, you said it was like a magician. - Exactly. - Your mother raises her hands and music comes out of her hands. - Yeah, well she was playing music through other people. - Yes, she was, so you see the hands moving and the music comes out, so this is your introduction to the magic of music. - Exactly. - It's kind of beautiful. - Hugely important, but I never thought I wanted to be a conductor. That sounded super stuffy, you know, oh I gotta get my baton 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 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'd been singing Blackbird, the song by the Beatles, which is a legendary banger. It was one of my favourite means to an end to get the audience to sing because everyone knows the song. And so I'd got these loops going at the end of the song through the audience because audiences like to be loops. It's one of the things they enjoy. So I'd got the middle group. I divide audiences into three, normally into three, because three is a nice number for audiences. So the middle group were 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 going singing in the dead of night so it's a lovely like triad we call it a three-part chord and round and round and round it went and i slowed them down and slowed them down as i like to do and at the end they just went so singing in the dead of and they sang this big f major chord and it was great and then i just kept them there and then i suddenly realized hang on you want to know you want to see you know so i can just what happens if i just point so i just looked at the group and i pointed up and they all went

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 sort of drawn. But it was different because these people had no music parts. They had no instruments. Mm-hmm.

And 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 you're in F. 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 would say, inherent to us. It's extremely deep as a concept. So the idea, though, that I could...

Could navigate or move around in and around a key center through them. Yeah without uttering a note Yeah was deeply moving to me as you're talking about it I mean and I'm thinking about and I've seen some of the videos of yours 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 and moving your hand just a little bit yeah, and and everybody gets it right and

Yeah, well... That's a strange... Like, we take direction. Yes. Like, to your point about the music is in us. Yeah. Like, we may not know...

How many keys on an octave? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. The point is, is you may know nothing about music, but you know the distance between notes because we've all listened to music our whole 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. Exactly, exactly. So here's the thing about music. It's beautiful. It's very simple at its heart. And the audience choir, as I like to call it, has been, I would say, 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 and I love to think about this music really is you can distill it's a very very simple axes for example the axis of high and low right everyone understands everyone gets it everyone children grown-ups Everyone it's like here's a high note and there's a low note. Okay got it because it's speech we all speak we understand the contour of speech and

And then there's loud and quiet. Everyone gets it. I intuitively understand what you mean. Loud and quiet. It makes sense. And then there's like many and few. 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 get it. It's like looking at a landscape because it reflects the world so well. And then the deeper you go into music as a process of learning or playing,

you kind of increase the resolution of these axes. So, you know, it starts with every kid. I think I was going to say, when we do it... Go to the piano. So, okay. So you've got high and low, right? Yeah. It makes sense. And you've got, you know, wide and narrow. That makes a lot of sense. You've got loud and quiet. But then, for example, there's this idea of, like, arrival and departure.

Everyone actually understands everyone's has departed or arrived at certain point. So if I'm in F, which is the key I was just talking about and Within the key of F I have like localities you could say so I have like next-door neighbors. So that's one neighbor B flat. It's like this. What do you mean by arrival and departure? So this is my home. If I'm in F, this is my home. I can exist in the key of F for a while and even if I

go somewhere else, like to E flat, when I get home, you still feel like, "Ah, I remember this feeling from before." So the idea of arrival, 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... like a chord like this, that's a weird sound. But if you're careful, then all those notes can move in directions that go, "Oh, I see." It's like the temperature of the shower has changed. "Oh, I get it." You know what I mean? So this idea of essentially movement in and around axes is so interesting. And yeah, if you think about departure and arrival, or you think about inevitability, this is such a beautiful, very subtle thing to describe.

One of my favorite things to do with the audience is I'll get them to sing one note. I'll say, "Sing F." And they'll go like this. And then I put them in all sorts of contexts. Like context. Like context. Right? Or it's weird. You know. And you know when you're home. But the exercise that's so beautiful with that, to me emotionally, is you understand your position in things. You understand your position. If I'm an F in this chord, that's a very particular kind of thing to be.

It's a different feeling from being an F in... The beautiful thing about the audience choir 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 murmuration. They'll kind of follow. I think the main thing about my audience now is that they are kind of just, they're open to it.

