A Bit of Optimism - You Are More Like Grammy-Winner Jacob Collier Than You Think

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

To create something truly original, do we build something new or break what came before? Perhaps the answer is both—simultaneously.Jacob Collier does exactly that. A brilliant songwriter and musician, he’s known for transforming his live audiences into massive three-part choirs, making music with the very people who attend his concerts. His album Djesse Volume 4 was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2025 Grammy Awards, alongside icons like Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, and Taylor Swift. Although Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter won, Jacob snagged his seventh Grammy for his rendition of "Bridge Over Troubled Water."I sat down with him in a music studio a few days before the Grammys, surrounded by multiple pianos, and it was a joy to hear him play. Jacob’s approach to music—blending structure with spontaneity—offers insights into creativity that are as inspiring as his sound.This…is A Bit of Optimism.For more on Jacob, check out:jacobcollier.com

What do you mean by arrival and departure? So, this is my home. If I'm in F, this is my home. Right. I can exist in the key of F for a while. And even if I go somewhere else, like to Eto'e 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... ...colourful. And the joy of music is how to make the best, most satisfying kind of tension and then resolve it. So good. Creativity is about breaking things.

No, creativity is about building things. No. Creativity is about building things. No breaking. No building. 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.

This is 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. Mean wins.

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 Arm 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 sit around thinking, you know, I'm bloody brilliant and you know, I love so much, it's 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 I'm just taking each day as it comes love How old were you and you when you're 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? Nice moment. Oh yeah. Yeah. That is something for motivation.

And is your whole family artistic? I would say so. I mean so I was fundamentally brought up by a single mother so and 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 a 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. 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 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 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, okay, I'm gonna take the world as I experience it as it is, and I'm gonna morph it into something 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 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 polymathem and sort of mental intrigue and struggle, but actually when he's working is when it flows at its best and its calmest. So I think there's something too 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 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. So in music you have, you know, 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 to do it. 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 organize a state of play to solve a particular problem. Like I just want to learn to go, diggity, diggity, diggity, diggity, diggity, diggity,

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 small I was somewhat resistant to like liturgical practice You know, I'm gonna sit down and do this for this much time. My brains 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.

Did you paint? Did you draw? Or was music always the thing? I think when I was small, 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, for example, 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 imagine the collisions. 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. 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 it's like Flint. It's like you make a spark out of these two unlikely things. And the spark will illuminate something new. And you think, 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 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 does it's almost like a like a level of disgust That to me is kind of like widened to 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

I think what we're talking about, or at least talking around, is the idea of being hyper-focused towards something. 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? 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. 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, stretchableable 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 squeez, 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-totalable, easily-modelable, buy-what-you're-soluble, washable, mendable, highly-dependable, buyable, sellable, always-available, bounceable, shakeable, always available bansable shakeable always unbreakable twistable turnable man Fantastic and 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 experiences 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 that the other way around So when you listen to something you might be in a particular mood you might say oh god And I and I'm trying to reverse engineer the 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 Siffy and Stevens day, or Earth and a Fire day, whatever it 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 only music can do. That you want to emphasize or get away from. 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 this 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, you know,

and it kind of comes back to the candle at dinner scenario of how you're feeling today, and whatever you say is actually fine, 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 to do,

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 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 you weren't it

wasn't like you had homework to do and you had to prepare for the piano teacher but now it's a career yeah now there's expectations now you have to play at certain times and certain reasons yeah you have to prepare for things. 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- Cause you don't wanna 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. 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, the things. And 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 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. 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 been 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.

I mean, to take you back to when I was like two, some of my earliest memories as a kid, at those sort of wooly half memories that you have at that age, were of watching my mother conduct, because she's a conductor, so she would raise her arms or move her body, and it was like casting a spell. 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 crazy. It was like, yeah, it was literally like magic. Right. I was obsessed with it. Right. How can you do that? That's good. 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. 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 You know, this is this is worth double clicking on it. Don't you you're two years old? Yeah, and your introduction to understanding music was not somebody sitting at a piano. 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.

