Now to new sound for a multi-grammy winning artist.

Jacob Collier has been described as a colorful Mozart of Gen Z Blending musical genres from R&B to jazz.

Well now in his new album The Light for Days He's stripping it all back.

Collier describes it as the scruffiest album he's ever made written in just four days using the five-string guitar.

Collier told our Hari Sreenivasan about his inspiration for the project.

- Bianna, thanks.

Jacob Collier, thanks so much for joining us.

Your most recent album, "The Light for Days," took you only four days to record, and you used basically just one instrument.

Why do this, and also, what's behind the title?

- Yes, well, thank you so much for having me.

This album was a drastic change from previous albums that I've made.

I've spent the last seven years mostly creating four radically collaborative albums, which are sort of explosively varied and multi-layered and sort of extravagant creatively.

And I wanted a change, and so I imposed these two limitations, one being the one instrument, a five-string guitar, and the second being four days, which is the amount of time I had to make the album.

I was kicking off my tour in Asia back in May, and I had this little magical window, and I thought, "Well, what if I make a whole album within this window of time?"

So that's what I did.

And the title, "The Light for Days," is really existent for three reasons.

One is it's a lyric in one of the songs, which is a song called "Icarus" by a band called The Staves.

And there's this lovely line, "I have not seen the light for days," which I think is how many of us are feeling right now.

"I have not seen the light for days."

So I thought, that feels like a nice title for the record.

Secondly, it contains four days in it, which is just a ticklish thing from my perspective.

And third, I think we all need light in our days.

And so this was a record that really provided a sense of calm for me, a sense of peace, and something I was really excited to share with the world.

- So you have some covers from some well-known names, James Taylor, The Beatles, the name of the Staves, the name of a few.

And then you also come up with your own music, right?

So I wonder, I mean, this is kind of maybe a strange question, but how is a song born in the mind of Jacob Collier?

Well, what is it?

Is it the lyrics that come first?

Is it the tune?

How do you create something?

Yeah, it's a beautiful question.

And I have to say, there's not one way.

I think of music making a bit like world building.

You know, you're building something that feels believable with proportions and warmth and humanity and things.

The thing with this particular album is that I had to work quick.

So I had to sort of be quite, I had to be quite decisive with my ideas.

I'm the kind of person who can happily sort of agonise over certain kinds of creative decisions at times.

So it was really refreshing for me to sort of jump in and say, look, whatever the first idea is, that's what I have to go with.

And so it was a combination of the above.

Sometimes it's a word, sometimes it's a chord or a sound, but often it's a sort of mood or a space that I'm trying to build a little world that correctly and accurately describes what that feels like for me.

>> Okay.

I know it's like picking between your children to describe a favorite, so I want you to maybe help our audience understand a bit more about one of the tracks.

One that caught my eye was a music video that you did with -- it had no visual effects, so that means real butterflies were on your face, you were standing in some light storm in a jungle.

Tell me about the song "Heaven."

It's probably the most ticklish experience I've ever had in my whole life.

It's really bizarre and really interesting, but "Heaven" in brackets, "Butterflies," is the second song on the album, and we actually shot a different video for each song on the album in a different location.

So I've been touring all year, and I ended up in Costa Rica on the final day of the tour about three or four weeks ago, the tour that was in that region of the world.

And yeah, we ended up in this butterfly kind of zone where they have all these butterflies that just want to play.

They're really delighted by people being around.

I can feel your butterflies.

I'm awake and I want to be.

Yeah, I can feel your butterflies.

Pour your love all over me.

So I was really thrilled and I had this song called, literally called, "Heaven" in brackets, "Butterflies".

So, yeah, the song is a really, it's very warm, very, very warm song.

Lots of voices in the background and guitars in the background.

But yeah, that particular experience for me was really kind of like a one of one.

Because you've done so many different parts of music, you've arranged music, you've rearranged music that we might all be familiar with.

You've used your own voice as an instrument, you play so many instruments.

And I read that you've described yourself at times as an introvert.

And so I wonder, is there something that's less enjoyable, more enjoyable for you to do?

Is some part of the process you feel more at home and comfortable in it?

And it's also, you know, explain being an introvert and still being somebody who literally goes out on stage every night and in front of thousands of people.

>> Yeah, yeah.

It's a great question.

I'm comfortable with people.

I enjoy people.

But I think that I get most of my creative energy from being alone.

I think we're all on a spectrum there.

And so I totally am utterly in love with tour.

I just love it so much.

I love the feeling of being on stage and feeling of hearing the audience saying all these things.

But I also know how important it is for me just as an artist in person to come back to my ultimate cave of self and kind of find those ways of recharging.

So, you know, when I was a small child, I never really had big dreams of touring and being a famous musician, anything like that.

I just really wanted to make the most compelling music that I could.

