Jacob Collier

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Jacob Collier has built a remarkable career as a multi instrumentalist and arranger, known for his complex harmonic approach and collaborative spirit. He first gained attention as a teenager posting multi track videos from his childhood bedroom in North London. In twenty thirteen, his cover of Stevie wonders Don't You Worry About a Thing caught the eye of the Quincy Jones, who began mentoring him and helped launch his career. Over the past seven years, Jacob's released four albums in his Jesse series, ambitious, wide ranging projects featuring collaborations with artists ranging from Torre Amis to Coldplay. He's won multiple Grammy Awards and developed a following through his inventive live performances and his willingness to share his deep knowledge of music theory with fans online. Now, Jacob has made a dramatic shift with his new album, The Light for Days. Recorded in just four days using only a custom five string guitar, It's a stripped down, intimate collection that explores folk, classical and jazz influences with notable restraint. On today's episode, Bruce Headlam talks to Jacob Collier about why he decided to limit himself to a single instrument after years of layered, maximalist production. He discusses the custom five string guitar built for him by Taylor's master luthier Andy Powers, and how its unique tuning opened up new harmonic possibilities. He also talks about working with Johnny Mitchell, the influence of artists like John Martin and Brian Wilson, and how growing up singing Bach Carl's with his family shaped his approach to harmony. And he performed several songs from the new album live in the studio. This is Broken Record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's Bruce Headlam with Jacob Collier.

00:02:11
Speaker 3: Sounds that you do.

00:02:16
Speaker 4: Mm hm.

00:02:24
Speaker 1: H m hm hm cool.

00:02:58
Speaker 5: All right, you want to have a seat there and we'll chat.

00:03:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'll start here right.

00:03:01
Speaker 5: Yeah you can. You can go back and forth as you wish. So, Jacob, welcome back to Broken Record.

00:03:06
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.

00:03:07
Speaker 5: Well, thank you so much for coming in. And we are talking about your new album, The Light for Day. Yes, so tell me about making this this album.

00:03:16
Speaker 3: Yes, So, I've spent the majority of the last seven years making these four radically collaborative albums called Jesse. Jesse only won two, three, four, and these were very very broad creatively, very sort of extortionate, you could say, very very very very diverse, very multiple layered, sort of kaleidoscopic albums, and I knew that after finishing them, I want i'd want to try something different. I didn't have any firm ideas, but I knew in the back of my head, I had this thought that'd be fun to embrace the idea of making a record with just one instrument, to sort of limit the palette. And what I ended up with with this record was a four day window before my tour began in May. I was going to go to Asia to play some shows there, and I thought, what if I make the whole album in four days. So it was these two limitations. It was four day window and a five string guitar, and that's how this album came to be.

00:04:11
Speaker 5: And it is very sparse sounding for people who know your music, how many tracks would you use on a typical song on this album compared to some of the songs you did on Jesse, Well.

00:04:25
Speaker 3: Everything from two to fifty probably on this album. On Jesse, it's you know, there was easily in the hundreds for every song. You know, there'd be moments where I'd have you know, audience members from around the world involved, which is many, many hundreds of microphones on top of orchestras that I recorded, or choirs I recorded, and multiple instruments, multiple vocal parts. This album was It's just a different style of infinity. You know, I'm a firm believer that you can render infinity out of anything. You can render it out of infinity itself, but you can also render it out of much more finite terms. So yeah, with this album, I really I just I enjoyed both the limited scale of the palette but also the timeframe. I think it helped me make decisions because there's an unlimited amount of things possible at all times, something I've come to experience. So I think with this album it was fun to really enjoy kind of that tight window for making decisions. I also think it was fun to really kind of like extrapolate on all the tonalities possible with this five string guitar, because it's not just like a singing songwriter folk record. There's also voices and other laid guitars and sort of these colorful worlds, the colorful worlds, but I feel like there's something that this guitar gives as a spirit that just provides a sort of context for the storytelling in a way that was quite satisfying in the end.

00:05:52
Speaker 5: You've talked in the past about how you called the decoration the edge of songs, the multiple tracks, the vocal things you add, the the you know, altered chords. You think of those almost immediately when you're thinking of a so a song you're covering. In this case, you really restricted that in a way. A lot of these songs, and you do some beautiful covers Close your Eyes and and Beach Boys Song and Norwegian Wood. There's not that much re harmonization, which of course is one of your one of your signature moves. Did you go in thinking that way or did the guitar just lend itself to a maybe more straight ahead approach.

00:06:37
Speaker 3: I think I found myself wanting to just do justice to these songs in their own right. There are a couple of expensive moments, for sure, but I would say much fewer that I am used to. I think the thing with this record, more than anything harmonic that inspired me was it's like it's a world of a particular world of of that that the sound of the instrument, the way in which the guitar lends itself to I think it's just it's a different kind of decoration. Like one of the things with this album I really enjoyed to do was this this thing where you you know, you have essentially a live take of a song. So I stood and I performed like an entirety of a song, vocal and guitar texts. This is album. Normal people record albums. It's quite novel for me. I usually record all the elements separately and collide them later. But with that full take, I think there was an amount that that was the unification for the ideas and the decoration I think I had later was was sometimes it was sonically interesting, but I think it was less sort of like harmonically driven, and I think in a way that's always been in my work and always been in the music. But I think I've put more emphasis on some of the harmonic irresponsibilities you could say, of the past than I did on this particular album.

00:07:50
Speaker 5: You've talked a lot about the harmony and the sounds on this guitar. You should tell us about your guitar. Many people know you play a five string guitars, how it's tuned, how you see.

00:08:03
Speaker 3: It, So this is a fun story. I grew up playing a four string guitar when I was just a wee lad called a tenor guitar, and they're rife into the folk music, especially in England, and I never really got on too well with the six string guitar. Like as a kid, it wasn't something that appealed to me greatly. It wasn't something that threw itself into my imagination and provided things. I think one of the reasons was because you know, the foundations of the guitar are based in shapes that when you play them, they sound familiar, and I think as a child, I was always excited by things that sounded unfamiliar. And when I heard first of the ten of guitar, it felt both like something I knew, but it also felt new and strange and unfamiliar in a particular way. So that the ten of guitar, I can show you the ten of guitar as being a for scring guitar was tuned like this, which is the same as like a violin or I suppose it's a similar system to a cello, same as a mandolin, things like that. So fifth's fifth based tunings. What I tended to do as a child was to tune the top string down a tone to their So that was my that was that was the sound of the guitar for me for so many years.

