Jacob Collier

“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.”

“For me, jazz is an understanding of music, rather than an end in itself.”

“Even if nobody was listening to it, I'd still be making music.”

“A lot of the music that I really love, and a lot of my favourite music and a lot of my favourite things and a lot of my favourite people, these can be experienced on many levels.”

“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.”

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

“I have lots of strange ideas in the back of my mind.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I just became accustomed to being all the members of the band. That was something that was really exciting to me.”

“I'd say that I'm a really quite a joyful person in general, but I think the idea of joy can be extremely complex, and rich and varied.”

“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 jumped into a world of musical learning that was very much led by myself and then I drew from the music that was all around me.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”