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 I can specifically remember the moment where my audience interactions graduated from kind of the Freddie Mercury, cool 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 favorite 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 had got the middle group. I divide audiences to three, normally to three, because three is a nice number for audiences. So the middle group we're 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 they're going, singing in the dead of night. So it's a lovely 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 night, and they sang like this, this big F major chord. And it was great. And then I just kept them there, and then I suddenly realized, hang on, you wanna know, you wanna see, you wanna 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, ah, like this, and then down, ah, ah. 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 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 I 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 Yeah, 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? Yeah, what's a strange like we take direction? Yes, but to your point about it. The music is in us Yeah, like we may not know How many keys on an octave? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. The point 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 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, grownups, everyone. It's like, here's a high note and here's a low note. Okay, got it. Because it's speech. We all speak. We understand the contour of speech. 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, there quiet everyone gets it. 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 those principles you get it's a thick chord 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 the deeper you go into into music as a process of learning or playing, you kind of increase the resolution of these axes.

So it starts with every kid. I think I was going to say, why don't we do it? Go to the piano. So you've got high and low, right? Yeah. Makes sense. And you've got wide and narrow. That makes a lot of sense.

You've got wide and narrow. So that makes a lot of sense. You've got loud and quiet. But then, for example, there's this idea of arrival and departure. Everyone actually understands. Everyone has departed or arrived at a 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 localities, you could say. So I have next to neighbors. So that's one neighbor, B flat localities, you could say. So I have next-door neighbors.

So that's one neighbor, B flat. What do you mean by arrival and departure? So this is my home. If I'm in F, this is my home. I could exist in the key of F for a while. And even if I go somewhere else, like to Eto'i 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

colourful 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 and 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. That context. That Right? 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 like murmuration. Okay, they'll kind of follow I think the main thing about my audience now is that they are kind of just that they're open to it I'm so curious how you explore different emotions like real emotions that you have there than happy sad Yeah, like when you are angry. Yeah, whether it's that, you know, not 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, oh, oh, okay. 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? Is it your therapist? I would say so. Should we go sit down with Joey? You know, poets write poetry, even if that's not for anything.

Is it the kind of thing that you just do all the time? Is it that you like, like, I'll give you an example, right? I've had a busy week, you know, and I'll be like, oh, I haven't gone for a run in a while, I need a run. You know? 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. They're, 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 finny of catharsis in a sense. You say, 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 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 gonna play this, oh, okay, now I'll play this, 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 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 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 my line of work, you could say as a songwriter, that challenge is always interesting. It's almost like 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 and to kind of whittle down idea

and to particularly whittle down idea, 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

I wrote 15 years ago, whatever. What's your relationship with ideas of old, their gestation, and then their kind of continued life as you evolve as a human? Yeah, so it's a good question. And for years, I after I wrote, start with why that's all anybody wanted to hear from me, but I wanted to talk about new things.

And of course very much wanted to force me to talk about the old things. 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 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'm 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 yeah, that's my favorite thing in the world to do 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. 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. 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? There are, the simple answer is of course. Yeah. 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? Give an example, sure. So I define the why as a purpose, cause or belief. Now that the work has matured and I've built upon it, and I stumbled upon the infinite game, which was my last work, I now talk about a just cause. And I was like, ugh, 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 so like little nuances I think that makes a lot of sense So here's so here's another question then or another another point to make is over the last three months or so for the first Time ever I've I've had this analysis done of my audience who my audience is 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 being asked to or want to define

What is it that I stand for? Essentially, what is my why like what is what is my driving course? They're like, why Jacob why come to a Jacob show? So one interesting thing about my audience is that I sell far more tickets than my streaming numbers would suggest. And I think it's because a lot of the things I most enjoy about my work are 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 mom conduct at age two. That's always gonna 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 there's a part of me 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. Enjoy resisting what?

Enjoy, I would say, resisting the idea that I can be defined as this one thing. 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've been 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.

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. You're opening a Pandora's box. I assume I might be. 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 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. You know, 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, your 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, like, do this and this, then this and 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. 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 other. And I could go quite a while and repeat it all because I understand the language. You understand the context for all the nuggets. So 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. So you speak that language, I speak this language, they speak that language. Sure, sure, sure.

I would say, you spoke about creativity is finding order in the chaos, 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 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 gonna take this rigidity and I'm gonna scuff it up. 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 too ordered, you have to break it. Well, exactly. And to me that I guess what I'm wondering about challenges 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. But and I and I agree with you. I think it's a cycle or a circle, right? Right. 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.