00:09:12
Speaker 5: And I say, you've had a fifth to fifth, and then I had.

00:09:15
Speaker 3: A fifth, fifth, and a fourth and four and crucially I had this octave here. So I got used to that idea that you could you could find the sort of the parallative and use it. So it developed a bunch of shapes for this tuning, and the more I played it, the more I realized, oh, it'd be really cool to have a fifth string, because if I had a fifth string, it would actually make whole chain symmetrical because then you could have and at the very top, which means you have two oxytes. You have this one for the same note and then those are the same note. And the shapes that I'd figured out for the original four string would still work, you know, like the major shape and office of things, but you'd have the ability to access the shape from from one direction like that, and also from the bottom so every shape is is totally symmetrical. I don't know that makes sense, but you could really find yourself with with interesting kind of like that. There's an interesting openness to the to the to the fifths of the tuning. But the fourths of the tuning given now that it's two fifths.

00:10:18
Speaker 5: So just to be clear, it's now it's the strings are now the bass string is A, so.

00:10:25
Speaker 3: I not the tune down to D. So this is D A E A D. So it's like the e is like a mirror, a.

00:10:32
Speaker 5: Mirror, right, But the fourths on the top, the.

00:10:35
Speaker 3: Fourths are on the top, the fifth are on the bottom, so it's.

00:10:37
Speaker 5: On the bottoms. It's like a could be like a string bass yeah, yeah, for sure. And the fourth on the top mean you can still you can play Chuck Berry exactly absolutely and be are on bass player.

00:10:49
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, absolutely. So, so there are sort of two two main vocabularies, one being a fifth thing, so you know, mandolin players, violent players, these shapes are familiar and it's easy to navigate in that way. The fourth stuff is more like it's what comes more from the sort of like LO and R and B world of the guitar. And just having you know these closer shapes makes a lot of sense. I think as a piano player, when I sit down at the piano and play, because that's really where I foundationally lived as a child, Mostly in terms of an instrument, my left hand would often play wider intervals than my right hand because the piano just sounds better like that. You know, if you play really clustery sounds in the left hand, it gets muddy, but the right hand you can be kind of as expensive as you want. Right So, I think the way the voicings were positioned, in the way that the shapes I loved worked, were that you'd have wider intervals at the bottom and smaller intervals at the top. So I think that my access point to guitar, which is less of thinking of myself as a guitar player and more of thinking myself as just someone who loves music and knows the things that I know and loves the things that I love. I think I was naturally drawn to this sense that you'd have a slightly narrower space at the top of a chord than at the bottom. It's kind of mirroring the harmonic series because the overturned series of nature that the bigger intervals are lower down, and for whatever reason, it really tickled my brain. And you know, I don't really play the guitar like guitar players necessarily do. I have a sort of quite strange and fairly unconventional technique. But one of the things I like to do is I like to sort of play with my left hand, that that's entirely my left of it. If I play one note with my right hand, that all of that vocabula comes from one comes from one hand. And I think that to me feels like something that it feels piano piano adjacent in the sense, in the sense of playing a key on the piano rather than plucking with one hand and playing with with another. And so I don't necessarily think when we call pull off, pull off, hammer ons, all that vocal, all that vocabul that I love that. And I never really got into guitar through the lens of like being a being someone who's picking liked, and I think that suff's amazing. But for me, I love playing melodies kind of essentially with both hands like I would on a piano. So I'm I'm sort of approaching the guitar a bit like a piano player. And I'm super grateful to Andy Powers, who's the actually the master builder for Tailor guitars, who is also a good friend of mine. He's the first person who I mentioned the idea too, who said, Hey, I think I can build you this guitar that's in your weird brain. Because for many years I've been playing in my imagination alone, I'd figured out the shapes for a guitar that didn't yet exist, but I knew that they would work if only I could play the guitar. And then Adie said I could build it for you. And this is the exact one that he built.

00:13:33
Speaker 5: This is the first one you will And you didn't try on a six string like open tunings for example.

00:13:38
Speaker 3: Oh, I totally did that. So my first kind of my first access point to to kind of playing the guitar at all before this guitar was created, besides the tenny guitar, was literally to rip a string off my six string guitar, I would I would remove the top string and then I tuned the top two strings of those five to the same note, and it would be like a teen guitar. And that was interesting and strange, but I think that I loved the residence of the guitar so much. I love the sort of brit the forcavery so much, and then eventually I sort of manifested this beast here.

00:14:15
Speaker 5: One of the songs you cover on this album is very fairy tale Lollaby by John Martin. John Martin people might be familiar with may not be, but to me, a lot of this album reminds me of that era of British folk. John Martin, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, who's a huge favorite and he's been on the show. Were you conscious at all of those sounds when you were playing totally?

00:14:40
Speaker 3: I used to absolutely crush on that album London Conversation by John Martin, which is just him and the guitar and has a really interesting approach to it. He plays it, yeah, with a lot of these sort of hammerons and it's quite groovy and it's it's less kind of like strummy and more kind of a cult combination of fingerpicking and rhythm and time and little licks and things here and there. So that was that was a lot of my reference for the album, and Joni was not the huge inspiration for me, and just the way that she heard solutions through the open tuning systems and made it possible for all of us as musicians to hear the guitar in a sort of new light.

00:15:16
Speaker 5: But and then you played with her a year or two I did, I did.

00:15:19
Speaker 4: What was that like?

