TED Radio Hour - Jacob Collier: The Language Of Harmony

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

Musician Jacob Collier is known for his electrifying performances and thoughtful views on art and humanity. This hour, Jacob joins us for a conversation on the sparks that fuel his creative process. Want to share feedback with our team? NPR is conducting a survey to better understand how listeners like you spend time with podcasts. Help us out by completing a short, anonymous survey at npr.org/podcastsurvey - and thanks! See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you.

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And do you know, Jacob Collier? If you're a music lover and spend any time on social media, where he has millions of followers, you probably do. Or maybe you're a fan of Herbie Hancock's. Stevie Wonder or Bobby McFerrin and have been wowed by Jacob's spin on those musical giants. Or maybe you've never heard of Jacob Collier. In which case, I have the distinct honor of introducing you. The 27-year-old is often called a prodigy and genius by his fellow musicians.

He's been nominated for nine Grammy Awards and one-five for his inimitable blend of genres and how he layers sound upon sound. Like all the different instruments you're hearing right now, they're all being played by Jacob. He's also an old soul with distinct ideas on finding inspiration, the power of solitude, and listening to your instincts. Jacob spoke and performed on the TED stage in 2017, and we featured him earlier this year in an episode called Play. But our conversation went on for so long and was so interesting that we wanted to bring Jacob back on the show. So today, an hour with musician Jacob Collier, recorded at his keyboard in a very special room in his childhood home in London.

Ah, the magical room. I'm extremely lucky in many senses, I feel, and one of those is that I've always lived in the same house for my whole life. This room was where it all began for me, and it's mainly because this is the room where the piano lives. And pianos are fascinating things for children. Specifically for me, I found it utterly magnetic. the idea that you could sit and basically play all music that had ever been made

with these black and white keys. And it was just a matter of uncovering it. And so I spent a lot of time here just kind of seeking my own goosebumps, I suppose, really kind of drilling into the things that freaked me out the most and made me the most delighted. And over the course of, I suppose, two decades, really, it became a kind of multifaceted recording space. But it started with just a few different musical instruments.

Wait, so exactly how many instruments do you play? Like, what do you have at your fingertips right the second that you could put into a song? Well, I've got my voice, which is the main one. And voices do so many different kinds of things. And I'm a huge fan. Then I've got this, which is just a MIDI keyboard. And I can play notes on it like that, which is cool. I don't know if you can hear this.

Oh, yeah. But this is a bass guitar. So that's a bit of a friendly, beastie. And let me just pick up. but this as well. This is an acoustic guitar. In fact, it's a five-string acoustic guitar, which is a little uncommon.

And so it's what I just described, perhaps plus drums. So you've got things that make rhythm, you've got things that make harmony, you've got things that make melody, and then you've got things that make sound. And within those four families of kind of musical creation objects,

I found myself never bored, you know, never unfastinated by the potential of what music could do. I also started on piano, and I was told I needed to practice for 45 minutes every day. And I'm sad to say that I don't play anymore, and I hated it. But it sounds like you got different directions or prompts.

Well, I did. I do remember being offered piano lessons, which I politely declined. Very polite, but I did say it. You know what? I want to keep exploring this on my own terms, which was actually really well received. I was essentially brought up by my mum on her own

and so she had this kind of extraordinary attitude about learning which really came from play rather than practice and I think it's an interesting thing to think about and talk about because it's hard to draw the line between those two and certain things you need to practice in order to be able to do them and other things I think are better discovered through just the process of kind of stiffing out what feels really good and both sides have existed for me

ever since I began the world of music however conscious I've been of either practice. process. But much to my kind of delight and gratitude looking back, I was really enabled to make my own world and design my own learning process in this room kind of for myself. I mean, what you describe sounds like the essence of what's wonderful about being a child is discovery and experimentation while you play and wonder. But how have you managed to hold onto that as you've become a professional musician as you've gotten older. I mean, and that is the word that so many people use to describe your music is playful, joyous. That's really lovely.

