Jacob Collier is absolutely here for artificial intelligence. “I love that stuff!” says the multi-Grammy winning musician. “I’m a fiend for it.”
The north Londoner, 30, once dubbed the ‘Mozart of Gen Z’ by the New York Times, is sitting in a central London café in a rainbow cardigan doing something he often does, which is to get a little carried away.
He’s telling me about when he first got his hands on Dall-E, the OpenAI image generator. He played with it for hours, creating tiny glass-blown universes and organ pipe trees until he fell asleep and began to dream of tiny glass-blown universes and organ pipe trees. “It’s like saying to someone: ‘If you could see anything, what would you want to see?’ That’s such a good question!”
He doesn’t find any of this threatening as an artist. “AI doesn’t have a point of view. People want to learn how other people view the world even more than we want to be entertained.” In fact, he’s excited about it because he believes this technology will allow artists, writers, musicians to move beyond mere technical limits and get to the heart of the matter.
“What happens when the spectacular becomes ordinary? When everyone can do it? When that’s boring, then we need to go deeper as artists,” he draws breath. “That’s where I want to go anyway.”
Jacob Collier is, it’s fair to say, a lot. A more-is-more maximalist, he sometimes seems to be receiving and transmitting all of the world’s musical information all at once. It was in 2013 that his peculiar, largely self-honed gifts announced themselves to the world in the form of a viral YouTube video, recorded in the music room of his bohemian family home in north London.
He played every single instrument and sang six-part harmony on a reimagining of Stevie Wonder’s Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing that caught the ear of Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock who invited him to Los Angeles and informed him he had discovered a new key.
Since then, Collier has recorded five albums, won six Grammys and worked with figures as varied as the grime star Stormzy, the Malian singer Oumou Sangaré and the Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices choir. He has 2.8 million followers on Instagram where the mind blown emoji features heavily in the comments.
And yet in the basic pop currency of a hit song? Well he’s no Charli XCX, put it that way. "Strangely mundane" was one critic's verdict on his actual songwriting. All of which makes him hard to classify.
I have musician friends who insist that he is a once-in-a-generation genius. And others who find his enthusiasm grating and his own compositions borderline unlistenable – the musical equivalent of those TikTok stars who are amazing at kick-ups but not much good at the actual game of football.
I’m not entirely sure what I think. But then again, it seems, neither is Collier himself. “Quincy Jones always says you can never be more or less as a musician than you are as a human being,” he says. “Everything you value and care for, it all finds its way into the choices you make. My best work – the parts where I feel the most alive are where I’m right on that nerve. I don’t even know if I like it. But I am getting to know myself better.”
And what can’t be denied is that Collier is a wonderful educator. Someone should really commission him to make a lavish TV series about how music works. He’s spent much of the last decade collaborating with musicians across the world and is full of surprising connections. At one point, he starts tapping out an irregular samba rhythm – “it’s like an egg rolling down a hill!” – and compares it to the hip-hop producer J Dilla.
At another, he’s comparing Coldplay’s Chris Martin and the Moroccan guembri virtuoso Hamid El Kasri. “I think, surely it’s possible to build a bridge from one world to another, where all these elements can speak to each other,” he says.
But now Collier’s odyssey is nearing home. He has just released the Deluxe edition of Djesse 4, which brings to a close the quadrilogy of albums he began in 2018. And this December, he will conclude his grand tour in front of 20,000 or so Londoners at the O2 Arena, which he finds “ridiculously exciting.”
The Djesse project began as a reaction to his first album, In My Room, which he recorded entirely by himself in the family home he shares with his mother Suzie (herself a musician) and his two sisters.
After all that time working by himself, he wanted to “collide with other people” and so he planned out four albums of collaborations, each in a different “sonic pocket”. Djesse 1 would be the big orchestral album; Djesse 2 the smaller, folkier, acoustic album; Djesse 3 the electronic album. But Djesse 4 he left deliberately open, hoping that the answer would come to him – as indeed it did, when he embarked on his world tour in 2022, just as his audience was emerging from their own rooms after lockdown.