00:15:20
Speaker 3: To me? It was pretty extraordinary. You know, some people are such giants that you never even you almost don't consider that they're real people. And Jonie was someone who you know, I knew that she was having a hard time with her health a few years ago, and I sort of, I think, in my mind put her in this category of of just sort of like absolute Titanic legend who I will never even meet or encounter. And I was so overwhelmed to get to hang with her and play with her. She's she'd been hosting these joney jams is what she called them. People come around the house playing Jony tunes, other tunes and just just having fun. And so I became a part of that scene a few years ago back instead of twenty one twenty two. And then she invited me to accompany her at the Grammys I think it was last year, playing both sides now, which was a really a life highlight for me. And then I joined it at the Hollow Bowl for those two iconic nights there, which I think were the last two gigs that she played with her sort of all star band with Blake Mills and Robin Pecknold and and all sort of luminary people. Lucius were there, and god it was it was wonderful. So yeah, getting to absorb a bit of her attitude was really really interesting. And of course she's she's really punk, you know, and she's such a jazzer like she she she phrases like like like Wayne shorted us, you know, And it's it's no wonder that they were friends because the way that Wayne, she Wayne had had this sense of being so unlocked, you know, so totally anything is possible with the sort of inner logic of a child and a total connection between intuition and craft. And I think Jonie obviously came up in that in that same era. It's the same as you know, John Martin and the rest of them in the sort of late sixties as a as a folk sort of song stress. But I think her real calling was, I would say it was to be a jazz musician. And it was really really exciting to get to provoke her I would say musically and see her respond, you know, because every time she'd sing a song in rhearse flavor, it's come out totally different, which is very much like my wheelhouse. So it was fun to get to adapt my language around her creative decisions and watch her sparkle and yeah, just sort of get her to react in different ways through things I would say, and do you know it was it was a really really profound experience for me.

00:17:28
Speaker 2: We'll be back with more from Jacob Collier after the break.

00:17:35
Speaker 5: I heard a lot of Joni Mitchell early Joni Mitchell in I think a beautiful song on your album, I know a little oh, And I don't know if that was directly inspired or it just it has that flavor to me.

00:17:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, that's very kind of you to say. Unavoidably, I was inspired by Joni at every turn with this record. Yeah, that that's one of those songs that's very much built out of this figure. It's just a very simple figure that kind of goes round and round. And you've got card one and card four mostly. Can you imagine me Jacob Collier saying that I wrote a song with those two cools, But but Joni also had this way of writing songs with one or two chords. But then there'll be these these moments of color, these beautiful kind of explosions of sound. And in the bridge of that song, I throw a couple of other more chromatic moments in. And I think that I think Joining made that possible for all of us. I think she it was her kind of tenacity and taste that provided a sense that as a musician or as a songwriter, as a guitar player, you can you can totally go into that zone without losing the grounding of your song and without it becoming too cerebral.

00:18:37
Speaker 5: Can you show me the transition?

00:18:40
Speaker 3: Yes, I absolutely can, so if I tune so two tunings for this guitar, one being this, the other being this where you put a fifth at the top and stead of a fourth, which kind of puts you in this key, so that so this song goes at this.

00:19:10
Speaker 6: Mm hmm. I remember ber the field, I remember by the taste of you, A little shadows car of the sea. Suddenly I believe bela a little I rememberer the world, watching all of my walls, card a little more, leading it all for letting it gold all.

00:20:05
Speaker 3: I know, So that figure for the verse is really simple, right, and then took chord four and back to card one. So that's that's all one and good. And then this this kind of bridge moment.

00:20:28
Speaker 6: There's no just.

00:20:36
Speaker 3: A moment of color, moment of chromaticism, which just kind of takes you out of the reverie for a for a second, but in a sort of non disruptive way. So it just it just kind of wakes up your ear and and reminds you of the other possibilities that are close at hand around the key. But but I think that the the melody of the song. Another lesson I think I learn from jony and others is that the melody of the song grounds you in the key. That the melody doesn't doesn't doesn't kind of pander to the chromaticism. The melody just stays right where it is. It goes. So the melody is at home and there is no keep it. But the chords beneath are giving you that context that the spicyinist that sort of provides that stuff. So you know, I think of I think of jony and and all those moments where she would just throw something in that was just slightly odd or something unconventional and provide that sense of spark.

00:21:29
Speaker 5: You know. Now, one difference between you and Joni Mitchell is that she didn't often know what notes she was playing. She would devise these tunings and just play them. You, of course, are maybe the world's most famous music theory nerd. Maybe so when you are playing, do you know every note you're playing or so? Or do you ever have because so much of guitar playing. For example, you you you cover a James Taylor song. James Taylor has a couple of moves.

00:22:01
Speaker 6: You know.

00:22:01
Speaker 5: This is the suspended two up to the three. It's almost all. It's a song that almost comes out of physically playing the guitar.

00:22:09
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:22:09
Speaker 5: Yeah, you wouldn't even have to know the theory just to know that. Are you always conscious of the theory when you're playing? Or sometimes does your hand just go somewhere and then maybe you figure it out later?

00:22:19
Speaker 3: Oh totally. I think that those are some of the most interesting moments when your hand finds the solution. I would say, despite my kind of love of musical theory, musical the kind of science behind what makes it work, I never create in a theoretical way I'm never sitting there thinking right, well, seeing I'm in the GB flat, I think that the note G sharp would be appropriate because of the relationship. I'm never thinking like that. What I know, I think, maybe similar to other guitar players, is I know I know the shapes I like, but my shapes come from off and come from instruments that aren't the guitar. So I think that you know, a move like this is something I know about emotionally, like I understand the effect that chromaticism is going to have on the harmony, but I'm not thinking of it. I could if I wanted to define it as right, or that's a sharp five move going to the thing, or it's modulation to this, but it doesn't help me as a songwriter to do so. Most of the time, I think having the command over that language helps when you're communicating to other musicians what you want. So if I'm arranging for orchestra, for example, or I'm writing something for my band to play or a group of singers to sing, and I'm able to write out the notes that I'm hearing and kind of define to them why certain notes in certain chords kind of make you feel a particular thing that's helpful for me as a band leader and as a ranger and as a producer. But I think as a songwriter, I don't speak. I'm not speaking in my own mind using that language unless I need to for any particular reason, in the same way that when I'm speaking right now, I'm not thinking, Oh, there goes the verb, and oh that's the adjective, and let's make sure the noun is at the end of the you know. But I've absorbed these kind of rules from having spoken a lot as a child and be surrounded by masters of speech as a child, you know, like the same as you. So I think with music it's the same with me. I can put that hat on if I need to, But overarching, I mostly am moving just through kind of association and feeling and thinking, Oh, I do like that as a sense, And I spent a lot of my teenage yers trying to find chords that I had no idea what they were because they excited me so much. And but then once those cars become part of your repertoire, then then your kind of repertoire grows. But I would still call it a non theoretical songwriting experience.