It's funny, I still don't really think of myself as a professional musician, even though that sounds kind of strange to say out loud. I don't think I'm that professional. I mean, I sort of, there are certain things that I've gotten very good at, but I think that in some ways there's something very sterile inherently about the word professional because it means that you've stopped learning. And I feel like in general, the more I figure out, the more there is to be figured out, I don't feel by any stretch, you know, well, I've finished that now. You know, I don't need to do any more of that. Because I think that once you've understood a certain angle or a certain corner or a certain

kind of concept or structure within it, then it just reveals the one beneath it or the one above it, you could say. So it's something someone once said, I can't remember who it was, but they says something like, you know, the creative adult is the child who survived, which I think is kind of true. You know, I mean, every child I'd like to think, so it goes into the world of education and learning with a totally open mind. And it's very, very difficult to kind of come out the other side with that curiosity intact, because it's exceptionally easy for people to shut it down. But I think that I had an interesting dichotomy because at school, you muck in with all sorts of people from all sorts of walks of life, which is a very important thing to do as a young

person. But in terms of learning music, it wasn't really a place where my curiosity was sated or expanded. But at home, it was this kind of unlimited space. So I had these two sides of the learning coin where education was being done to me. But learning was being done for myself by myself, even within educational institutions, I fell in love with the idea of grounding my own ideas and sort of things that I was interested in. I wonder if you could walk me through that. So, you know, you're a teenager and you come home from school and you, I don't know, throw your knapsack down on the family room floor and then go into the room. And then what would happen? Well, it's seeking chemical reactions, really, isn't it? It's like seeking the spark that starts the process going. And it's

kind of a mysterious thing. You know, you don't know when or how you're going to be inspired. And it might be by something that you're not expecting to be inspiring. And in fact, normally it is something fairly improbable that they get so excited. But I feel like, you know, as long as I had some degree of language on a system that I was using to express the music I was trying to create, then I had something to do with it. So I remember, you know, being at school and singing in the choir, which really was a joy, even though I was a little irreverent. Actually, I was very irreverent in that choir. I would sort of take people's parts and write notes in the score that what they weren't in the music and then hand them back out. And then people would sing the funky notes. And then it would

be extremely frustrating for the leader. So what is this going on? This E-flat over here. Why did this come from? I bet it was you, Jacob, you know. That's like the nerdiest acting out. I think I've never heard. I love it.

Exactly. Absolutely. But that process of kind of stretching the stuff that was going on at school was really fun. And what I would do, I would learn a song or listen to something or whatever. And I'd bring it back home and then I would recreate my own kind of spin on it. Maybe I'd record the song and then I'd reverse it. And that's always a fascinating thing, especially for me when I was like 12 or 13.

I used to play a game with my friend where we would say a word. You'd say something like, good afternoon. And then you'd reverse it, and it would be like, and then you'd learn how to say the reversed version. You'd say, and then you'd reverse that and see how close you were. I love it. It was so interesting. And all these tools were brand new. And I didn't understand what on earth I was doing, but I wanted to find out.

Is there a song that's coming to mind? right now, one of those early ones that you would come home and remix? Yeah, there was one song called Blow the Wind Southerly. It's a beautiful folk song. I think it's definitely British. I'm not sure where I'm the British house it's from, but there was an arrangement that was handed out to my school choir. And, you know, it was just like, lo, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Like, that's the tune. It's very simple. And the arrangement was, you know, lots of ooze and ours and all sorts of things. I remember thinking, oh, but you could add a G there. Or you could add an E there. That would be crazy. If you had an E, that would be wild. All these things were going on my head of how I would recreate it.

And I went home and at this time I couldn't sing below kind of like, that was like my lowest note because I was a boy. So I got up my pitch shifter plug in and I sang, you know, one octave higher than the baseline and then it transposed down. So it's sort of this funny sound. And I recreated this arrangement from memory. And then I added all the notes that I dreamed of adding when I was in rehearsal. And that was super fun. And I think that every experiment like that would teach me something

or evolve my understanding a little. And the thing that taught me the most above all other things was the voice, because there's something about the voice that's so kind of present and so universal. You know, when you sing a note in a chord, if I'm in D major, which is here, and if I sing an F sharp, the feeling of that note is different from singing in an A. or a D. You know, like being different notes in those chords. It gives you a different perspective of the harmony. And so I would sit at the piano

and I would play these dense chords these kinds of colorful, clustering beams, you know. And then I try singing them. And if you have a chord like this, this is a really dense chord. And by dense, I mean, all the notes are very close to each other. My favorite chords in the world sound like this.

It's like tension and release at the same time. beautiful. And if I sing this note, which is an E, then I'm fighting that note. Yeah. Yeah, we're fighting. But that's such a beautiful fighting. And if I move to, I'm fighting a different note, you see what I mean. There might be some people who don't think that's very beautiful, Jacob. They might be like, ooh, that makes me feel uncomfortable, actually, those sounds. Oh, yeah. I mean, to be honest, I think some of the most beautiful sounds do make you slightly uncomfortable.