I'm so curious how you explore different emotions, like real emotions that you have better than happy/sad. Like when you are angry, whether it's that burst anger, how does it show up when you sit down to let it out? Yeah, yeah. Is it therapy for you? Yeah. So as I'm playing, I'm like, "Oh, I see. Oh, I get it. I see." Because I don't know where I started, somewhere down here or something. Do you use your piano

as therapy, you know, lovesick, angry, homesick. Sure. Is it your therapist? I would say so. Should we go sit down in the chair? You know, poets write poetry even if it's not for anything. Is it the kind of thing that you just do all the time? Is it that you 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? Yeah. Is it that for you? Like, oh, I haven't been on a plane. I need to play. I just need to play. It is 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 your feeling through, especially when it goes through other people and back to you.

you kind of just learn how you're doing. Oh, I see, I'm feeling like that. But yeah, there's a feeling you get when you haven't played in a while. And you can sort of play, you can play shows. I mean, you can always tap your fingers. You tap your fingers, do some 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 gnarly place or whatever and then you sort of as you untangle it it's an immense feeling of catharsis in a sense you sort of think oh that is that's the human in me singing you know and doing things but there's an interesting thing that happens as a

As a songwriter, because improvisation is one thing, right? You improvise. And all the great composers, someone like Johann Sebastian Bach, he was like a master improviser on the organ. I wish I could have heard him improvise. But a composition or a song or a piece or a production is like composition in stop time. So I'm going to play this. Oh, okay. Now I'll play this. Now I'll 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 a songwriter where you kind of deliberately put yourself in situations where...

Interesting results will come out that hopefully can crystallize but that could be kind of a hard thing to do I guess I'm curious maybe this is more of 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 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 and

on the journey from raw starting point energy life input to distilled output sensible done quantifiable where part of the energy required to make the idea kind of dies 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 whittle it down to this thing i mean from my perspective in in my line of work you could say as 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 whittled down idea into particularly whittled down idea into sharing the idea. And then in your case, into maintaining ideas across many, many years. But 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 over 15 years ago. What's your relationship with

ideas of old, their gestation, and then their kind of continued life as you evolve as a human. So it's a good question. And for years, after I wrote Start With Why, that's all anybody wanted to hear from me, but I wanted to talk about new things. Of course. And they very much wanted to force me to talk about the old things. And I am proud of my old work.

I still live by the principles of my old work, but I have zero interest in talking about my old 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's 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. Got it. I want to move to the next thing I don't understand. 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. Yeah.

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 old ideas to your new fascinations. 100%. I don't disavow them. Right. And I'm proud of them and they are the foundations and all of my work is built on the work that has preceded it. Yeah. But I want to talk about the new renovation I'm doing on the house, not the foundation I built 15 years ago. So are there things that you would...

Are there any things you would thoroughly disavow? Are there any things you would say, I really don't stand with this anymore? Something that you used to hold dear? The simple answer is 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 now.

My work and going through life that necessarily so the simple answer is yes. Can you give an example? Yeah, sure So I define the why as a purpose cause or belief now that I've The work has matured and I've built upon it and I've stumbled upon the infinite game, which was my last work I now talk about a just cause and

And I was like, oh, I wish I didn't use cause to describe. It's just a purpose or a 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 like that. That makes a lot of sense. So here's another question then or another point to make is over the last three months or so, for the first time ever, I've had this analysis done of my audience, who my audience is. And it was really interesting because

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 being asked to, or wanting to define what is it that I stand for? Essentially, what is my why? Like, what is my driving cause here? Why Jacob? Why come to a Jacob show? So one interesting example about my audience is that, like, I sell far more tickets than my streaming numbers would suggest.