00:24:31
Speaker 5: You throw in a couple of chords in the James Taylor piece, I mentioned there's a and I tried to pick it out and I got.

00:24:38
Speaker 3: A flat major. I think I know the moment that it is.

00:24:42
Speaker 5: It like, is it a I'm going to get this wrong. Was it a tritone at that point or it's.

00:24:46
Speaker 3: Well, it's half of a tritone, which is a minor third, but it has a similar sense about it. It's like a like one of my favorite things to do, besides tune my own guitar, it's to do what we what we call pivoting, and pivoting is not really a musical thing. It's like a it's it's a human thing. We understand the feeling of putting your your weight or your gravity a particular point and moving your weight from one place to another. So if I take if I'm standing in one place and I stand on one foot and I pivot from that foot to standing in another place, then I've kind of guided my body through that through that experience in a controlled way. So with with with James Taylor, h I mean, this song really is one of the greatest songs of all time. The sun is slowly see.

00:25:39
Speaker 7: So rising.

00:25:44
Speaker 6: From this all around and Nashti.

00:25:53
Speaker 3: And I think what I did was something like, so.

00:25:57
Speaker 4: Closer eyes, you can close your rights.

00:26:02
Speaker 6: It's all right.

00:26:06
Speaker 8: I don't know love song es. I can't sing the booze and I can sing this song.

00:26:20
Speaker 4: You can sing this song when I'm gone. That was the moment somewhere else.

00:26:28
Speaker 3: But that note works in discord, but it also works in this chord as well, right, So that's been my pivot.

00:26:38
Speaker 7: You can sing this song.

00:26:40
Speaker 3: I could go when and or I could go when I go and then I go back to but I can sing this. So it's just a little like a window of color opens. It's like, oh, I knew world just for a moment.

00:26:54
Speaker 5: It's such a nice moment because it follows what makes that song distinct in the harmony, which is when it goes to the flat seven.

00:27:04
Speaker 3: Yes, which is such a James Taylor move.

00:27:06
Speaker 5: Right, But it's so beautiful in that song. And then this just took it off, and I think you do it before the solo and it.

00:27:11
Speaker 3: Just absolutely right.

00:27:12
Speaker 5: It just takes it just goes into space.

00:27:14
Speaker 3: You're right on the thing I love about about James Taylor is he has this way of he'll often kind of reassert his position in a key using what we call as musicians a plaguel cadence. So it's like, that's what we'll do. It's like saying, Okay, I'm an F and then I'm going to go, which kind of means it's like B flat. Fan's like, I'm really home, I'm really home.

00:27:38
Speaker 6: I'm really home.

00:27:38
Speaker 3: And he does a thing called a plague on plaguel cadence where he'll go, he'll be, he'll be in one key and then he'll go into another key, and then he'll do a play.

00:27:49
Speaker 6: In that key.

00:27:50
Speaker 3: And it's a really comforting kind of harmonic instinct that he has and I really enjoy it. But what plagueal cadences do is they move you to into the darker side of a key. It moves it and moves you into into the flat side of a key, which you're kind of going into the yeah, into the into the dark side, onto the flat side as opposed to right. That will be like the brighter side. You can go bright forever in that direction around what we call the circle of fifths, or you.

00:28:18
Speaker 4: Can go.

00:28:20
Speaker 3: Darker and darker and it gets like into the deeper news of the key. So one of the reasons why you can say this where gone is surprising is because that is a really bright chord in comparison to F anyway, but especially given the context of all the plagual cadences, which is like dark thing darkening, it's like even more of a statement to say, oh, I'm going to go here, and suddenly it's we're in this other key. I think I'm playing this now in F on the album, I think it's an F sharp, but in this context it's a D D major, which is like full full of light, you know, in comparison to to the F. But then, but then some of these other James Taylory areas are much darker. And again I can describe these things in theoretical terms, but but foundationally these are just like sensations that are familiar to me. And I think probably too many of you too, who are listen and who love listening to music, is that you have you're affected by the harmonic relationships. My kind of fascination and job as a musician and an arranger and harmonist is to try and understand the impact that some of these things can have on my songs and my choices that I can control those moments of contrast or okay, a little bit of sunlight here, or let's make some fog, or let's let's make this feel heavy, or make this feel light or and I love playing with all those sensations.

00:29:34
Speaker 5: It's funny you describe it as going a little dark with the with the playable cadence, because when I hear it, even in James Taylor, to me, it sounds like that's a gospel move It is very much a gospelways going. You know, if you think of the beginning of Aretha Franklin's You Make Me Feel like a Natural woman, that's piano.

00:29:55
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:29:58
Speaker 5: And it's also I found and I'm not sure if this was deliberate or if this again comes out of playing and a guitar. A lot of drone sounds in this on this it's something you don't do as much on the piano.

00:30:10
Speaker 3: It's true. I think the guitar has that beautiful way of offering, like if you leave two strings going throughout your song, which I tend to do. I tend to play mostly on this guitar using the lower three strings, and these kind of just go these estate they're there so there's an automatic sense that there's a drone, which I've always loved drones so much. On the piano, it's it's harder to have these things ringing efforts. You'd have to play those notes again and again on a piano and orders to get that that same effect. But I think that the drone sense kind of grounds the sound of the guitar and being quite similar to an open tuning guitar anyway, and really being an open tuning guitar. Many people who play with open tunings, I think, also feel drones are of significance. I think Joni would be one. You know that just having having those certain notes that could keep going through the cars and other notes that change is a really beautiful way of making comonic contrast interesting.

00:31:07
Speaker 4: M hm.

00:31:07
Speaker 5: So we know a change your writing style. Did it change your singing?

