Music is just another language, but it's very special because it crosses everyone's borders.
Jacob Collier
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.
The bottom line is you need to be authentic, you have to be really honest to yourself.
It's hard to say that one way of doing things is the best for everybody all the time.
Having an idea is easy, courting one can be difficult.
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.
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.
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.
Even if nobody was listening to it, I'd still be making music.
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.
Music is like cooking for me: you mix the ingredients together in one big pan and see how they end up. Through experimenting, you find what you really like and stick with it.
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.
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.
You can get people to follow very intricate pathways of musical information, but it feels like a nursery rhyme or a children's story.
It was what I did after school. I'd learn a song in choir that day and I'd sing it, all the parts.
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.
Making music with other people feeds spontaneity, and lends ideas to your solo work.
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.
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.
I have lots of strange ideas in the back of my mind.
Music is one whole force. And I think the Proms have always represented very clearly that music is a universal language, one that everyone can speak. I've just followed my goosebumps in every direction and have found a recipe for what my music feels and sounds like.
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 that the journey of self to truth is always kind of a gnarly one.
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 want to write orchestral music. I want to get a group of singers together and sing William Byrd songs.
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.
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!'
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.
With the Internet you can research anything.
I suppose technically I could say I'm based in jazz, just because it's the school of thought that I've been encouraging myself to operate within.
I enjoy exploring music so much.
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 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.
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 world of Stevie Wonder - in particular, the kind of overflowing joy that exists in every single thing I've ever heard him do, every note he sings - that is so deeply inspiring to me in every way.
D is a wholesome key. It's not bland, like C. It's not neutral. It's probably on the bright side.
I love songs with, like, six or seven or eight different things going on at once, and that's just me.
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.
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 was sort of brought up to sing from the age of two or three I was definitely giving it a go.
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.
It was a challenge with 'In My Room,' because I was the only person in that room making the record, to maintain perspective.
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.
I love the interaction with people online, I love engaging with the fans.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