But I feel like all of harmony, you know, the whole of the world of adding notes to other notes and things. It's all about context. So, you know, I wouldn't start my song on this chord, but I might start my song on this chord, which is F major. And if I go on a journey and I land there, that's a kind of a fascinating feeling, because I'm here and I have to break out of it somehow and maybe I'll go somewhere new, you know. So when you create tension, it's like a signpost. It says, right, I've got a collection of energy. Where are we going to put it? Where is it going to go? And I would take these experiments and I'd compound them and conform them into songs and arrangements and my experiments that had no end in that capacity. In a moment, how Jacob's irreverent musical experiments turned into sold-out performances like this one all around the world.

I'm Anoush Zamoroti and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. NPR, I'm Manus Zumerode. My guest today is Jacob Collier. He's a five-time Grammy Award winner whose joyful and playful music is hard to define. It spans genres and doesn't really adhere to any one tradition. And as we heard before the break, Jacob got his start by messing around with just about any instrument he could get his hands on, reworking classical compositions and turning them inside out. And eventually, he started

sharing his music online. Yeah, there are lots of musicians who come out of whatever music they're learning or studying or creating and stand on a stage and play their songs, and that's the first time that they share their things. But interestingly for me, there was about a three or four year window where I didn't play any songs live. I just released them as I'd created them. And those arrangements and songs were kind of mosaics of sorts.

You know, there were lots and lots of different ingredients. You can feel like you're running away? All combining together to make a kind of quite an intricate structure. So it was, you know, lots of different voices and lots of different stringed instruments and bass instruments and drums and various things that you wouldn't call an instrument. But they are definitely instruments like badminton rackets and saucepins and things like that. So I decided to remember your name. And they'd all fit together to make this tapestry of sound. It's quite hard to play it live.

Saucepants, did you just say? Oh, I said saucepens. Do you have saucepins? We do. We call them saucepans. And so, wait, you're playing those? Those are in your room? Are they there right now?

Oh, yeah, yeah. There's one up on the shelf here. Oh, oh, are you okay, Jacob? Sorry, I had to stand on the piano to get it. That's what it sounds like. Ah. It's a good one, isn't it? Kind of like an agogo.

Yeah. So anyway, these things all kind of had their place. But when it came to, you know, how am I going to play this stuff live? It was a really interesting challenge because I'd never really considered having a traditional kind of band. And I kind of felt like the world I was making kind of needed its own degree of performance structure that I didn't know what it was. It was a mystery until it made perfect sense. Wait, tell me more about that. Tell me about that process.

The mystery being that you were kind of a lone operator in some ways. You were the percussionist, the bassist, the lead singer, the keyboardist. And that doesn't translate to going on tour usually. if you're the one. Well, I mean, well, Beck made it work, right? Beck made it work. Yeah, he did. The challenge was how do you tour a room instead of a band? You know, how do you tour a world that is a portable space in which I could be kind of doing equivalent things to the things I was doing when I was making the music, which felt like, you know, the most honest way of playing it live would be to somehow recreate the process of layering down

these tracks and all sorts of stuff, but in real time. And I made an album called In My Room. It was the first songs that I'd ever written, really. And it was around that time that I met a wonderful man, his name is Quincy Jones. And Quincy Jones got me my first gig. The Quincy Jones. He got me my first gig. And he's such a cool dude. And Herbie Hancock and Chick Correa, who are two kind of absolute titans, giants and legends of the jazz piano world,

they were doing this tour at that time. And they were just kind of improvised and play a bunch of stuff together and kind of duel on stage. They needed an opening act. at the Montre Jazz Festival in Switzerland. And so Quincy and his team managed to land me that gig, which was extraordinary as a first gig. It was really quite scary. You know, 3,000 people,

and it was just brand new. The whole thing was brand new. And had you performed at any point by then? Well, I had done some performance. You know, I played in the school concerts, and I'd also sung in some operas. as a boy, I sang in some productions at the English National Opera and a few places around Europe singing Benjamin Britain and singing Mozart and things like that. But that was all playing other