00:31:13
Speaker 3: Yeah? I would say the thing that foundationally affected my style of singing with this album more than anything else besides just the fact that it was there was a guitar, was actually the the style of recording with these full takes, because I think that you know, if I if I record my voice as many of us do in isolation, you know, you go into the quote unquote vocal booth. Having recorded the basis of your song and you do a performance of the song, you're not necessarily at one with any of the elements in terms of of a of a performance aspect. You're you're reacting, and so you're attached in that way, but you're not you're there's there's not that sense of dualism. So so here if I if I sing and play the guitar at the same time, because I'm one person, my phrasing will move along with my instrument. My dynamics will be in line with my instrument. I will naturally kind of create a sense of conversation. You know, Son is saying, what happens is between my vocal phrases, the guitar will kind of rise up like a wave, and then it will rescind a little bit when I sing, and then it will fill in the gap. So that the dynamics I think of my singing were really inspired by and informed by the way I play the guitar, and vice versa. I think the guitar was inspired by the by the voice as well. I think in general, as a multi instrumentalist and enthusiastic of instruments in general. I think that instruments are at the best when they feel like voices in general. You know, it's no wonder that we we bend our strings, or we we we add vibrato on violins, or you know, across the gamut. That's there's the sense that instruments have a variety of ways of imitating the voice essentially. And yeah, I think as a guitar player, I can't try and play like I'm singing, even if I'm playing a chord. You can, you can kind of stroke a chord, or you can it's like you breathe, you know, it's like the way that the voice does. I think that the least interesting kind of guitar players, I know, play the guitar like it's like it's a guitar, if that makes sense.

00:33:20
Speaker 5: You're bringing up an interesting idea, which is modern recording now is you record everything separately, and even folk artists now I'm sure you do.

00:33:29
Speaker 3: A guitar is separately, yeah, isolation.

00:33:34
Speaker 5: But then you lose some of that interplay between the instruments.

00:33:39
Speaker 1: Now.

00:33:39
Speaker 5: The other thing that's happened to recording is everything is now on a grid. So when you're talking about the swells. You're also changing the tempo, which is something you don't hear a lot in modern music.

00:33:48
Speaker 3: It's true, you know, it's such a good point you make. I take for granted that I don't play in time a lot of the time, but I think, you know, oftentimes the way our psychologies are are kind of illustrated now in terms of like a canvas or a workflow is if you look at a computer and you're running a daw audio software, you see grits constantly. There were think only two songs out of the eleven on this album that I recorded to a grid. Everything else is totally whimsical in terms of time, which I really enjoy. It's funny. I've always kind of felt comfortable going off the grid, especially with recording, and the thing that really taught me how to do it well was back in twenty sixteen when I released my debut album in My Room with the way that I funded that album and I built the campaign was through a service called Patreon. It's like one of the craphnic websites that I'm sure you know. And I decided to launch a campaign where I would harmonize my fans, harmonize my Oudence member. So I asked people to send me fifteen second snippets of any melody in any language of their choosing. Some some of them wrote new melodies, some of them sang songs I knew, and I would kind of send it back to them harmonized, and I would film myself singing the parts and I would upload them as videos, and I did about one hundred in the end, and it really it was a really fun way of building an audience online in those early days. And to me, it was like I had to get really good at harmonizing quickly because I'd received so many different submissions, and that process it was like solving Sudoku's you know. It's like someone would send melody that goes, you know, whatever the melody was, and I would I would find a solution for it harmonically that felt just like ticklish and fun and made the person sound really good. But no one was seeing young Grid, so I had to create ways of making somebody's time make sense without imposing anything on them. You know, I had melodies from like two year old kids, you know, super microtonal as I'm sure was not their intention, But there's this one girl, so she's saying, like.

00:35:45
Speaker 6: Tweet good, tweet, golys, you.

00:35:49
Speaker 3: Know, and my job is not to change anything about the melody all the time. But so I modulated around her using all these microtonal chords to make her sound incredible, you know. And it was a really fun, like philosophical musical excise for me. But I think that one of the biggest things it taught me, especially with you know, accompanying musicians would play things in time, was how you can make you can kind of make someone sound good by following their time rather than imposing any kind of grid. It wouldn't have worked if I tried to impose a grid. So weirdly, I learned a lot of lessons from that process that I applied to this album, because I think with this album, I was kind of harmonizing myself in the sense that I'd record a full length take a recording, and then I would begin the process of in so much as it was necessary, adding that context or decoration or you know, just sort of like a yeah, elements to make that performance shine. And for certain songs, like there's one song called called Icarus, which is by a group called The Stage, which I just love so much. The song that is primarily just completely me doing it live. Same with a song called Norwegian Would, which I recorded. It's fundamentally just that live performance of me playing the song. And then other songs like the Beach Boys, Keeping on Summer, some of my own songs like Heaven Butterflies, and I know a little some of these things have a little bit more of that layering effect. But I love the challenge of following something that feels natural and organic and alive without trying to. In music, we say the world quantize it, you know, so of lock it to a grid, make it rigid in terms of rhythm, but all some terms of tuning. In terms of sound, I love all that sqriggly imperfection.

00:37:27
Speaker 5: Norwegian wood is interesting because because there's always a debate about whether Norwegian woods in three four times or six eight?

00:37:35
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:37:35
Speaker 5: Yeah, And you do something. First of all, you're making a sound that sounds like you're you're striking above the net.

00:37:43
Speaker 3: Is that true?

00:37:44
Speaker 4: Yeah?

00:37:44
Speaker 3: This thing I did do that. Okay, So I a little fire, that's one thing. But that rhythm rhythm for that, yeah, again, it's that drone thing. And I love I love the palmuting sound in general, but what you're hearing a lot is me hammering on with my left hand and these little baby kind of like strings. And I love it because it feels, again, it doesn't feel like a guitar. It doesn't feel like I'm hey, you know, I'm not.

00:38:21
Speaker 4: It's like.

00:38:24
Speaker 3: It's like partly percussion, partly partly drum, partly kind of drone, and it's there's something almost like like a climber about it, like some piano about it's really kind of groovy.

00:38:35
Speaker 5: It sounds a little and I know it's not. It sounds a little busting over almost.

00:38:39
Speaker 3: Yes, the first part somewhat yeah, somewhat yeah.

00:38:42
Speaker 5: But then the chorus you're just playing, yeah.

00:38:46
Speaker 3: That's more.

00:38:47
Speaker 6: Yeah.

