Revisited: How to Turn Stress Into Creativity With Grammy-Winner Jacob Collier

0:00 B flat. It's like, what do you mean by a rival in departure? So this is my home, if I'm an 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 Etoi flat, when I get home, you still feel like ah, I remember this feeling from before. So the idea of a rival, you could say, comes from being not F, something that does not F, like C, arriving at F, right, and I'm home.

0:34 And then you can kind of augment that arrival into something much more colourful. And the joy of music is how to make the best, most satisfying kind of tension and then resolve it. You know, creativity is about breaking something, nope, it's about building something, no, it's breaking, no, it's building.

1:02 Or maybe, just maybe, it's both at the exact same time. But how can you build and break something simultaneously Simon? Oh wow, thank you so very much. Jacob is a Grammy-winning musician who has an uncanny ability to turn anything around him into musical instruments, including his audiences. If you've seen any of the viral videos online, he literally turns his massive audiences into his own personal choirs.

1:48 I invited Jacob to join me in a music studio in Los Angeles, while he was in town for the Grammys, where his album, Jesse Volume 4, was nominated for album of the year alongside Billy Eilish, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift. It's a comfy because this is a front row seat to his wildly beautiful genius. This is a bit of optimism.

2:19 So you're nominated for album of the year for your Grammy, congratulations. 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.

2:40 I'm personally deeply proud of this. I'm 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. Is this made up? Someone made that up. I'm deeply honored to be included in the number alongside such luminaries. I'm not taking it too serious. I mean, you've already won.

2:55 I mean, to be included amongst. Oh, absolutely. You know, none of us really know what we're doing. We're just playing around. I don't sit around thinking, you know, go, I'm bloody brilliant and you know, but a lot so much is just one interesting time to be Jacob, you know, and one is the time to be making music.

3:12 Because I've made a very unconventional album that is deeply irreverent in many ways. And for it to be counted as one of those is just kind of a thrill. So I'm just taking each day as it comes. Love. How old were you when you when you're sort of folks started to realize that there was something there that wasn't, let's call it normal?

3:31 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. Like, did you have family done every night? Yes. By candlelight. Still. By candlelight. Oh, yeah. What was the motivation for that?

3:47 It's just nice. I don't think it was an agenda. It's just nice. I mean, your parents played the electricity for the moment. Oh, yeah. That is something. And is your whole family artistic? I would say so. I was fundamentally brought up by single mother. And I'm an eldest of three. So we were like a core tech growing up.

4:03 And there was a deep sense of, I suppose, like introversion, you could say. We all sourced our energy from within each other. And the thing that was interesting to me when I was growing up was how much I was encouraged to look within myself for answers or inspirations that might arise. So for example, say I come to the dinner table by candlelight one evening.

4:25 And I'm feeling kind of angry. But I don't quite know why. But I'm not, I'm not feeling angry in a sort of scaled up way. I'm feeling angry in a small way, like a knotted way, like a way that tugs on itself. And also incidentally, my tummy hurts. So say I feel like this. I come to the table. And I say, guys, I'm feeling like this.

4:43 And the first thing I met with is, oh, so that's interesting. So like, how did this come about? Why did this come about? And how is it that we can untangle this together? Because we're all here together. And so never I, in my memory, did I come to the table with with something, a feeling or an experience, I mean, that was met by judgment, you could say.

5:02 Like, well, why would, why would this, why would that? And I think that what I learned through music is just that 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, to your mother, right, for affirming your feelings and wanting you to express them in a constructive and healthy manner.

5:26 And, you know, I mean, I guess this is a good question, which is when you think about art. So much emphasis is put that artists have to be tortured to create, you know, more songs are about breaking up and loss and, you know, and stuff like this. And painters, they always talk about the torture. And in this case, it's the opposite, which it was healthy expression rather than a torture.

5:46 Yeah. Well, I think music, like other art forms, that it's best, is a sort of alchemy of sorts. You say, okay, I'm going to take the world as I experience it as it is, and I'm going to morph it into something of value, of light. David Lynch, who passed away just a couple of weeks ago, said that beautiful thing about how negativity is the enemy of creativity, which I really adore.

6:05 And David is someone who, I think, had a fair amount of sort of inner demons and struggles and forces at play, you know, the way he described it was, you know, you think about someone like Da Vinci, who, you know, lives this life of absolute polymathdom and sort of mental intrigue and struggle, but actually when he's, when he's working is when it flows at its best and it's at its calm.

6:24 And so I think there's something to that. I've never really subscribed personally to the idea that you need to pick 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 an extraordinary place to do it because if you look inside music, kind of every force at play is in a sense a reflection of life in some way.