While on stage, he hit upon the idea of turning his audiences into a choir, dividing them into sections, and conducting them like a sort of psychedelic Gareth Malone. “The sound of this and the feel of this utterly recalibrated my life,” he says.
“And what excited me was that this was not so much a discovery as a return. Through all of these collaborations I’ve worked on, through all these continents I’ve travelled through, my north star is the human voice.” You can hear the results of this on the first song on Djesse 4, which is called 100,000 Voices because that’s roughly how many individual human voices appear on it.
I know what you’re thinking. This kid must have a heck of a hard drive. “Yup,” he says. “I’ve got a 50 terabyte server at home with something like 387 gigabytes of RAM.” In fact, there was a point a few years ago when he reached the 256-track limit of the music software, Logic. The manufacturers duly upped the limit to 1,000 tracks. He recently maxed it out again.
But he insists he is not making things complicated for the sake of it. “I think if I set out to do it for that reason, it would all be a bit grim,” he says. “But I do notice myself heading for the edge of what I understand. That’s where it feels natural to live for me.”
Indeed, this is what is so interesting about Collier’s particular vision. Artists will often say that it’s limits – of form, of technique, of equipment, of knowledge – that spark their creativity. Collier says he is more interested in the challenges of limitlessness. “Where there is infinity, finity must form. And those crystals ultimately become what you value.”
It’s not the only moment that he sounds a little like a new age mystic. He describes himself as an “empath” and uses the word “dizzying” a lot to describe his experience of the world. When I ask him what scares him, he says: apathy. “As humans we need each other desperately. But our apathy is being preyed upon. You can take advantage of someone’s sensitivity and push them to a point of apathy quite easily now. If there’s anything I’m fighting against, it’s that desensitisation to the world which all of us are experiencing in different ways.”
Jacob Collier’s playlist
Shine - Joni Mitchell
Mayor of Simpleton - XTC
Sunever - Chris Cohen
What About Us - Brandy
Love Is a Black Hole - Martin Luke Brown
But in a sense, he’s describing almost everyone’s experience of the world in this hyper-connected age. Indeed, it’s impossible to imagine Collier’s music existing in the pre-internet age. It’s not only the technology he uses to make it. It’s the global everythingness of it. The question he is most interested in is: “How can we use all of the wild new powers to bring people together?”
What he thinks it comes back to in the end, are the actual moments of human connection. Which is why the border he most relishes breaking is the one between him and his audience. “That feels like a really good use of this infinity.”
Yikes. How does he stay grounded? Well, it helps that he still lives at home with his mum when he’s not on tour and he makes most of his music in the room that was always his refuge. “The room was like my Where the Wild Things Are. The walls collapsed and it became as big as my mind.”
Then there are his musical friends. He speaks warmly of Stormzy. “He’s a really deep music fan and aficionado. If you know him as a hard-hitting grime legend, you’d be surprised at how deep he’s gone into jazz and gospel.”
But the collaborator who clearly means the most to him is Chris Martin of Coldplay. “His kindness and genuine spirit really permeates everything,” says Collier. The pair became friends when Martin contacted him out of the blue to ask if he could sample Collier’s song Home Is, which he had initially mistaken for a piece of 16th century choral music.
They ended up hanging out and recording together. “He’s a really interesting hybrid of brother and partner in crime and mentor. There is Quincy but he’s 91 and he’s seen everything. But Chris is still doing it all. It’s amazing to watch him navigate the music industry, being a public figure, relationships, friendships, life!”
I wonder if Collier has given much thought to what comes next? It’s the first time in seven years, he says, when he doesn’t have a solid plan. “To be honest, I’m utterly revelling in it.” And no, he doesn’t rule out the possibility of an album with just him and a guitar and a tape recorder. But everything is on the table.
“The arts are often at the frontier of cultural change,” he says. “And there’s certainly a sense with art right now of being citizens of the world, making music under one sky. Everything is welcome now. You go to a pop sessions and the producers are pulling out tabla and dhol drums or they want to use some Buka tribe sample or salsa. It’s all on the table now. And as a lover of music and the world, I’m like hell yeah. It’s a bit of a buckle your seatbelt moment. But I’m terrified and thrilled by what’s about to happen.”