00:38:50
Speaker 3: But I love how I mean. One of the things about this guitar I love is that it has a six string neck but only five strings, so there's much more space between the strings to just kind of find these sounds. And somehow it's it's it's it's like an an appealing system for me to to find these these kind of ticklish, little little pockets. In this song. I also bend do a lot of string bending, which again is possible because of the space between the strings, but you know. Yeah, for this particular song, the time is constantly shifting slightly because it's all live. But I focused on the fact that this was just me doing a take and singing the song, and only the very last minute that I had a couple of little moments of decoration here and there.

00:39:31
Speaker 2: Well, LA's break and we'll be back with Jacob Collier.

00:39:39
Speaker 1: Now.

00:39:39
Speaker 5: Probably the most produced song is your Beach Boy cover of keep an Eye in Summer. Yeah, not their best known song, No tremendous song.

00:39:46
Speaker 3: I love that song.

00:39:47
Speaker 5: What inspired you to do that song?

00:39:49
Speaker 3: You know? This was one of the things that I had before the four day window began. I'd recorded a rendition of this song summer of twenty twenty four. She was on Midsummer's Day and it was one of those rare days that I'm sure many of you will know, where you you know, your life's been full, and you've been busy and things have been going on, but you just find yourself at the weekend home, you got half the noon ahead of it. You think, oh, what should I do? I've just I found myself, you know, a Lauren to myself, and so I thought, well, maybe I should just record keep an arm Summer because it was a song I've been sort of jamming on for a bit and playing, and I just got my my ten string guitar, which was a brand new kind of angle on the fire string. It's just the twelve string equivalent of the fire string. And so I sat down and I took me about three four hours and I recorded this quite scrappy arrangement of it with all these different layers and things, and that that arrangement of the song existing actually was quite a big part of the inspirations to make this album at all, because I when I sat down in May to do this record, I thought, well, what do I have that I could work with it? It's like, well, I have that arrangement of keeping on Summer, maybe I could build a whole record around that world, because it it's a musical world I really love, and a sort of sonority of a particular area of my taste that I've really wanted to explore and go deep intofferent ages and sorry, what is that?

00:41:08
Speaker 1: What is that a that you liked?

00:41:10
Speaker 3: I think it's a combination of the sound of the guitar mixed with a sort of stripped back approach. There's also with Keeping On Summer. A microphone that I use called an R a T eight ribbon mic which has that really nice hiss like to everything, so when you record something on it, it feels really kind of feels analog, feels a life, feels like warm and rich. So there's something about that, the word that which is part a big part of this world, which for me made a big impact, and I used it on Keeping on Summer. It's one of the first times I'd ever recorded using it, and so I got really excited by this hissy warm world. I'd explored it a little bit with Jesse Volume two back in the day, but yeah, there's there's something about the the acoustic guitar meets vocal harmony world that inspired me. And obviously the king of vocal harmony and songwriting to me is Brian has always been Brian. So to cover that song Keeping On Summer felt like a really nice sort of homage to the great man. And we obviously lost Brian this year, so it just like I renae to share that arrangement with the world as just a sort of really warm, sunlit, gladeful afternoon in England, thinking oh, maybe I can do a rendition of the song that I really love and yes, not not one of his big hits, but a beautiful modulation in that in that bridge there.

00:42:23
Speaker 5: M h, absolutely it goes up. I can't remember the chords.

00:42:27
Speaker 3: Exactly, major third or something on my third.

00:42:30
Speaker 5: Did you get a chance to meet him?

00:42:33
Speaker 3: Sorry, I never did get a chance to me, Brian, and he, like Joni, was one of these people who sits in a total on a throne in my head, someone who like I never felt the need to to meet him for any I have enough of a feast of inspiration just from his work. But I did see him play once and it was it was unbelievable funny.

00:42:56
Speaker 5: When you talk about this album, it was about restricting choices, or at least putting some of your palette away, which is you know, famously, he's the guy that was almost driven crazy by the number of choices he could make it.

00:43:09
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. I mean, here's a guy who embraced the fireman's bells and the timpany and the swanny whistle and the and the there men, of course, and it's it's to me. It gave me so much permission as a kid to play and to explore these big words, but I also love that. I think it's a bootleg album that Brian put out or was put out of just Brian playing songs on the piano. It might be called like Brian at the Piano or something like that, and he just plays these songs at the piano, and you recognize with Brian how strong the songs are, because when you take away all the swanny whistles and the craziness of the sandwich I love so much, you're left with a really beautiful song. And so yeah, for me, that was so inspiring and still so inspiring to me as a as a Songwriter's like, how can you make something that both works in a totally acoustic strip back scenario and also works when you scale all those layers on top of other layers, and you know, you have a song like good Vibrations, which I think I look back at that at the first time I heard that song and it was just like the whole, this whole new faction of creativity became available to me. It's like I didn't I just didn't know you could do that. But when Brian saits to the piano plays the song, it sounds great too, you know, and That's why I love about Brian and love about those songs.

00:44:21
Speaker 5: I want to talk about a couple more of your influences, how they may or may not have found their way into this album.

00:44:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, you grew up in a musical.

00:44:28
Speaker 5: Family, and you said you sang bar corrals.

00:44:31
Speaker 3: I did what we did. Did you sing by the way, Well, I was the bass, so I would and i'd often I'd often add notes in or imparize things around those, around those those things. I always have to have a pencil handy and would be, you know, jotting notes in and things, just like learning what I liked and what I and what I responded to. But yeah, so I was brought up by a single mom. I'm the eldest of three kids. So we were s a TV, you know, and my mum sings ten that kind of Shekina goes ah and he kind of comes out with these tenor lines. But I really loved I love that feeling. I still love that feeling now of sitting with those those lovely people and just singing together. And actually is what Brian used to do too, used to sing with his brothers. He used to transcribe four Freshman arrangements and they'd sing it all together as a group. And I think he did a lot of his process of studying and expanding his kind of harmonic palette through learning these arrangements and teaching these parts to his brothers. And I love the thought that, yeah, he did that and then went on to write songs like you know, Surfer Girl or whatever, and outcome all these four freshman voice things. But in the context of a surf rock song, it's amazing.

00:45:35
Speaker 5: Now are there points where we're hearing a little Bak in any of the songs on this album?