characters. And around the time where I was offered the gig, I received a Facebook message. I don't often check my Facebook messages. And at that time, I did even more seldom. But luckily for me, on this one day, I did check my messages. And I had this message from a man named Ben Bloomberg, who was at that time a PhD student at MIT in Boston. And he said, you know, know, hey, my name is Ben, and I basically build stuff. I build live things, and I've built things for Bjork, and I've built things for Image and Heap and OK, go. And I just love these videos that you're making. And if you ever wanted to build something, just let me know. And it was, it was kind of a big moment for me because I realized maybe this was the key that I was looking for about,

like, maybe he could build me some kind of rig that could enable me to either uproot my entire room as it is and move it around the world, or maybe to build some kind of equivalent thing that you could tour. And that's exactly what I did. I flew to Boston and I met Ben and Ben is just the nicest dude. He's just super, super open-minded, super creative, really, really fun. And we started to mess around with a few different things and the first thing I really wanted to build was this instrument called the vocal harmonizer. And the vocal harmonizer that we built is an instrument that basically enables me to sing a note and play a number of notes on a keyboard. And what comes out of the instrument is the sound of my voice, but singing all of the notes that I play. So it's kind of like I'm a spontaneous

choir. That's how you do it. Yeah. So I can, I can kind of play all the voices and it has this crazy kind of vocoder harmonizer, sampler sound that we kind of forged together. So, you know, it was a really interesting process for me and it took about two or three years to really kind of feel like I could dig it fully. And that was how long I taught with a one-man show. I did about 300 gigs all over the world and by the end of it, I'd kind of fallen in love a little bit. How's everybody feeling today? You feeling good? Fantastic. Would everybody mind singing with me for just one second? Could you sing something? Could you sing a D? Sing oh. Everyone sing a louder, sing a louder, sing oh. Sing a louder, sing

Sing oh, sing oh! Now please, if you could sing Woo-hoa-o-o-o-o-o-o. Thank you so much. That's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. So do you feel that motion? Do you feel yourself as part of that motion?

Things moving underneath the surface? So the language of musical harmony is an absolutely extraordinary one. It's a way of navigating one's emotional frameworks, but without the need to put things into words. And I think that, as with many other languages, It doesn't matter how much you know about a language. It doesn't matter how many words you can say, how many phrases you know, what matters,

is the emotional choices you make with this language. So I encourage us to embrace this idea as a community, which is the thing which in time may grow us towards, as opposed to away from our own humanity. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, the one thing we can't bring people listening right now is that you're very generous with your expressions

when you're on stage, just the real genuine pleasure you derive from hearing sound. And you can't fake that, right? I think you're so right. And I think there's something really effortless about enthusiasm in a sense, because as you say, it's either there or it's not. And it takes no effort to be enthusiastic about something if you love it. At least that's what I find. It's like if you put a spoonful of sugar and a spoonful of salt in a child's mouth

or in somebody's mouth and say, hey, which one do you like better? Then it's really obvious. It's like, oh, for the salt. And there's, ooh, for the sugar, it's lovely and sweet. And that kind of instantaneousness, I think it's actually really powerful. And when I look back at the music that I have made and the music that I learned as a boy, a lot of it came, literally just came down to what do you like? Like, what is it that you like?

I think it's a question that's not asked enough in education where someone says, you know, what do you like? What feels the most important thing to you to make in the whole way? world because that's what you'll spend the rest of your life trying to figure out. And I know when my enthusiasm kind of dries up or it's not there, it's normally because I've kind of migrated to something that I maybe think I should like or other people like or whatever, but it's not really connected to something that I'm enthusiastic about at that moment. And so I think it is important to kind of seek out the underlying source of what it is that you get that spark from, you know, because

in a certain kind of a way when you get that spark, you just know. It's not. It's not. It's not. something that you decide or or needs much thought, you think, oh, I love this. And I think in my mind, what happens is how can I share it? How can I share that enthusiasm? How can I explore it and expand it and give with it? Because I think that's what we're here to do as people. I think if there's something that gives us a spark, then we have to give that spark right back. You seem to have such an interesting relationship with your own voice. I read somewhere that at one point, you experimented with all kinds of different ways to use your voice to try and pinpoint the one that you liked best, which I thought was kind of funny because I think a lot of people think, well, oh, this is my voice.