6:46 So in music, you have, you know, symmetry and balance and maths and physics and history and, you know, geography and the body and all these things that make life possible. So when you explore it, you're kind of studying yourself. At least this is how I was born. Were you classically trained? I wasn't.

7:02 No. So this is talent. Well, I think it was in a sense, I mean, there's a distinction between practice and play. Practice being, you know, when you organize a state of play to solve a particular problem. Yeah. Like I just want to learn to go, take it, take it, take it, take it, take it, take it, take it, take it, take it, take it, really well and really fast.

7:17 That's a particular thing. I can practice. I can work on that. Right. But I think when I was, when I was small, like 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, 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, which, yeah, I think when I was, yeah, when I was small was quite varied.

7:38 I was brought up with so much different kinds of, just music. 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 in my mind perceived a particular chord was similar in a sense to the way it perceived a particular relationship between words.

7:58 I remember being obsessed with just the idea of like, what are many contexts within which you can put a human finger, like, you know, you say linen on finger or doorbell on finger or hummus, you know, imagine, you imagine the collisions and it's not the name of your new album, hummus on finger, yeah, volume four, but, but no, I think there's something that I learned through my love of words, it's like you have these miniature explosions that happen in your mind when you, when two things collide, that maybe don't usually collide and you can do this with vocabulary and it's kind of one of the more relatable ways I've found of explaining this because, you know, you take these two things and you,

8:34 and you kind of, you know, it's like flint, it's like you make a spark out of these two unlikely things and spark will illuminate something new, anything, oh gosh, where could that take me? That's, that's 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 in a dubstep drop, you know, to me, it's just interesting, it's like, oh, it's, it's almost like a, like a level of disgust that to me is kind of like wired into entry creatively.

9:06 One of the things that I love about you, the way you approach the world and, and even taking music out of it, I think creativity and inspiration exists in all of us. Yeah. You know, I think everyone's an artist, you just have to find your medium, right? And I think what we're talking about, or at least talking around, is the idea of being hyper focused towards something, yeah.

9:26 And finding beauty or inspiration or interest or curiosity, whatever it is, in something. And as you're talking, like, things are sparking in my head, I love the sound of a list. The sound of a list. If someone could pull up on their phone for me, the, it's the shell silverstein, a bendable, stretchable man, and I'll show you what I mean.

9:51 And there's a Shakespeare's sonnet, you know, like Shakespeare did this a lot in his sonnets, where in the, in the middle of his sonnet, he would, there would be a list of like, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this. And I love, I love reading a list. I don't know what it is.

10:05 And as you're talking about how you find the beauty and language, I don't know what it is about my brain that I enjoy the sound of a poetic list. You have it? I'll show you what I mean. Oh, cool. Okay, you're great. I haven't read this in a while, so bear with me. Next, where it gets brilliant is the end.

10:22 Okay, so it's called twistable turnable man by shell 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, or taller or squeeze himself into a thimble or smaller.

10:43 Yes, he can, of course he can. He's the twistable turnable, squeezable, pullable, stretchable, shrinkable man. And he lives a possible life with his squeezable, lovable, kissable, hugable, pullable, tugable wife. And they have two twistable kids who bend up the way that they did and they turn and they stretch just as much as they can for this bendable, foldable, do what you're told, will easily model, will buy what you're soldable, washable, mendable, highly dependable, viable, sellable, always available, bandsable, shakeable, always unbreakable, twistable, turnable man.

11:09 No, fantastic. That was 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. It goes. Yeah. And so as you're talking about this, this idea of hyper-focus, 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.

11:31 Yeah, right. I feel very similar to this, actually. That is a beautiful poem and the thing about that list is it's like you have a series of miniature chemical reactions, they go off in your brain. But the thing about it is that everybody who has ever perceived language or, you could say, music as well, has experiences of version of this.

11:49 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, and I'm trying to reverse engineer the emotional remedy to my mood.

12:06 And I know that the right song will hit the spot right on. It might be like a Bonnie Verde, but only Bonnie Verde can hit the spot, or Siffian Stephen's Day, or Earthen of 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 that gorgeous way that you want to emphasize or get away from.

12:26 Yeah. I either want to be sad, so I'm going to play myself sad music, or I want to get away from sadness, so I'm going to play as happy music. Well, usually the thing that's right for your space will meet you where you are and then modulate you slightly to somewhere else. And so I guess that the thing with making music is it's similar.

12:40 You know, and it kind of comes back to the candlelit dinner scenario. How are you feeling today? And whatever you say is actually fine, but it's just where it's just like a summer play. So you start 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 to do, you know, I'm not great at reading the dots and the notes and all sorts of things like this, but I think that for me, I've tried to learn how to be as fluent as possible in music as a language in general.