00:45:40
Speaker 3: It's a good question. I find him unavoidably inspiring, and he shows up in all sorts of places. I think there are certain moments. There's a song called Where Did My Apple Fall on the album, which is really it's quite an austere to. It's quite a strange song. I really love it a lot. One of the songs one of those song seeds that I had that I didn't know what to do with that because it didn't feel like it fit on any of the Jesse albums, and it didn't really have it a world that where it belonged, and I was so excited to get to release it, but it's quite it's amos quite classic in terms of the harmony, this three part harmony that that moves I think in a way that hopefully Bark may may approve of. There's another song on the album called tom Thumb, which is which is a similar thing, and so it goes Tom Thumb.

00:46:24
Speaker 4: Goes, light up the stove of your countenance. You're all that matters to me.

00:46:44
Speaker 6: I am a lake or a stone or an hour glass. I am a joke that is wasted on.

00:46:54
Speaker 7: Grab me and stoves of your confidence.

00:47:00
Speaker 3: Render me to tatters.

00:47:01
Speaker 6: I'm free.

00:47:04
Speaker 4: I'll be a.

00:47:04
Speaker 6: Steak or a bone or an oven glove. I'll be the island the drowns in the sea talm thong, Where did you come from?

00:47:20
Speaker 4: The last soft drown and everything tall thought you were gone?

00:47:32
Speaker 6: The found inside everything.

00:47:45
Speaker 3: Oh that's the whole song. Miss that's very short for this.

00:48:05
Speaker 1: What is it?

00:48:11
Speaker 3: It's very classical and I love I love that influence showing up in songs. You can't plan what inspires you, and when you sit down to write a song, you just your job is to make space for whatever wants to sort of come through. But I think having loved that music for so long, as a kid. It's it's always a surprise and delight but also unsurprising to me to see certain sort of tragic things make their way into songs, And I think, yeah, a progression like that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for that that that influence. So I definitely didn't learn the bulk of my my harmonic understanding or my songwriter style through any kind of jazz harmony. I think I was most inspired and informed by some of the more expensive classical harmony that I loved as as a child, and hearing that find its way into into songs to me that that's that's always a sign that I'm tapped into something real.

00:49:07
Speaker 5: Here's a trickier one. Benjamin brittin You Love.

00:49:10
Speaker 3: I adore.

00:49:13
Speaker 5: Any little any little bits of Benjamin Britain in here, I.

00:49:17
Speaker 3: Would definitely say so. I think those two songs feel again feel britain Esque in to to the to the point that they are austere. I think of Britain as the master of the austere harmonically, like he he kind of plays what's not the chord rather than just what is the chord. He will leave out a really important note in a chord and make you feel like you're like you have to imagine the note instead, you know.

00:49:44
Speaker 5: Well, he often inverted chords in the in the base, you'd have a fifth, you'd have.

00:49:49
Speaker 3: A fifth, or a third, or even a seventh or sixth. That it really had a had a very bold imagination for kind of leaving space in chords and leaving austerity within chords. I think Britain to me, it's hard to point to a particular moment where it's like, oh, there's there's Britain. But I think that the attitude of of a harmonic language that can be yeah, both very warm and reassuring and also austere and rather unpredictable. I think that there's an essence of that which he he was like one of the funding fathers for me as a child, of being harmonically unpredictable in ways that are just disarming, like not just fully fledged and radically dense, but just surprising in these gaunt ways.

00:50:30
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was watching a video you made. I'm not sure how many years ago you were on Lodger, just showing people how you create vocal effects over I think he used maybe Hay Jude. I can't I can't remember his Hay Jude or sure or something like that. And you were just showing people and you were you were talking about doing this, and this is how you created I think this is where I got your description of decoration over top of the melody, and how impatient you are to get yes yes to that part. I'm glad you've learned patience. But you said something that really struck me. You said, and you were speaking very fast, and you said, you know, this takes a lot of practice, and then you pause and you said and it takes a lot of courage and trust. And those two last words really interested me because not only I mean, I've dealt with writers my whole life. I'm an editor. That's something so many people lack courage and trust. And even musicians we have in here sometimes who've have great accomplishments and are sitting here at some point in their career, don't have that faith in their own work at that moment. I'm interested where you get that.

00:51:47
Speaker 3: Oh, it's a beautiful question. I think of all the most important things in music, I don't think there musical things. I think that human things. I think courage and trust are too to the central pillars that are somewhat necessary to make a thing a tool. It makes something interesting to me. It's hard to say where where these things come from. I think everyone needs a champion in different ways, in different parts of their journey. Everyone needs a person to reflect them back at themselves in a certain way, in some form and say, hey, this thing that you are doing is interesting to me. I can think of people along my journey, whether it's my mother, whether it's Quincy Jones or Herbie Hancock, or just peers of mine, friends of mine who notice something about what I'm doing in a moment where I don't have that trust and belief and say you Ruin as this is special, you should keep doing that. And I say, oh, really, are you sure? And they say yeah, And there's something about that exchanged that reflection, which I think it really helped me out along my way. I don't know where my audacity comes from quite It probably comes partly from from my mom, it comes partly from my heroes, people I've loved over the years. I think I've always possessed a sort of dogged belief that something is possible, even if it's totally not possible, you know, for example, going to a key that doesn't exist. You know, these kinds of things that I've done in the past. You know, the piano is limited to twelve notes. I've written songs and keys that are beyond those twelve notes. And the only real reason I've done it is because I'm just too interested not to give it a try. I think that every time you take a risk and something interesting happens, you get a little bit of confidence out of that. I think about being on stage over the years, and you know, when I first stepped onto a stage, I you know, I was it was really it's really scary thing to do. You know, you stand in front of a thousand people, or five thousand people, or a hundred people, wherever it is, and you tell your story and everyone's watching, and if you're not used to that as a format, it's it's a really strange thing to do. It's a strange thing to subject yourself to. But what I found is every time I'd take a risk and I'd get a little bit of that reward back, I would I'd gain a little bit more courage for next time. And I think that as one thing went to another, both in the studio and out of the studio I really enjoyed. Just you just have to try stuff out. And you know, the worst thing that can happen in music is that you do something that's just not great. And we've all we've all made things that aren't great, you know. And I think, I think when I'm at my best, when I'm at my most open and free flowing, I'm I'm totally willing to to just let go and see what comes out. And I also know the feeling of of I think, is it all artis who have really doubting, of really doubting the thing I'm making? You know, basically every single thing I make, At a certain point, I'll be like, oh, I don't know about this. I don't know, is this really worth completing? It doesn't feel like it tells the whole story, or it feels like it tells too much of the story, or you know, is this interesting enough? I think it is something I've often come up against myself, or or is this is this too much? You know? Have I have I gone too far? There aren't really any guidelines around this stuff, Like, there are people whose taste we can align with, but but ultimately, as an artist, you have to find those lines for yourself. I think I've I have deliberately put myself in situations creatively where I out well be uncomfortable and I won't know what's going to happen next, and I have to find a solution. I think about collaborations like that too. I've I've been in the room with musicians who I respect greatly and who I've been trying to build some kind of musical bridge with, and you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but there's always an interesting lesson to learn. I think that I think that trust comes from not being afraid to make a mistake. I think that there's nothing that prevents creativity more effectively than the fear of making a mistake. That's that's the ultimate death nail for you being opened and you being you know, And I experienced this all the time, and I think my job as an artist is to keep on maintaining those strategies that flip you out of those kind of fear directions and think, well, you know, I can take confidence in my in my risk going through this challenge. And at this point I've done so many kind of unruly things musically that I do have a sense of faith in myself.