This is the way I sound. But correct me if I'm wrong, you kind of have the philosophy that you can sound a bunch of different ways. I mean, one of your most famous projects was the acapella cover of Moon River, where you ended up layering your voice like 5,000 times. Yeah, I think in a sense, you know, you have your one voice, there is your one voice, and you can't change that. But learning what your voice can do is super, super fun. So, you know, learning about shouting and screaming and you can sing high, you can sing low.

And also what happens when you layer your voice, which is something I've really loved, like your voice becomes a new instrument. It sounds like a church organ. It's a crazy, crazy sound. And that's part of my instrument in a certain way. And I think, you know, discovering your instrument in that sense is really exciting because it gives you a set of tools. And when you have a set of tools, then you can kind of go play.

In a certain kind of a way, I think that there is a way that my voice feels the best when I use it. And I think it's when I use it in a healthy way. And so there is a certain amount of discovery about what that feels like and what that sounds like. But, you know, I don't know how it's possible to find your voice unless you're kind of just, trying everything. I think that you should try all sorts of things, you know. And over the years, I've been a dubstep producer and a jazz pianist and a folk, you know, a folk fiddler and a slap bass player and all these different things. I'm none of these things really, but wearing the different hats teaches me about what I like. Going back to what I said before, when you know what you like and

you trust your nose in that sense, then you kind of know how to combine the things that you know. and you actually need to know so little to start combining things. And I think one of the best examples of this is if you look at a baby who's learning to talk, the baby doesn't sit down and kind of study grammar and spelling and all these things before they start playing around. The first thing that the child does is start playing around. I think, they're pulling syllables out of the air and saying, how does it feel or I use this syllable to mean this or to ask for this or whatever?

And only later do they sit down as like, okay, so this is what this word is. what it looks like on the page and this is how it's spelt and this is what a comma is for. And they think, well, I know what a comma is because I know what it means to pause in a sentence, but I didn't know it was called that. And I think for me with music, it was a bit like that with theory, you know, which I resisted for so many years. I thought this is so boring. But then I realized a lot of this stuff actually intuitively I've kind of discovered just through

using my voice in interesting ways. And I guess one thing I really felt is I think your voice or you could say your sound as a musician people are interested in. how do I find my sound? I don't think your sound comes from all the things that you do really well. I think that in some ways your sound comes from things that you don't quite know how to do or that you do kind of weirdly, at least to start with, because I think that that teaches you equally as much as, you know, doing something well, if not more.

I think at any time I kind of, I struggle or I come up against a creative block, which happens a lot. you know, I think, well, how would I do this the worst it could possibly be done? Or how wouldn't I do this? And actually, that could be really helpful in breaking me out of my barricade because it stops moving too serious about the whole thing. Whoa. Thousands of you, Jacob. Thousands of you.

It's like a wall of your voice. It's wonderful. So you spent years touring as a solo act. You gave these very theatrical plays. performances where you basically were leaping from one instrument to another on stage. Did you think, you know, I like the solo thing. I like being able to play my instruments the way I want to play them. Or did you start to think, I don't know, I'm getting a little lonely up here.

Maybe it's time to open up my playground here to other friends. Yeah. Well, both things were very much true, kind of one after the other. I think at first it was really thrilling and immensely challenging to do it by myself because it enabled me to kind of think on my feet in a way that I'd never done before. And I had to change gear really fast. And I've got that kind of mind that just gets a kick out of that kind of experience and those kinds of experiments.

You know, to have to do four two-bar loops on percussion. And then you have three beats to make it to the bass. And if you don't make it to the base, it will loop in silence. So you have to play it. You know, all these kind of, it was a very, very sort of confining system of things, which I found immensely freeing. It was a very strong set of boundaries that I had to be creative

within these very strict rules and in a funny sense I really loved that but after three years I just all I wanted was a bandmate I just wanted someone else to jam with because the one thing that you can't do on stage on your own

is improvise with someone else is to jam with someone else and in fact I got so kind of caught up in my own space and in need to jam that I started to jam with the audience and the audience would would sing stuff and I would ask them to sing chords and clap in certain things and stamp and

call and response and all sorts of these things. And I loved that. And I still do that now. It's just one of my favorite things ever. But I knew I needed a band next. And I also knew that for my next album, I didn't want to just do it on my own in my room. I wanted to expand that world. I wanted to dunk myself in the deepest possible waters of things that I partially understood and see what happened. And that's how the whole of this next project sort of came about. And the project's called Jesse, DJ E-S-S-E. And Jesse is a four-volume project,

and it's the sort of most maximalist form of collaboration that I could possibly imagine. Every album is a different genre, a different set of sounds, different part of the world, just a completely different journey. Yeah, you actually visited us at NPR back in 2019 for a tiny desk concert where you played some of Jesse, volume two.