Right. And I think it's because a lot of the things I most enjoy about

My work is our experiences. I love having experiences with people. I love the audience choir. I love conversations at large with people. I love playing, collaborating. Maybe it's with an orchestra, maybe it's with a band, 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, you know, what is it that drives me? What are my, you could say, my foundational pillars? I have this dual kind of experience with that where 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 sculpture is already there. You just have to remove what's not the sculpture and reveal what's there. 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 analysing 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 enjoy I would say resisting the idea that I can be defined as this one thing yeah, and

And I suppose the question I wanted to pose to you was this idea of the irrational, the completely irrational mind, which as a creative person, all of us have a relationship with. And there is the part of us that can rationalize. And I can say, okay, well, I'm in the key of F, then I do this. This is what's arrival. This is departure. I'm making tension. Or here's how 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 could ever possibly have done about who I am and where I am. And 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'd almost say, being disobedient with regard to what is defined as you. Okay, you're opening a Pandora's box. I assumed I might be it. So, okay.

So I define creativity as finding order in chaos. Finding order in chaos. Right? And so, and I would argue that, you know, 88 keys on a keyboard is chaos unto itself chaos, right? Because you take a, you know, you take somebody, a baby who doesn't, and they bang it. I mean, it chaos and finding order in that chaos is the, is what we call music. I would create the creative expression.

And I think artists inherently have a comfortable relationship with chaos. Yeah, I would say so too. And I would argue that chaos is irrational. We seek order. We seek rational. 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. Fundamentally what we're doing is playing. We're playing with pieces of a puzzle. Mine might be words and ideas, yours might be keys on a piano, somebody else might be colors.

And we become facile in our own language. And the example I'll give is, have you ever hung out with dancers? Dancers, yeah. So I've gone to watch friends choreograph pieces. And the choreographer will be like, they will demonstrate something. They're like, do this and this, then this, then this. Then I want you to go here, ba, ba, ba. And I want you to do this. Actually, no, don't. Do this, do this, then do this. 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. And I could go quite a while and repeat it because I understand the language. You understand the context for all the nuggets. I know how the pieces relate and I can put them together without any rehearsal. So here's one thing I'll say to that then. So if we take language as an example, you can say words or music, whatever happens to be dance, music.

So you speak that language, I speak this language, they speak that language. Sure, sure, sure. So I would say, you know, you spoke about creativity is finding order in the chaos of

But I also think an important part of making art, this is a different thing from following the instructions of the choreographer or playing the parts as an orchestra member. This is more about as the maker of an idea, as the source of the why, you could almost say, is this concept of making or finding chaos in the order. And we all have this feeling, I think, of going through rules, regulations, self-imposed, you know, gatekeepers, things, our own structures that we're trying to resist, other people's structures we're trying to resist.

in my situation, the music industry, which is a very strange, nauseating 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 your way back to the chaos. Yeah, I think that's true. But I think one thing that people do... When it gets too ordered, you have to break it. Well, exactly. And to me, that... I guess what I'm wondering, what I'm challenged is, does the nature of creativity also go the other way? Yeah. Is it just when creativity transforms to order or vice versa? 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 and order. And the artist, when there's excessive order, 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 also different.

is AI, right? So AI asks us to ask questions. That's our fundamental way of interfacing with it. The more interesting the question is, the more interesting the result you'll get. And it's kind of an interesting process of whittling away through deeply uninteresting things, like mortally uninteresting results, to get something that's actually interesting. And I've spent so many hours...

For example, just generating images. I spoke before about colliding unusual 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. The thing I used to do, my favorite era of, it's so funny, the eras of AI are so new. My favorite era of AI was mid-2022 because Dali 2 had just come out.

But it was before it got really good. It was before it got really obedient or extremely appropriate or reasonable. I remember drawing it to... I'll see if it's a real 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 a torchlight. But none of those things were present in the image. But you look at the image and you think, that kind of a day, if that's what it feels like to be a child. Yeah, it's sort of like...

So early AI was actually better because it captured feelings. But this is the 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 understanding exactly what a thing is, that's where the most creativity happens because the most amount of change happens between order and chaos. This is brilliant.

So the whole Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours. Yeah, right and this is what we're touching on Yeah, which is the more you gain mastery what ends up happening is ossification. Yes, you also fire You know you I look exactly who are quote-unquote experts have been doing 20 years 30 years 40 years They are the best and you realize they're stuck and

You realize that they're bored. Stagnated. You realize that they are either afraid of change, don't understand how to change, or the money or fame is too good and they don't want it to change. Threatened, yeah. Threatened, but generally the feeling of boredom is there because they've done it so much. The joy was the figuring it out up to 10,000 hours. Right, right. And so I think you're 100% right, which is mastery is a devil to me.