And I just loved music to the end of the earth.

I kind of still feel like that.

I feel like being able to tour and play these shows and collaborate with people is a huge, huge bonus to a process that would already be happening, which is me making things that I care for and just trying to learn about how life of musical works, you know?

>> For people who might not be familiar with your work, it sort of took on a whole different dimension about a dozen years ago where you posted a video on YouTube of you basically doing every part of an amazing Stevie Wonder song by yourself.

[Music] So you post that video.

What happens next?

Well, I have a magical little room in my home in London, my family home, my child's home, where I recorded a lot of music as a child.

And I layered lots of instruments on top of other instruments and voices on top of other voices, and so it was this one-man band figure.

And then one day I got an email from Quincy Jones, and this was a moment that absolutely blew my mind, and I was distinctly flabbergasted at the sort of friendship that unfolded thereafter with the great man.

There's such an amazing sense that he has this access to humanity and infinity and joy, but he's also just one of my absolute greatest heroes.

And he became a bit of a Godfather/mentor type figure for me.

We lost the great man last year, and so now every note that I play on stage or record in the studio feels like it has the essence of Quincy within, you know.

Going back a bit further, I've heard you say that, you know, some of your earliest memories are watching your mom conduct an orchestra, because she's a musician, you're in a family of musicians, and I wonder whether, you know, you're sitting there at two or three years old and you're just kind of soaking this up in osmosis, does it change your perception of music, or did you just think this is what people do, they wave their arms and then magical sounds appear?

Yes, I think that the fundamental lessons that were at play in watching my mother Susie Collier conduct weren't actually musical lessons at the heart of them, they were human lessons.

Because what she was demonstrating was a kind of leadership model where she's completely unafraid of the freedom of the musicians around her and the openness and the collaboration and they're not afraid of her either, so it's this fearless space and as we all know nothing prevents you from being creative more effectively than the fear of making a mistake, you know But I think I watched her create these these amazing environments social environments musical environments where people weren't afraid of making a mistake They wanted to challenge the status quo and she's a very unconventional Kind of teacher and thinker but the results that she got were so strong and so so unequivocally brilliant and schooling all the other the disciplinarians that were trying to do the same thing.

So I think that, you know, I didn't feel pressure as a child to be a musician.

It wasn't like I have to be a musician in order to do the right thing.

But it did feel somewhat inevitable that I'd explore music within my arsenal of human things to explore and do.

And I think that as I've grown older, I've sort of accidentally fallen deeply in love with the idea of not conducting orchestras, but conducting audiences.

And I've recently been able to incorporate many, many thousands of voices at my concerts and create these amazing sort of sound worlds.

And I think a lot of the root of that comes from those early experiences.

But I think I also recognized that music is something that I really loved.

It's something that I wanted to give a lot of my time and attention to.

So I did very actively decide that I wanted to really understand why these things make us feel so much.

You know, music is this really serious thing.

And I wanted to get to the heart of the matter.

Tell our audience a little bit about what you do at your shows.

I mean, there's so many examples online of you really just somehow turning, it could be 100 people, it could be 100,000 people, into a choir.

[MUSIC] How does that happen?

Yeah, well the idea with the audience choir is that everyone is a musician as long as they're participating.

Permission is more important than skill, first of all.

But second of all, that it's possible to create a sort of musical context for people where they intuitively know where to move their note up and down.

So the way the audience choir works is I'll have these people here and I'll divide them.

Sometimes I'll divide them into different groups, so say three groups, and I'll give three different notes as starting points.

And then rather than singing or telling them what to do, I just move my hands up and down and watch that section and they kind of move up and down accordingly.

And what happens is this really majestic kind of emotional, it's like a huge organ of people, like a massive, massive musical instrument that's kind of like 10,000 pixels long or something.

And it's based in people's intuitions and people's kind of faith in me.

And I have total faith in them.

And a lot of the time, these are quite improvised.

So the harmony and things can move into all sorts of interesting places.

But I think that people really love to participate and are good at participating.

But my job is to create the conditions where people don't feel worried about making a mistake, but also feel supported in understanding kind of where they are.

There are also moments of total chaos with the audience where people will sing like 11 different notes and it sounds crazy and it sounds weird and you know we sometimes we do all sorts of other types of like even like non-harmonic effects like sound effects and sounds of rain and storms and stamping and it's a really really visceral experimentation ground.

I think my audience members know that they're coming to play.

And to me it's become like a sort of unmissable part of the experience that gives me goosebumps every single time.

I think it's at the Kennedy Center and you started improvising with the orchestra.

And at that moment I was just like, is his brain hearing everything already?

I mean, do you already have the music in your brain and you're just moving the clarinets to do what you want?

Or are you, is your brain shifting and creating something new knowing that this is the sound that this tuba is going to make?