So let's take a lesson to part of that performance. It don't matter what your boyfriend is saying. It don't matter what the games you play. It don't matter what the preacher pray. Because when you wake up in the morning, I throw it all the way. It doesn't matter. Here to stay.

In a moment, more from my conversation with Jacob Collier. We're going to talk about burnout and how to keep joy alive, even when play turns into work. I'm Manus Shumeroody, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Shumeroody. On the show today, we are spending the hour with musician Jacob Collier, who at this point has four albums under his belt. He's working on a fifth.

He's collaborated with musicians all. over the world, and he's currently on a global tour. Oh, and by the way, he is only 27 years old. Jacob, I hate to ask, but how the hell are you going to keep this up? I mean, you'll be, you won't even hit 30 by the time you finish. this massive four-volume project, Jesse. What? Do you ever think about that? Like, that you're firing literally on all cylinders.

This is hard to keep up. I mean, if you were an athlete, you would be maybe getting an injury at some point, certainly chugging a lot of gatorade. How do you keep up this momentum? Oh, yeah, that's a big question. I asked myself that a lot last year, which was such a weird year for everyone in the world. But for me, it was kind of funky because I'd had this 2020 world tour that was pushed to 2021. And then it was pushed again.

And so I was kind of left a little bit at the mercy of, you know, these so many unfinished ideas and so much kind of potential, but not being able to leave the house. And so in a weird sense, I'd kind of, I'd left the room and I'd tour the world and I'd collaborated with these different musicians. And I was just kind of learning that language. And then I had to sort of put the lid back on it and go home, which was actually very strange, creatively and challenging for sure. But I think that after volume four is done, which hopefully will be, you know, not too long away, it's going to be interesting to see what feels right to do next. I'm deliberately not making a plan because I don't know what I'm going to need at that time.

But I think that, you know, my priorities creatively, as I kind of expected, have shifted drastically since I began. And I didn't sort of think in my wildest dreams that it would sprawl to this scale, the Jesse project. and it would have this many musicians on it and it would have this much kind of expectation from the world. So, you know, it's a very interesting challenge but I'm learning the power of taking time away, especially from social media, I must say.

And I know I'm not alone in that, but it's such a strange world, isn't it, to live online? And I think it's the polar opposite to being curious and being open is all of this kind of digital certainty and things lasting forever and very judgy. and also incredibly joyous if you kind of embrace it for what it is. Yeah. Because you wouldn't have been discovered were it not for the YouTube social media world, right?

I mean... No, no, not at all. There's always two sides of that coin. But I think when you leave the house, I'm sure many of you listening will feel like this too. You know, when you're in the context of your own life kind of firsthand, when you're within the things that you think about and the people that you know, something makes a huge amount more sense than when you're... removed from it and you're kind of ideating around around it but you're not with it and i know for so

many many friends of mine uh and me too i just have just found it hard to not be able to to kind of do what it is that we that we really love which is to share as you say to share the music in the real world and with each other and to and to challenge each other and to to get into those situations where something can happen by accident because you know it's so hard to you know even catch up with a friend in a way where you might start doing something creative because, you know, if you're on Zoom for an hour and then you have to go on do this other thing or you've got to do X, Y, Z. It's tough. It's tough to be spontaneous in a controlled environment. I think you're putting really your finger on it. And it makes me think of all the people who

maybe do play around and find out that they're good at something. And, you know, when I was a kid, they would have called that a hobby. And now it's like, oh, you could sell that on Etsy or maybe you should start a YouTube channel or you could get a lot of followers on Instagram and become an influencer. It's this kind of need to commoditize the things that give us joy or that we think could bring joy to other people. Do you ever, I don't know, you're really successful and obviously this is what you're doing to making a living, but does it, I sound like such a Gen Xer, but do you ever feel like you sold out? Oh, sold out? well it's a hard thing to quantify you know i i think that in my mind when i look back there are there are different moments where my career kind of jumped into a space that was unknown i fully kind of relate