13:09 So 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 modulate them slightly, you know.

13:25 I'm so curious, like, you know, 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, you weren't like you had homework to do and you had to prepare for the piano teacher. But now it's a career, now there's expectations, now you have to play it certain times and certain reasons, you have to prepare for things.

13:50 Has it become a job? Like 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. The funny thing about my performance is the things I prepare for are that they're not designed to be the same each time.

14:09 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 16s really getting that language together and sort of understanding, okay, so here's how to create tension. Here's how you release tension.

14:25 Here's how you ask a question and give an answer, here's how you twist or turn or whatever you have other things. So I think that now 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's I'm feeling or the thing that's in the room?

14:47 How do I best turn that into something that can be accessed or related to? So that work, that practice is less about, I've practiced for two hours this morning, so I'm ready. It's more like I've tuned in enough to know, or I'm just kind of, 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.

15:12 So one of the things that I admire about you and I find remarkable is your ability to use the audience. And I've been in audiences where musicians have attempted to get us to do the singing and I'll be totally honest, it sounded terrible, right? And I admire the attempt, but it has always failed. Your work is the opposite, which is I'm amazed with these huge audiences that you are making good sounding music with people who don't necessarily know how to make good sounding music.

15:44 At what point did you realize this actually sounds good? It's not just doing something, you know, community wise. It is an ongoing process of like deep fascination for me. I mean, to take you back to when I was like two, some of my earliest memories as a kid at those really half memories that you have at that age were of watching my mother conduct because she's a conductor.

16:03 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 and it was just great. It was like, yeah, it was literally like magic. Right.

16:17 I was obsessed with it. How can you do that? Instead of like this and something happens. Yeah. How about it is people would leave the room not just having played the right notes, but they would leave them just feeling better about themselves and life. They would have been like lit up or lifted up. And I didn't really question it.

16:30 I just thought, this is what music can do. This is not cool. And she would have students come over to the house and they would come in and down Trondon and they would leave the house and they would be uplifted. But this is worth double clicking on, right, which is your two years old and your introduction to understanding music was not somebody sitting at a piano.

16:48 It was your mother, you said it was like a magician, like your mother raises her hands and music comes out of her hands. Yeah. Well, she was playing music through other people. Yes. She was, she was like, so you see the hands moving and the music comes out. So this is your introduction to the magic of music.

17:04 Exactly. It's kind of beautiful. Usually important. But I never thought I wanted to be a conductor. That sounded super stuffy. Right. You know, I got to get my bat on out and sort of read the parts and, you know, order people around. No. Sometimes is the case, what your parents do and the way that you see them behave just ends up coming out through you.

17:21 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've been singing Blackbird, the song of the Beatles, which is a legendary song, Banger.

17:42 It was one of my favorite means to an end to get the audience to sing because everyone knows the song. And so I got that these loops going at the end of the song through the audience because audiences like to be loops is one of the things they enjoy. So I was, I had got the middle group. I sort of divide audiences to three normally to three because three is a nice, nice number for audiences.

18:00 So the middle group was going, singing in the dead of night, singing in the dead of night. And on the left they were going, singing in the dead of night, on the right of the 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.

18:13 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 night, and they sang with this road, 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 want to know.

18:28 So I can just, what happens if I just point? So I just looked at the group and I pointed up and it all went, ah, like this. And then down. And so we played around a bit with it. And it felt crazy. It felt unbelievable. Because first of all, I knew at that moment that I was continuing the line that my mother had drawn.

18:48 But it was different because these people had no music parts. They had no instruments. 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 your NF.

19:04 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 navigate or move around in and around a key center through them without uttering a note was deeply moving to me.

19:29 There is something, as you're talking about it, I mean, and I'm thinking about it. Some of the videos of yours, you know, when you're going like this, and then you go like this, everybody knows how far to go down, and if you go like this, everybody knows how far to go down, moving your hand, you know, very low down or moving your hand just a little bit, and everybody gets it right.

19:49 That's a strange, like we take direction, but to your point about the music is in us. Like we may not know, you know, how many keys are inactive. The point is, you 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.

20:10 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, is it's very simple and it's hard, 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.

20:36 People are not silly. People really tuned it. I love to think about this. Music really is, you can distill it to very, very simple axes. For example, the axis of high and low, right? Everyone understands this. Everyone gets it. Everyone. Children. Grown offs. Everyone. It's like, here's a high note, and there's a low note.

20:53 Okay. Got it. And then there's loud and quiet. Everyone gets it. I know, I intuitively understand what you mean, loud and quiet, it makes sense. And then there's, there's like many and few, right? Everyone understands those principles. You get it. It's a thick chord, like this. There's a thin chord, just like that, and everyone understands, okay, I get it.

