Quotes from Jacob Collier

The whole 'Djesse' project is, like, the paramount example of something that has evolved alongside me creating it. It started as one album, and then I realized that I had too many ideas for just one album.

The bottom line is you need to be authentic, you have to be really honest to yourself.

As a member of a generation who have been subjected to much over-stimulation, it's hard to say I fit into any one category.

It was what I did after school. I'd learn a song in choir that day and I'd sing it, all the parts.

I suppose my job is to describe spaces that are honest to me. And the goal, I suppose, is that the listener can hear themselves in some way in that song and also, in some way, hear me. And so if the listener is able to identify with my honesty then I'm being the most helpful I can possibly be.

I'm a firm believer in the saying that goes, 'If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans,' kind of approach.

I always wanted to, at some point, sit down and consider how to plot out one piece of work, one album, from start to finish.

Having an idea is easy, courting one can be difficult.

Really, I was brought up with music as a second language. My mother was extremely encouraging of the sensitivities of my brain. It was this sense of curiosity but never pressure.

Parents write to me, or come up to me after shows and ask me 'How can we get our children to be as excited as you obviously were as a child?' It's not necessarily what they want to hear when I say, 'Don't make them practise!'

I love songs with, like, six or seven or eight different things going on at once, and that's just me.

It's not like I wake up and think, 'Now I'm going to go to work.' It just feels like a continuing exploration.

I enjoy exploring music so much.

There's an amazing power that music has, and it definitely had its power over me as a boy. I just saw fit to keep exploring it.

I was given this music programme called Cubase, one of the first multi-layering programmes, when I was seven, and I graduated to Logica at 11, and that became my primary instrument.

I love to zoom in and study why a chord is making me feel a certain way, but then I've learnt to zoom out again. Because if I'm not actually feeling it, there's not much point making it in the first place.

D is a wholesome key. It's not bland, like C. It's not neutral. It's probably on the bright side.

The only reason I create something is because I'm chasing a feeling. You can use a bunch of musical or psychological operations to achieve that result.

My mother was this force of nature when it came to both communication with people and the whole of learning music. She's a champion.

I want to write orchestral music. I want to get a group of singers together and sing William Byrd songs.

The thing with music education is that it is good at teaching technique, but not texture. You only learn about that from listening to music and experimenting on your own.

Woke Up Today' is a number of different sections compounded together. There's the melodica solo section which is three divisions; there's the really funky thing in eleven before that, there's the chorus and verse and there's the ending which slows down and speeds up.

The way my brain works, it created me thirsty. From the off, I was a sponge for information that had emotional connotations, I think that was it. I was brought up to see the world as emotional, and anything that I could get my hands on that helped me explore that emotional stuff, I was fascinated by.

You always have those moments of standing outside your own life and thinking, 'This is kind of bizarre and quite wonderful.' And I think those moments always catch you off guard.