To a true creative. There are different kinds of mastery, though, I would say. You can master, for example, the technique of something, the execution of 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 the open air, it just goes and fizzles and disappears. Or it's too much. There's too much infinity.

So what you need is a container that holds you together. I think this is something you can master. What's your container? Well, it could be a song, could be an album, could be a stage, could be a lyric, could be collaboration. But 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 a container to your point. We want the song to be, you know, three minutes ish, you know, it's about a 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 there's a part of your brain that just won't do the thing that you are telling it to do. I remember being at school and studying for exams, which is something I really didn't like to do. And I would kind of have to engineer...

through some kind of strange trickery that I would be revising for the exam by tricking myself that it was in fact procrastination that I was revising. So I would say, here's the task. I'm just going to do this thing on the side. I'm just going to make some music for one second. And then if I managed to trick myself into thinking that the music was the task and that actually I'm just going to do a quick bit of revision before, you know, it's like you're dancing with this really abstract part of you. It's like this chimp that'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 what's your relationship with your old work? I'm grateful. If you made me sum it up, it's gratitude. Yeah. Well, I suppose I'd say the same for your work and my old work. But I would say, what is it that keeps you...

Being tickled. It's like, it's like you, how, how does one stop? I guess the question is, how does one stop entering into that thing that you described just now of stagnating or getting stuck and of getting bored and of just sort of recycling the same old ideas? How do you keep someone sharpened? And I think to my mind, it's something about changing the container. It goes back to the conversation we had before. And I have gone through periods of boredom and stagnation and oh my God, I'm out of ideas. I've had all of that.

And so how have you, if you had to say it in reductive terms, how have you got out of those? It's what you said, which is I have to break something. Yeah, exactly, I have to break something. I have to break it. And if I go back and look at my whole career when I was in the corporate world, my career would move well, I'd get promoted to a level where

It was boring and I'd quit. 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. I can relate to that. And there was so much chaos. I was thriving. Yeah, me too. Now, notwithstanding the sadness, the fear, the uncertainty, all at the same time, it was a jumble. But from a strictly creative standpoint, it was absolute magic. And the stress of it

was Fuel. 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'd be like, I wish every concert was like this one. I wish every album was like this, 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 the thing, really the thing, because we're all chasing the thing. And you get close to it. Sometimes you think, oh, that's the thing. I've almost got it. So the first album I ever made was called In My Room. And I made it in my room in London, in this very, in this tiny 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. There was this visual element where I would sort of loop my skeleton in 3D using Kinect cameras. And it was this multimedia thing that was really, really fun. And that was like day one in the office. So everything was new. Everything was exciting. And the metaphor of the room I stand by today has been a huge one for me. Massive. Everyone's got a room of some kind. I was lucky enough to have a physical one. The album I just released this time last year was...

It's called Jesse Volume 4. It's the fourth album in a series of four albums. So this was my reaction to the solitude of In My Room. It was like, I'm going to collaborate drastically. I'm going to go big. I'm going to go massive. 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 100,000 people on it.

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 are all sorts of choirs, individuals, artists and things. But I recorded audiences obsessively from 2022 to 2023. And I didn't tell them I was doing this really at the time. I would end up in a key and I'd be getting the audience to do certain things, singing up and down, whatever. And in my mind, I was playing the song that was 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 of a 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 a direct end. I didn't go, go in knowing exactly what I wanted to get. I went in with a, 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. 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 have 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 it's about being a voice and having a voice. I think that the first, my first contribution to this album in my room was about me exploring my own voice and being like, what the hell is this? What's the furthest I can stretch this?

And the result, though, obviously I listen back to it now and I'm like, oh, that's just little Jacob just figuring it out. You know, it's just getting started and stuff. And I would, I guess to second your point, I say I'm very grateful for the album, but I so appreciate the thing that I was catching, which was this idea of like what I, what,

if I close my eyes and listen to music in my head, what does that sound like? What is that? What does 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 learned to walk in that room at home. It was my ultimate foundation. And then the, this album I did last year was kind of like the same principle, but in the opposite, which is the voices of everybody else. Um,

But it kind of felt as faithful to the thing, which is very mysterious. And I'm curious how you define 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 feels like the thing I'm chasing. Tell me an early specific happy childhood memory. A specific childhood memory. That I can relive with you.