00:55:55
Speaker 5: People don't talk a lot about your lyrics, mainly because I think you're known so much for your incredible music vocabulary. Has your lyric writing.

00:56:05
Speaker 3: Changed, Yes, it has, I think in a sense, I still feel like I'm learning the ropes. I'm someone who loves words and description and language equally as much as I love music. I could happily talk about my experience of the world in as much length as I play about my experience of the world. The two worlds have existed somewhat separately for me for a lot of my life, Like I because the music that I've created in the past contains so much kind of depth and contour and color. My sense over the years has often been to not try to make the lyrics too too much either, because otherwise it's just too much information. So sometimes my lyrics have been relatively simple in comparison to the music. But as someone who just loves the whole spirit of language within poetry and words and resonance and the mind that it's something that I think I'm with this album. I think there's a particular element of that being explored. I knew, but I'm always curious how those two worlds can converge, and I've always blown away when a songwriter can do both things really well. Well.

00:57:14
Speaker 5: Let me give you an example, and it's the last song on your album, which is very different, and after a beautiful album, it comes as such a surprise. The lyrics are quite different, the piano treatment is quite simple, and you use your voice in a way that I had never really heard before. Can you tell me a bit about that song?

00:57:36
Speaker 7: I can.

00:57:36
Speaker 9: So.

00:57:36
Speaker 3: The song's called something Heavy, and it's another one of these songs that I had before the album. I didn't know what to do with that song. It felt like it came from a totally different place from other songs. But I love that figure. I can play film the piano right now. It's just something I found myself one day really.

00:57:56
Speaker 7: Enjoying.

00:58:08
Speaker 3: As I suppose, Okay, there's a song that needs to be written here in some way, you know, And so I I started to sing a melody, and as I went, some things came out. So I was saying, I've been holding something, something kind of heavy.

00:58:35
Speaker 6: And then I had this gong.

00:58:43
Speaker 4: Doorded it on on.

00:58:45
Speaker 3: I really like that melody, and so I worked it through and I figured that it might be fun to say.

00:58:51
Speaker 6: So let go.

00:58:54
Speaker 3: Now, let it go now, and the end of holding something heavy, so so so let it go now. It's like a song from from an ancestor or something, and we all know the feeling of holding something for a really really long time and finally realizing I gotta I gotta put this down, I gotta let this go. This isn't serving me anymore, this is this is something big, and I don't need it. And there's there's a sense of relief about that exchange, that handoff, and there's a sense of grief about that handoff as well. I think that, you know, it's one of those songs that just kind of came it wrote itself a little bit. You know. It's like the figure was there and I became kind of really attached to it, and that the melody was clear, the chorus, I know.

01:00:06
Speaker 7: It's time to let it go.

01:00:08
Speaker 3: I knew that's how we should and so I just, you know, I sang it until the lyrics came through.

01:00:14
Speaker 9: And every time I feel a weird upon me, you hold a line to keep it onside normal life.

01:00:29
Speaker 7: You've been holding on beside me, and it's down to let it go.

01:00:47
Speaker 6: Let it go.

01:00:53
Speaker 3: So the song kind of came from from there. One thing I found on tour that I really love to do is belt, like use my chest voice and belt really loud. And I this album is such a softly spoken album, and I enjoyed the idea that at the very last minute I would really sing out. And so the second chorus, the second chorus of the song goes, and every time I build a wall around me, but I belt it loud.

01:01:22
Speaker 6: I'm like, every time.

01:01:26
Speaker 4: I bid walll around me, you hor alte to pull me back love.

01:01:36
Speaker 6: In all this time, you never start thinking of me, but it turns letting now.

01:01:52
Speaker 3: And that kind of catharsis was something I think the album needed. It's it's funny, it's all this all this kind of softness and consideration and warmth, and and it needed a burst, It needed a burst open. But I didn't write this song for this album. I wrote the song on its own right and realized, oh, actually this could totally work for this, for this record. And yeah, the style of songwriting and the start of note writing came from a kind of a different place, but it was a refreshing challenge to write from that perspective. Is right from a figure or an instrument. I think the way it was related to the rest of the album is that it came from my relationship with one figure on one instrument, and that kind of solo instrument approach was different from other songs I've written that begin as kind of sonic world, sonic environments or moods, and then that is what birthed the lyrics. But yeah, this just felt like a good old fashioned song.

01:02:44
Speaker 5: You know, thank you so much for coming in, yes, and just wonderful.

01:02:47
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me all right, it was great.

01:02:52
Speaker 2: In the episode description, you'll find a linked to Jacob car Year's latest album, The Light for Days, as well as a collection of his past releases. Be sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record pot. You can follow on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Holliday. Broken Record is production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats.

01:03:39
Speaker 6: I'm justin Richmond.