Quotes from Jacob Collier

In my experience, my music has drawn people of all ages, which is a real wonderful thing. And at my gigs you get everyone from six year olds to 90 year olds. And I find that really quite moving, actually.

There's one song that I recorded called 'Saviour' and every single sound from that song was actually recorded in a shipyard on my iPhone.

I'm a huge fan of voice memos. I put down many ideas there and sometimes I even use some of those audio files in my actual recordings. You get this really raw energy from voice memos that you can't get when you sit down in a studio with a microphone. There's this sense of immediacy, which I'm really drawn to.

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.

The Proms are everything life is all about: people coming together, and joy and music and celebration and togetherness.

I'm one of those people that's listened to so much music, I feel like I've soaked it all and not rejected anything, so it's all present there when I'm in my inventing room.

AI as a tool in music-making is fine, but it's always going to be the humanity in music that makes people want to listen to it.

Djesse,' essentially, is this spirit. It's this sort of character, very much with some childlike energy, which permeates all of this music... The first album represents kind of pre-dawn, to that moment at the end of the morning when everything's very much alive.

With the Internet you can research anything.

I suppose for me, with 'Djesse,' I realized fairly early in the process that I also needed a character to walk this path, which in some ways is me, and in some ways is not me. I think of Djesse a bit like the infinite child who can see everything and walk into everything as light as a feather and just alchemize.

There are a whole bunch of instruments I'd like to build.

I love the interaction with people online, I love engaging with the fans.

It's a really interesting situation, because when you make music at home all the energy goes into the process, and touring's all about the energy going outward. I had to learn how to do that transition, but once I figured that out it's so much fun.

I was sort of brought up to sing from the age of two or three I was definitely giving it a go.

It's funny, I guess when I was growing up, I didn't really think about being an instrumentalist, per se. I didn't think, well, I want to be a piano player, or, I want to be a guitar player, or even, I want to be a singer. I just wanted to be a musician.

I always created things, layered things on top of each other. That hasn't changed at all. With this first album, it was basically a celebration of that process of inventing and building sounds.

I grew up in this room filled with musical instruments, but most importantly, I had a family who encouraged me to invest in my own imagination, and so things I created, things I built were good things to be building just because I was making them, and I think that's such an important idea.

I think of what I do for work as playing/jamming. Music for me is so much fun so I don't take my work very seriously in terms of not being humorous, but I take it absolutely seriously in terms of taking the time to make it as rich and glorious as possible.

It just so happened that I had this place called YouTube where everybody in the world could do exactly what they wanted to do and it's potentially one of the most exciting times I've discovered in the history of anything ever.

I think that the journey of self to truth is always kind of a gnarly one.

I find it difficult to stand up for what you are and what your essence is, and seeing that clearly can be an unbelievably hard thing to do.

Music is just another language, but it's very special because it crosses everyone's borders.

I'm a firm believer that embracing the imperfections of making music is so much of what makes something groove. Getting rid of these imperfections runs the risk of removing a lot of the magic that makes this music really special, and diminishes music's ability to connect with us as human beings. We are all imperfect, after all.

I've spent so much of my life examining the smallest details. In some ways, it's where I feel most at home. For me, it's super-important to understand all of the different nuances of light and shade. But if you can't paint in primary colours, no one's going to listen to your songs, because they need to feel like something.