21:15 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, you know, learning or playing, you kind of like increase the resolution of these axes. Yeah. So, you know, it starts with every kid. I think I was going to say, I think we, what do we do it?

21:31 Go to the piano. So, okay. So, you got, you got high and low, right? Yeah. It makes sense. And then you got, you know, wide and narrow, that makes a lot of sense. You got loud and quiet. But then, for example, there's this idea of like arrival and departure. Everyone actually understands. Everyone has departed or arrived at, so, what, 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.

22:02 So, I have like, next to a neighbor. So, that's one neighbor. Be flat. It's like, what do you mean by arrival and departure? So, if 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 get to a flat, when I get home, you still feel like, ah, I remember this feeling from before.

22:27 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.

22:52 So, even the most gnarly sounding like, like a corner is, that's a weird sound. But, you do careful, then all those notes can move in directions and go, ah, oh, I see. It's like the temperature of the showers change. Oh, I get it. You know what I mean? So, this idea of, essentially, movement in and around axes is so interesting.

23:13 And yeah, if you think about departure and arrival, or you think about inevitability, it's such a, such a beautiful, very subtle thing to describe. One of my favorite things to do with the audices, I'll get them to sing one note, I'll say, sing it. And then I put them in all sorts of contexts, that context, that context, that context, right?

23:37 That's weird. And you know in your home, but the exercise that's so beautiful with that, to me, emotionally is, you understand your position in things. The beautiful thing 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.

24:06 I mean, the more musicians are in the audience, often the faster people can learn. But the challenge really is you need about, you need over 50% of the people to know what's going on. The rest will follow. It's like, like, murmuration. They'll kind of follow. Okay. But I think the main thing about my audience now is that they are kind of just, they're open to it.

24:25 I'm so curious how you explore different emotions, like real emotions that you have that are unhappy side. Like, when you are angry, whether it's that, you know, that burst anger, how does it show up when you sit down to let it out? Yeah. Is it therapy for you? Yeah. So as I'm playing, I'm like, oh, I see, oh, I get, oh, I see, I see, because I don't know where I started somewhere down here.

25:25 No, something. I think we all have our way of, and I'm going to go back to your mother, you know, her trying to get you to express yourselves and affirm your feeling. Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you look at so many of the struggles that people have, we don't know how to express our feelings. So it comes out in frustration or anger or burst or we say things we don't mean.

25:45 And even harder than knowing how to, or as hard as learning how to express our own emotions is trying to help somebody else express theirs. Yeah. Yeah. And I think to find one's own therapy, some people go to the gym to get it out, go for a run, whatever it is, you know, go outside and have a primal, primal yell.

26:03 Do you use your piano as therapy, you know, love sick, you know, angry, homesick? Sure. You know, is it your, is it your therapist? I would say so. Should we go sit down the chair? I'm so curious if it's, and this is where I'm getting it, like, you know, poets, right, poetry. Even if it's not for anything, is it the kind of thing that you just do all the time?

26:29 Is it that you're like, like, I'll give you an example, right? I've had a busy week, you know, I'd be like, oh, I haven't gone for a run in a while. I need to run, you know, is it, is it that for you? Like, I haven't been on a plane and I haven't, I need to play, I just need to play. Yeah. It is a bit like that.

26:49 I had it 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 you're through, it goes through other people and back to you, you kind of just, you kind of just learn how you do it. Like, oh, I see, I'm, I'm, I'm feeling like that.

27:03 But yeah, there's, there's a feeling you get when you haven't played in a while and you can, you can, you can sort of play, you can go, you can play shows, I mean, you can always tap if you can. You tap if you can 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, is a strange place or, or maybe it's a pleasant place or a naughty place or whatever.

27:23 And then you sort of, as you untangle it, it's like, it's an immense video of, of catharsis in a sense. You see, I think, oh, that is, that's the human in me singing, you know, and, and, and doing things. But there's an interesting thing that happens is a, as a song writer, because improvisation is one thing, right?

27:38 You, you revise, and all the great composers, someone like Johann Sebastian Bach was, he was like a master improviser on the organ, I wish I could have had him improvise. But a composition or a song or a piece or a production is like, composition in, in, in stop time. So I'm going to play this, oh, okay, now I'll play this, now I can, I'll collide it together and make it, make sense sort of on the canvas.

27:58 And so there's a funny thing that happens, I think, as, as, as a song writer where you, you, you kind of deliberately put yourself in situations where, interesting results, where you try to put yourself in situations where, kind of interesting results will come out that hopefully can crystallize. But that could be kind of a hard thing to do.

