Jacob Collier

“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.”

“With the Internet you can research anything.”

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

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

“You can get people to follow very intricate pathways of musical information, but it feels like a nursery rhyme or a children's story.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The whole life of a song doesn't end with the way that it sounds on the record. How does this song grow? What works live? What do people like to sing along to?”

“I can support my sound from the diaphragm, I can project and I can enunciate and things like that. But I was definitely singing from a lot younger than that.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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