So I think you're right. I think it's the duality of chaos and order. And the artist, when there's a sense of 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 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 to do with creativity, but also different is AI, right? So AI asks us to ask questions. Mm-hmm 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 interesting process of 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 storm troopers. 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 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 ask you to draw a 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 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, 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 ossify. You know, I look at people who are quote-unquote experts, been doing this 20 years 30 years 40 years They are the best and you realize they're stuck 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 to change threatened. Yeah threatened but there 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. And so I think you're 100% right,

which is mastery 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 of something. You can also exhibit mastery by your ability to create containers. And this is the thing I'm currently obsessed 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. I think people- 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. Yeah, 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 three minutes-ish. It's about a right, it's a good time. So I'm sure everyone who's listening, who's ever sat down to write a song or really, 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 manage 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? Because- I'm grateful. That's how I, if you made me sum it up, it's gratitude. Yeah, well, I would, I suppose I'd say the same for your work and mine, my old work. But I would say like, what is it that keeps you being tickled? It's like, 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 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 have 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 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. Yeah and kovat was a gift I think I was at a period in my own self in my work where I was bored and Kovat was this magical disruption where I didn't have to break it. It got broken for me

And then I can relate to that and there was so much chaos. I was in such a I was thriving. Yeah Yeah, you know now notwithstanding the sadness the fear the uncertainty all Jumble but from a strictly creative standpoint, it was Absolute magic. Yeah, and the stress of it was fuel. Mm-hmm Is there something you've done an album you've worked on a concert 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, 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 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. So this was my reaction to the solitude of In My Room. It was like, I'm gonna collaborate drastically. I'm gonna go big, I'm gonna go massive. I'm gonna 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. Wow. 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 doing this really at the time. I would end up in a key, and I'd be getting the audience to do some 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 I didn't go in with a direct end. I didn't go in knowing exactly what I wanted to get. But 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 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, 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 wanna 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 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, let's just Little Jacob, just figuring it out, you know, is just getting started and stuff. And I would, I guess to a second 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, if I close my eyes and listen to music in my head, what does that sound like? 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. 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. 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. Yeah, well I have kind of two main memories from when I was two, one is the memory I already gave you.

Right, right. Which you already relive with me. But the second is, I remember sitting on my mother's lap and she was playing the violin, she's a violinist. And 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. Like 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 and 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. Mm-hmm. Right and in the first album you're the instrument and

you're looking to compose through 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 I think the idea of being a vessel, the idea of being a container, and the word container's come up a few times,

but this idea, I think think of being the messenger for some sort of expression and discovery, I think is your genius and what you're giving us. You've touched on it 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 half the audience is musical, it just goes quicker. They just learn quicker. And I think that your music itself is so exploratory, formful and formless.

Oh, thank you. Formful and formless. Oh, thank you. I think that what you give us is a megaphone. Like, you are the megaphone, weirdly, and not the sound going into the megaphone. I think that's who you are. That's amazingly put. I love, I mean, just in listening to your podcast,

I love that moment at the end of the podcast when you say, and basically, here's the container. But I love, I mean, just in listening to your podcast, I love that moment at the end of the podcast when you say, and basically, here's the container. And 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, it's sometimes just 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 Yeah, and there's that there's that funny dance between Yeah being being one pixel in the image and yet also being the big beam the image Well, I think I think it's a healthy relationship with ego, right which is if the music Comes through you. Are you the music or you just the vessel for the music and 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. 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 regard to catching ideas. Because you are like a maester 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 divine place. And they're just completely a vessel. This idea of coming to them from above, some divine place,

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've never experienced it in quite this way. 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 the reason I love surfing is analogy. Do you surf I don't do anything on boards really it's not that I don't want to it Just I don't just I'm not good at boards fair play skateboarding I mean, I also didn't do much. I don't do much on boards either

But I've surfed a couple times and there's an amazing thing about it. It's mostly patience You're mostly just waiting for the wave. It's being like Okay, when's it coming and then strike and then when it but but then there's technique required Okay, when's it coming? And then it strikes. 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 and write it out correctly.

I think that's the difference. So what you and I do that's similar. 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. The problem is 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

Because I don't know when it's gonna 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 you know 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. It's capturing them.

And maybe the artist is the one who learns to catch it. Mm. Mm. Love it. Do you know any Bartok Bagatelles? Do you know that, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum? I don't think I do know that. OK, so I heard a concert.

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

The Plot Talk is the man. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed. It was such 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, simonsenick.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 Lindsey Garbenius, David Jha, and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg

Ruderschen.