28:15 I, 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, let's, let's put this on the page or let's have a conversation or, or let's put together a presentation, there's something that happens to me on the journey from raw starting point energy life input to distilled, output, sensible, kind of, done, quantifiable, where part of the energy required to make the idea kind of dice and falls away, because in distilling the idea, you have to kind of rid yourself of an amount of the infinity surrounding it, but then you get, you, you wait it down to

28:54 this thing. I mean, from my perspective, in, in my line of work, you could say, as a song writer, that challenge is always interesting, it's, it's almost like you have to, you have to court the idea and keep it alive for long enough for it to continue to sort of burn fuel as you move through the process of raw idea into kind of whittle down a day, into, particularly whittle down a day, into sharing the idea, and then in your case, into maintaining ideas across many, many years, like 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 error at 15 years ago, but like, how, what's your relationship

29:31 with ideas of old, yeah, their gestation, and then their kind of continued life as you have always done. Yeah, so it's a good question. For years, when I, you know, after I wrote, start with why, that's all anybody wanted here for me, but I wanted to talk about new things, and they, of course, very much wanted to force me to talk about the old things.

29:52 And I, 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, I, I actually won't do it. And there is a few reasons I won't do it. It's not just, I am a student, and I love to understand things.

30:15 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.

30:38 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 foundations, right? 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.

30:55 But I want to talk about the new renovation I'm doing on the house, not the foundation or 17 years ago. Are there things that you would, are there any things you would thoroughly disavow? Are there any things you would say that I really don't stand with this anymore? Something that you used to hold dear.

31:09 There are, the simple answers, of course, you know. But there's nothing that upsets the whole thing, there are nuances and tweaks and language that has evolved, that I better understand my work and going through life that necessarily. So the simple answer is yes. Can you give an example? Yeah. Sure. So I define the why as a purpose cause or belief, and now that I've, the work is matured and I've built upon it, and I stumbled upon the infinite game, which was my last work.

31:52 I now talk about a just cause, and I was like, I wish it 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, so, like, little nuances like that. That makes a lot of sense.

32:10 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, my audiences. And it was really interesting. And the questions it threw up were kind of beautiful and profound. And for the first time ever, really, though, I've always enjoyed to somewhat do this, I've kind of been placed in a position of wanting to, or I'll be asked, you all want to define what is it that I stand for, essentially, what is my why, like, what is, what is my driving course, why Jacob, why, why come to a Jacob show?

32:43 So one interesting thing that I've stumbled upon 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.

32:59 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?

33:14 What are my foundational pillars? I have this, this dual kind of experience with that. Well, on the one hand, I have this deep relief of knowing, oh, so that's what was always going on. You know, because it's like that beautiful Michelangelo thing about, you know, everything within the sculpture is already there.

33:29 You just have to remove what's not the sculpture. Right, right. Which I think is very much the case as an artist. All you're, all you're working with is what you already have. It's me watching my mum conduct at age two. That's always going to be there. That's one of my raw materials. But as I've gone on this process of analyzing it all, I can't help but had that there's a part of me that that that enjoys not just sort of 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.

33:58 Enjoy resisting what? Enjoy it. I would say resisting the idea that I can be defined as this one thing. Yeah. And I suppose the question I wanted to post to you was this idea of the irrational, the completely irrational mind, which as a creative person, all of us have a relationship with and there is the part of us that can rationalize.

34:17 And I can say, okay, well, I'm even in the key of F, then I do this, what's arrivals as 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 still on stage and do it, there is upon me that just does not respond to any amount of data or analysis that I've could ever possibly have done about who I am and where I'm curious how you feel about the cultivation of that part of you that is just an animal and doesn't want to kind of be put into a box, but also enjoys, you can almost say, you don't want to say being disobedient with regard to what is defined as you.

34:53 Okay, you're opening a Pandora's box. I see you don't want to be it. 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 keyboard is- Chaos. Unto itself chaos, right? Because you take a, you know, you take somebody, a baby who doesn't, and they bang, I mean, chaos.

35:18 And finding order in that chaos 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. You know, we seek order, we seek rational, we seek rules and structures and explanations.

35:38 That's all that rational stuff. And the irrational, the emotional, the uncomfortable, the unscripted, the unknown, the uncertain is where the artist plays. And I think great artists understand that what they do is play. Yeah. So what we're doing is playing. We're playing with pieces of a puzzle. Mine might be words and ideas, you might be keys on a piano, somebody else might be colors.

36:02 And we become facile in our own language. Yeah. And the example I'll give is, have you ever hung out with dancers? Dances, yeah. So, so if you hang out, I've gone to watch friends choreograph pieces. And the choreographer would be like, they will demonstrate something, like, do this and this, then this, then this, then I want you to go here, pop, pop, pop, and I want you to do this.