And this is this, I don't know, it was just like, you know, I'm really trying to map your brain here, sorry.

Yeah.

Well, I think it depends on the style of improvisation.

Sometimes I think that it does help to go with a picture in your head.

So with that particular example, when I improvised the orchestra with the NSO, that was something right.

I did have somewhat a plan of what I was going to do with the instruments, and I could hear it all in my head, and I just was trying to activate on it and get it the best I could.

But as I iterated on my idea, which was a challenge that was set to me by a friend of mine, he said, "Why don't you just try making something with the orchestra with no plan?"

I thought that was right up my alley.

But as I went, you realize certain things don't land as you're expecting them to land.

I don't play all these instruments.

So I think the fun thing there was going through the process and iterating and changing my mind.

I think it's best if you stay on a G rather than the F. I think the G is better.

I think that people, again, people enjoy watching me not know what I'm doing as much as they enjoy watching me know what I'm doing.

I'm kind of comfortable in both spaces at this point enough to follow my nose and hopefully find something of interest.

I wonder if you think about where we are right now with where music is and how people discover music right on the one hand, the platforms like YouTube have given you a phenomenal opportunity and lots and lots of other musicians and creative artists have been given these opportunities and been discovered, so to speak, right.

And at the same times, the sort of economic structure doesn't necessarily seem to value their creative work.

You hear about musicians that have to have millions and millions and hundreds of millions of views to really try to make a living or they have to go out on the road.

And I wonder if, you know, as a society, we're not necessarily supporting the creative community as much as we could, or maybe even more than we could.

I couldn't agree more.

It doesn't have to be like this.

I think there are so many ways of structuring a society where the creative people are valued.

I think it comes down to people in these sort of positions of high power not actually recognising how foundationally crucial the arts are to a functional world.

You know, you've got so many people in the world right now who are looking for purpose, who are looking for answers to big, unanswerable questions.

You've got people who are just looking for perspectives, looking for learning about the world and people who want to feel.

And the reality in the world today is there are a lot of people who would like us to feel so many different kinds of things, and you can't really tell someone what to feel.

But what you can do is you can show someone what to feel.

What the arts do is they give you a chance to feel things that you wouldn't otherwise feel if you were living in "reality" all of the time.

If you step into this other space, there's such a huge benefit to the way that we feel as people in growing and in changing and in evolving.

And we really, really need our artists and our creatives and our musicians like we've never done before.

So I think it does come down to that simple kind of valuation, like how much do we want people to spend their time making things in these ways?

And to me, there's no more important thing, I think, to do right now other than to make things.

You know, it feels like a way of incorporating the world, a way of expressing the world, a way of building community and connection.

I'm just, I'm really hoping that we're moving towards a bit of a moment of change in society where we're recognizing how crucial it is for the artist to be able to not just survive, but actually to thrive too.

One of the other big changes kind of on the horizon right now is what artificial intelligence is doing and how it's kind of transforming lots of little parts of our lives.

A lot of these models have been trained on the work, the intellectual property, and creative juices, so to speak, of so many millions of people, right?

So as a creator, I mean, how do you think about what this technology is doing?

Do you use it as a tool?

Do you think about it?

Yes.

It's a really unprecedented thing to have access to, a thing of such extraordinary competence that it kind of ... that the mind boggles.

The interesting thing about art, which I'm coming to realize, is that competence doesn't mean something's good or meaningful.

And I've got to say, over the last three years, AI has got more and more competent, and I've got less and less inspired by it, because nowadays everything is too realistic to be real, which is really a weird commodity.

I think of the artist's role in society to ask questions.

We're question askers, we're not answer providers, we ask questions.

Now AI is primarily accessed through prompts, through asking questions, so in a sense I think artists are uniquely positioned to make meaningful things using whatever tools we have.

AI is one such tool.

I think that it takes nowadays a pretty interesting question to get an interesting answer because your usual answer is super kind of down the line, very regimented and predictable.

Artists thrive in the unpredictable.

I think that humans thrive in the unpredictable.

And I actually think we might be entering into a sort of unpredictability revolution somewhat because I think that in an algorithmic world we're free when we can't be predicted and I think this is a feeling that artists can remind us of, is of being untethered to structures and ways of thinking.

So I also think it's dangerous in its ways.

I mean you mentioned the ownership problem with regard to training data which is really gnarly for musicians.

It's so hard to kind of define that problem and it's so hard to stop it given how those models work and how the more you feed them the more capacious they become.

So there are a number of issues that I perceive but I do have faith in that the imperfections of people being our sort of saving grace and how I think that an imperfect person will always need another imperfect person to relate to.

If the role of an artist is to be related to and to build worlds you can trust, I think that role will always have a place.

All right.

Jacob Collier, thanks so much for your music and for your time.