to the idea that trying to commoditize something that you just love for the sake of it is super super challenging i would say in any industry but in terms of the music industry you know it's it's tough it's tough to keep doing things that might be kind of weird that people might not fully understand or be interested in, but that you really love and to share those with people without letting the kind of the big wide world get its claws in you. And I feel like I've been, I've been very kind of stubborn about that space in the past, you know, and saying, you know, I want to do this on my own terms and I want to do this in my own time and all those things. And I think that for artists kind of all over the world, that is the most important thing is to do things the way that you

want to do them. But, you know, I also feel that it's an interesting problem to have, when you start to reach people or when you realize the potential of something that you're doing, it's a bit like, you know, you become aware of yourself and you think, oh, I don't know if I can just stumble into something anymore

because, you know, everything I do feels significant in a new way. And maybe I should be having my camera on for this, you know, oh, I wonder if I should, you know, all these things kind of start turning. And I think that for me,

when I look back 10 years and I was just kind of in the thick of really unearthing a sound world that felt like it belonged to me and it was something that I really, really was excited about. I kind of didn't think twice about making things. I just sort of thought, well, this feels good. I'll do this now. And oh, maybe I had this. Oh, no, no, that didn't work, you know, whatever. And I didn't sort of feel bad if I did something I didn't like. It was just part

of the process. Whereas I think what's harder now is if you do something and it kind of doesn't work so well, especially if you release it. You know, if you make an album or you release a song and you think, oh, that didn't really, actually, I didn't that really worked. It was worth experimenting with, but now it's like public and people think, oh, this is, this is what Jacob does. that, you know, whatever. So that, I think that process is... The stakes are much higher. Yeah, for sure. It's a really interesting challenge. But I do think that, well, I know for a fact that when I need to kind of find the ground

beneath my feet creatively, I have to stop listening to those voices, you know, and the voices that are saying, oh, it's like this, it's like this, it feels like I'm back at school in a lot of ways, you know, it's, don't you understand? This is how this has done. And anyone who does it different is wrong and all these kind of strange haunts that come back to you. And the funny thing is in... music, nothing is wrong at all. I mean, I think you can make a strong decision or a weak decision about how something is played or how something feels, but otherwise, I mean, you have to just muck in and figure stuff out. And I've got a lot of kind of pleasure and joy over the years of just

kind of mucking about and finding things by accident. And I think that accidents are harder to come about and find their way through the surface. If you're doing something that's for others and and that's being kind of made available and is permanent in some sense. I think that the idea of play, I think, it does become harder. And all the more important, I think, to kind of get right. Ah. I love the way that I feel when you put your arms over me. There must be something I could say to make you sleep more.

And I love the way that you get in the groove when you walk. Because every time I think about it, can't stop thinking about it. There is a school of thought where people say, you know, play around, figure out what you love, and do that, and you'll never work a day in your life. It sounds like that school of thought certainly works for you, applies to you. But there are some people, I think, right now who are thinking, I have played around. And I haven't found my thing, my calling. You know, I think we look at people like you who are so beautifully managing to take. play and turn it into work and back and forth like that. There's a melding there. But I wonder

for some people we have to say like it's okay. Work is work and play is play. Yeah. Oh, it's such a tough one. I mean, it is okay to draw a line between work and play. I think to say that they have to be one and the same and that that's the only way that life is truly kind of meaningful. I think that puts pressure on in a certain kind of a way. There are certainly things I do that are no fun at all and that you just have to do. Maybe it's doing a bunch of traveling and being on early flights and all these all these moments you think actually this is this really isn't fun it's not healthy it's not sparking any joy i'm absolutely ravagingly knackered and i just want to go home and i do know that that feeling to a point and i suppose what i'd say is it actually takes very little time and energy

to be curious about something and for me i feel like curiosity is where so much of of the joy starts i know those days where my mind is closed and i don't i don't feel curious you have those days Those are the hardest days. Oh, absolutely. And I think that, you know, it was a big lesson for me was how to kind of find or discover the curiosity. And the thing that I felt, which was wrong, I think, was I had to kind of rekindle curiosity that I used to feel about certain things.

Or even just music. I used to love writing songs. And now it feels like, oh, it's just so much pressure or all there's a burden here. I don't know if like, whatever. And I think what I realize is, curiosity is always new. It always starts in the present and it always applies to. present. Realizing that helped me get out of a bunch of ruts because I was relieved of the pressure of having to kind of find something that felt like it got buried or whatever. I think that

sounds like an intimidating task, but it starts literally now, you know, and I think I tried to figure out a sense of what was around me and just being interested in doing things and just for no reason at all, just doing things for myself or for play or with friends or with other people. and reawaken that kind of spark. And I think the other thing about curiosity is that, you know, sometimes when you're curious, you go and create something, you know, you think, I'm interested about that.