36:22 Actually, no, don't. You can do this. Yeah. And all the dancers, the whole room, does it exactly, after they were shown once and there was a change in the middle. And I can maybe remember the first two. And I was like, but how, huh? And you realize it's a language. Yeah. You know, if you say to me, repeat the sentence, you know, three balloons, flew up into the sky and one of them burst and fell down to the, and I can go quite a while and repeat it.

36:46 Because I understand the language. You understand the context for all the nuggets. So, you know how the pieces relate? And I can. No, no, no. Put them together. Exactly. Without any rehearsal. So, here's one thing I'll say to that then. So, if we take language as an example, and you could say words or music, whatever happens to be dance.

37:00 So, you speak that language, I speak this language, you speak that. Sure, sure, sure. I would say, you know, you spoke about creativity is finding order in the chaos. But I also think an important part of, you could say, making art, this is a different thing from following the instructions of the choreographer or playing the parts as an orchestra member.

37:19 This is more about as the maker of an idea, as the source of the why, you would almost say, is this, this concept of making or finding chaos in the order. And we all have this feeling, I think, of going through rules, regulations, self-impote, you know, getting keepers, 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, norceating place at times.

37:43 You think, okay, I'm, I'm going to take this rigidity and I'm going to scuff it up. And that's creativity. So you're almost finding your way back to the chaos, but I think one thing that people do, when it gets to, or did you have to break it? Well, exactly. And to me that, I guess what I'm wondering about, what I'm challenges, does the nature of creativity also go the other way?

38:02 Yeah. It's a great insight. It's a great insight. It's a great insight. I think that's a great insight, but 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.

38:20 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, yeah. And it's that. I kind of, I kind of like that, but I would also say, I mean, and here's an interesting analogy that's, that's, to do with creativity, but, but also different is AI, right?

38:42 So AI asks us to ask questions. That's our fundamental way of, of, 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, of wittling away through deeply uninteresting things, like, mortally uninteresting results, to get something that's actually interesting.

39:00 And I've spent so many hours, you know, for example, just just generating images. And I, I spoke before about, you know, colliding on usual stuff. I love it. It's a beautiful place. I've made so many different kinds of stormtroopers. Oh, God. Yeah. Like, dressed as Vikings. But it's, the thing I used to do, and, you know, my favorite era of, it's so funny, the era, the, the era is of AI, or so noon.

39:22 My favorite era of AI was mid 2022, because Dali too has just come out, but it was before it got really good. It was before it got a really obedient or extremely appropriate or reasonable. I remember drawing it to, I'll, I'll see it through a picture of children escaping from a garden by a torchlight at night.

39:42 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. Wow. But you look at the image, you think, that kind of a day, if that's what it feels like, to be a child.

39:55 Yeah, it's sort of like, so early AI was actually better, because it captured feelings. But this is the thing, this is the 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, your technique can be refined, the friction between understanding exactly what a thing is and not understanding what a thing is, that's where the most creativity happens, because the most amount of change happens between order and chaos.

40:20 This is brilliant. So the whole Malcolm of Adwell, 10,000 hours, right? And this is what we're touching on, which is the more you gain mastery, what ends up happening is ossification. Yes, you ossify. Exactly. You know, I look exactly who are quote unquote experts, they've been doing 20 years, 30 years, they are the best.

40:37 And you realize they're stuck. You realize that they're bored, 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 like boredom is there, because they've done it so much, the joy was the figuring it out, up to 10,000 hours.

41:00 And so I think you're 100% right, which is, which is mastery is, I think, probably creatives, is a devil to a true creative. There are different kinds of mastery though, I would say. You can master, for example, the technique or something, the execution or something. You can also exhibit mastery by your ability to create containers.

41:24 And this is the thing I'm currently obsessed with, with mastering, because I've always required the right container for my creativity to feel safe within, because if you pour creativity into their open air and just go, 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, and this is, I think this is something you can master.

41:45 What's your container? Well, it could be a song, it could be an album, it could be a stage, it could be a lyric, it could be collaboration. But I think this is, I think this is right, which is, though creatives are comfortable in chaos, they don't reject order until it's time to reject the order. So this comes back to the irrational thing though.

42:01 Because you can't just improvise forever and have that be satisfying to you or the people of the song. Without input. We do want a container to your point, we want the song to be three minutes ish, that's about a right, it's good time, you know? Well, yeah, so I'm sure everyone who's listening, who's ever sat down to write a song or read, I mean, a whole host of creative activities knows this, understands this feeling, it's your, there's a part of your brain that just won't do the thing that you are telling it to do.