There was a moment when I was probably about two years old as well. I'm amazed that you have memories from two years old. Well, I have kind of two main memories from when I was two. One is the memory I already gave you, which you already live with me. But the second is, I remember sitting on my mother's lap and she was playing the violin. She's a violinist. I remember looking up and seeing the violin above me and being like, I'm the violin.

I'm the music that's being played. It's me that is, I'm the source of the sound because the violin was going into me and then out. That to me felt very, very exciting and like many memories of that age, it's sort of in this weird dream, half dream state thing. So I think that's where the truth lies because all those three stories that you described, the two albums and this experience of you sitting on your mother's lap

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, you know, the different sounds of you. And now basically you're your mother. And in the first example, you're sitting on your own lap. In the second example, the audience is sitting on your lap. And it's, I think the idea of being a vessel, the idea of being a container, and the word containers come up a few times, but this idea, I think of,

being the messenger for some sort of Expression and discovery I think is is your genius and what you're giving us? Hmm. You've touched on 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 a half the audience is musical it just goes quicker they just learn quicker and I think that your music itself is so exploratory hmm

formful and formless oh thank you i i think that what you give us is a megaphone like you're the megaphone weirdly and not the the sound going into the megaphone oh i think that's so i think that's who you are and that's amazingly put i love i mean just in listen to your podcast i love that moment at the end of the podcast when you say and his and basically he's the container and the way the reason i love it so much is because it's it's a thrilling thing to be kind of

nestled into one concept. And as a person who is the person that they are, sometimes it's hard to see it. But I love the way that you put that. And I think it's interesting to me that I feel in some ways the most myself when I'm that megaphone for others. But there's something about being that megaphone which also feels like it is me, but it's also not me. And there's that funny dance between

Yeah, being one pixel in the image and yet also being the image. Well, I think it's a healthy relationship with ego, right? Which is if the music comes through you, are you the music or are 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 just a megaphone for the music. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Not necessarily my music. Yeah. One question I have for you off the back of that, I think is, is regards to catching ideas because you are like a master of ideas, but you're also 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 images I've ever encountered to try and Describe what's going on here people talk about ideas coming to them from above so some some divine place and and they're just completely a vessel this idea of I am just a vessel of hollow come through me that's not who you are I can't wait 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 is partly that. I mean, there is certainly a mysterious source, but there isn't a lot of surfing as an analogy. Do you surf? I don't do anything on boards. Really? It's not that I don't want to. I'm not good at boards. Fair play. Skateboarding. I mean, I also don't do much on boards either, but I've surfed a couple of times and there's an amazing thing about it. It's mostly patience. You're mostly just waiting for the wave. Just being like, okay, when's it coming? And then it strikes. But then there's technique required.

Psychological and physical technique required when it comes to know how to catch it right. Yeah, and write it out correctly I think that's that's the difference. So what you and I do that's similar creative people ask me. What's my creative process? I always say that it's days of guilt and self-loathing punctuated by hours of sheer brilliance 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 I carry a notebook in my back pocket and

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 once you're working on something, it stays with you. 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 brushing 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. What everybody's not doing is capturing them. And maybe the artist is the one who learns to catch it. Love it. Do you know any Bartok bagatelles? Do you know that... I don't think I do know that. Okay, so I heard a concert...

And I'm gonna play it for you and then do whatever you want. That's so beautiful. God, Bartok's the man. Alright, so this is totally a selfish request. I've got a Grammy artist with me and instead of asking you to play your music, I'm asking you to play Bartok. Okay. Is that wrong? No, I don't think that's wrong. So it was like... Goosebumps. That was very generous. Thank you very much. I've never been asked that in my life. Ever before.

The bar talk is the man. So good. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much. It's really a joy. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenic.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company.

It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbenius, David Jha, and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Rudershan.