I'm going to write that down. I'm going to play that on my instrument or I'm going to teach about that tomorrow in a classroom, whatever. And whilst those ideas might stay, the curiosity moves on, and it moves on with your life. You know, you might have signed up for a job that felt like the dream job

and the job that would give you all of the joy in the world and a few years might go on and you might think, you know what, I just, I think I've moved and I think I need to do something new. And I think that that's part of being human. In no situation is everything always a joy and everything always a breeze. And I find myself increasingly drawn to music, both as a creator and as a listener that comes from, I suppose, a more honest, complex emotional space than just kind of happy or sad or whatever. Human beings, I feel like all of our emotions that really have meaning are compound emotions.

you know, it's a combination of relief and sadness or a combination of relief and joy. Like a chord. Like a chord, exactly. And so I find myself kind of trying to unearth those feelings more now than ever before. Because I think that there's, as anyone grows older as a person, I think there's more things to feel. And there's all these layers now of the world as we know it.

And there's so much that's unknown as well. That's one of the strangest things. But if there's one thing that music has taught me, especially being on a stage in front of thousands of people and not knowing what on earth I'm doing, which is one of my favorite feelings of all. Sometimes it's the most magical thing to not know what's coming next.

And that doesn't mean it's easy to be where you are. But I think sometimes for me, it's like you switch it over and you look at it from a different angle and suddenly you think, well, yeah, no one knows what's going on and things are very uncertain. And somehow it's going to sing, you know. And when you're on stage, you have no choice. You have to sing.

And that can be really good for you just to say, well, I have to play something now. so something will be played. So off I go. It's out of my hands, you know. Might as well make it fun. Exactly, exactly. Okay, so Jacob, we have asked you to play us out of this conversation with one final song.

Tell us what you've chosen and what's so special about it. I figured maybe I'd played the song, which is one of my most favorites that I've ever written. In fact, it was written in 15 minutes, which is a complete whirlwind. And I normally spend like months and months crafting a song. and this was one of the first songs I ever wrote that just kind of went and it popped out. And it's very simple. It's an F sharp major, which is one of the best keys in my opinion ever. It was actually in New York City when I wrote this song. It was just this figure, which is so simple.

And I just thought, that's nice. And then it was done. I thought, is that it? Do I need to now go and make a thousand layers and stuff? And I thought, I don't know, but I recorded it on my phone. And then I forgot about it for a few months and I came home. And I sat here in this chair and I thought, okay, how am I going to record this? So I thought, well, I've got my microphone's out and sat here and sang the song. And it just didn't come close to the voice memo. This didn't come close to it.

So I released the voicemower in the end. Did you? Yeah, I just released the phone voice memo. And I'm glad I did because it just reminds me when I listen to it and when I play it, it reminds me of how sometimes it starts with just being curious about the smallest of things, you know. You just grab it for what it is and it doesn't have to be anything more than what it is. And sometimes it's really plain and simple. And it was unlike any other song I've ever kind of written.

And I love it dearly. And it's called The Sun Is In Your Eyes. The Sun is in your eyes. The sun is in your eyes. Throw me the cold. Throw me the cold, cold water. I can't smile again. So take me by surprise.

You take me by surprise. Throw me the bold. Throw me the bold, bold treasure. your lips again. Leave me in the right direction. With your love is my protection. I'll be a world of your projection. Sing your songs to your affection.

With rhymes to your perfection. In my eyes see a reflection. I see you clear. I hold you dear. The sun is in my eye. That was beautiful. That was just lovely. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's Jacob Collier.

you can see his full TED performance at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. To see hundreds more TED Talks, check out ted.com or the TED app. And if you've been enjoying the show, we'd be so grateful if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It's the best way for us to reach new listeners, which of course we really want to do. And one last reminder, please take our yearly podcast survey. Tell us how we're doing and what you want to hear more of. Just go to npr.org slash podcast survey to share your thoughts.

This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner and it was edited by Katie Simon. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Montalione, James Delahousie, Matthew Cloutier, Fiona Gehrin, Diba Motisham, Ramel Wood, and Catherine Seifer. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewey. Our partners at TED are Chris. Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Daniela Bellarezzo. I'm Minouche Zamoroti, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.