42:28 I remember being at school and studying for exams, which is something I really didn't like to do. And I would, I would kind of have to engineer through some kind of strange trickery that I would be revising for the exam by tricking myself that it was in fact procrastination that I was revising. So I would, 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, you, you have to, you're dancing with this really abstract part of you, it's like this chimp that's just like, you know, and

43:02 it will react to kind of anything you give it. But I think this is such an interesting conundrum in terms of creativity and it goes back to the thing I was saying to you before about how do you, what's your relationship with your old work? Because I'm grateful. That's for how I, if you made me sum it up, it's gratitude.

43:16 Yeah, well, I, I would, I was, I suppose I'd say, I'd say the same for your work and my old work, but, but I would say like, what, what is it that keeps you being tickled? It's like, it's like, you, you, how, how does one stop? I guess the question is, how does one stop entering into that thing that you described just now of stagnating, of getting stuck and of getting bored and of just sort of recycling the same old and it is, how do you keep someone sharp and, I think to my mind, it's something about changing the container.

43:42 You, but 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. Yeah. I've had all of that. And, and so how have you, if you had to say it in, in, in reductive terms, how have you got out of those? It's what you said, which is I, I have to break something.

43:58 Yeah, exactly. You have to break it. And if I go back and look at my whole career and I was in the corporate world, you know, my career would move well. I'd get promoted to a level where it was boring and I'd quit. And COVID was a gift. I think I was at a period in my own self, in my work where I was bored.

44:15 And COVID was this magical disruption where I didn't have to break it, it got broken for me. And then, and it was so much chaos, I was in such a, I was in, I was in, I was thriving. Yeah, yeah. Me too. Now, notwithstanding the sadness, the fear, the uncertainty, all, all at the same time, it was a jumble.

44:30 Very, very, very, very time. But when we were strictly creative standpoint, it was absolute magic. Yeah. And the stress of it was, 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.

44:50 Like, when you look back, you'd be like, I wish every concert was like this one, I wish every album was like this, like, or every experience I've had was like, 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 the album. There are two albums that I think sum up for thing, really the thing, because we're all chasing the thing.

45:08 And you get close to it, sometimes you say, oh, that's the thing, I've almost got it. But the first time I ever maybe was called in my room, and I made it in my room, in London, in this very, in this tight room filled with instruments, and I made it by myself. And it was really exciting. I taught it by myself with a circle of 12 instruments in a circle on stage, and there was this visual element where I would sort of loop my skeleton in 3D using connect cameras and it was this multimedia thing that was really, really fun.

45:33 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 as being a huge one for me, massive. Everyone's got a room of some kind, I was lucky enough to have a physical one. The album I just released this time last year, it's called Jesse Volume 4, is the fourth album in a series of four albums.

45:51 So this was my reaction to the solitude of it 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 as many people as possible. The first song I'm Jesse Volume 4 has over 100,000 people on it, wow.

46:11 And that's because not only are there, I mean, there's orchestra that my mum actually conducted on the album, which is amazing, there's all sorts of choirs, individuals, artists and things. But I recorded audiences obsessively from 22 to 23. And I didn't tell them I was doing this really at the time.

46:27 But I would end up in a key and I'd be getting the audience to do some sort of thing, singing up and down, whatever. And in my mind, I was playing the song I was half written in all these different parts of the world, every content of the world. And then I took those audiences home and I organized them into this kind of like anthem of the song.

46:46 That philosophically to me, it really thrills me because it's made out of people. But it's not, I didn't go in with the direct end, I didn't go in knowing exactly what I wanted to get. I went in with a container, with a concept of what would it sound like to have 100,000 people on one song? And then I figured it out.

47:03 Oh, it sounds like this. So of those two experiences, what was the reason you decided to talk about? You've had many concerts, you've done incredible collaborations, you've written some brilliant songs, 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?

47:19 Well I think that they both contain the thing, which is, which I think maybe is about the human voice. I think is about being a voice and having a voice. I think that the first, my first contribution in this album in my room was about me exploring my own voice and being like, what the hell is this? What's the first I could stretch this?

47:36 And the result, though obviously I listen back to it now and I'm like, oh, let's just just a little Jacob just figuring it out, you know, it's just getting started and stuff. And I would, I guess the second point, I say I'm very grateful for the album. But I so appreciate the thing that I was catching, which was this, this idea of like what I, what, if I close my eyes and listen to music in my head, what does that sound like?

47:56 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 this album I did last year was kind of like the same principle in the opposite, which is the voices of everybody else.

48:17 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, that, that feels like the thing I'm chasing.

48:33 Tell me an early specific happy childhood memory, specific that I can relive with you. There was a moment when I was, probably about two years old as well as a main memory that you had memories of two years ago. Yeah. Well, I have kind of two main memories from what I was to. One is the memory I already gave you.

48:47 Right, right. Was you already really? Right. But the second is, I remember sitting on my mother's lap and she was playing the violin, she was a violinist. And I remember looking up and seeing the violin above me and being like, I'm the violin. I'm, I'm, I'm the music that's being played, like it's me that is, I'm the source of the sound because the violin was going into me and then that, to me, felt very, very exciting and I mean, yeah, like, like many memories of that age, it's sort of in this weird dream, half dream state thing.

49:17 So I think that's where the truth lies. And because all those three stories that you describe, the two albums and, and this experience of you sitting on your mother's lap, I think is, is the discovery that we are all instruments, right? And in the first album, you're the instrument and you're looking to compose through the, you know, the different sounds of you.

49:40 And now, basically, you're, you're your mother and in, in the first example, you're sitting on your own lap. And the second example, the audience is sitting on your lap. And it's, I think the idea of, of being a vessel, the idea of being a container, and the word container has come up a few times. But I, this idea, I think of being the messenger for some sort of expression and discovery, I think is, is, is your genius.

50:10 You've, you've touched on it a few times, which is you make musicians out of people who didn't know that you're 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. But, and I think that your music itself is so exploratory, formful and formless.

50:36 Oh, thank you. That I, I think that what you give us is, 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 I think, I, I, I love, I'm interested in listening to your podcast. I love that moment at the end of the podcast, when you say, and his, and basically he's the container.

51:02 And the, 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, as a person who is the person they are, it's sometimes as hard to see it. But I, I love the way that you put that. And I, I think it's interesting to me that I feel it in, in some ways, the most myself or when I'm that megaphone for others.

51:20 There's something about that being that megaphone, which also feels like it is me, but it's also not me. Yeah. And there's that, there's that funny dance between, yeah, being, being one pixel in the image and yet also being the, being, being the image. Well, I think, I think it's a healthy relationship with ego, right?

51:37 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, you know, it's healthy to have an ego, but it's healthy to be humbled. And I'm, I'm just a megaphone for the music. Sure. Sure, sure.

51:56 That's really my music. Yeah. One question I have for you off the back of that, I think is, is regard 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, kind of the, one of the best ideas like, I've ever, one of the best images I've ever encountered to, to try and describe what's going on here.

52:17 And to talk about ideas coming to them from above, some, some divine place, and, and they're just completely a vessel, this idea of, I am just a vessel, I'm hollow, come through me. That's not who you are. I come, I've never experienced it in quite this way. Nothing you've, nothing you've explained or said here has that metaphor.

52:34 Well, the way I think about it is, it is partly that. I mean, there is certainly a mysterious source, but there is not enough surfing as an analogy. Do you surf? I don't do anything on boards. Really? Okay. It's not that I don't want to. Yeah. It's skateboarding. I mean, I also don't do much, I don't do much on boards either, but I've surfed a couple of times and there's an amazing thing about it.

52:52 It's mostly patience. You're mostly just waiting for the wave, because being like, okay, when's it coming? And then straight. And then when it, but then there's technique required, psychological and physical technique required, when it comes to know how to catch it, right? Yeah, yeah. And ride it out correctly.

53:07 I think that's, that's the difference. So you and I do that similar. People ask me, what's my creative process? And I always say that it's, 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 ride them.

53:29 Exactly. And I walk, I carry a notebook in my back pocket, because I don't know when it's going to strike. I used to keep a dry erase pen in my, in my bathroom, and if I had an idea, especially when I'm working on something, because you know, once you're working on something, it stays with you. It starts going.

53:43 If I had an idea in the shower, you lose it as quickly as you have it. You're like, oh, I'll, I'll remember that later. You don't. And so I, my, my bathroom wall was covered, all the tiles with ideas, and I'd stand there and brushing my teeth, reading all these ideas. But the point is, is the difference of what you and I are doing.

53:58 I think everybody has the moments of inspiration. Yeah. What everybody's not doing is capturing them. It is capturing them. And I think that's, and maybe the artist is the one who learns to catch it. Mm. Love it. Would you know any bar attack bag it tells? Do you know that, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, I don't think I do know that.

54:20 OK, so I heard a concert, and I'm going to play it for you, and then do whatever you want. That's so beautiful. God bar talks to the man. All right, 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 bar talk. OK.

55:04 Is that wrong? No, that's wrong. No, that's wrong. So it was like... Goods, boss. Oh, that was very generous. Thank you very much. Oh, it's that... I've never been on set in my life ever before. The bar talk is the man. I've never been on set in my life ever before. The bar talk is the man. So good. Thank you for your time.

58:09 Thank you so much. It's such a joy.