Jacob Collier Quotes

I like to create a sound and then leave it behind.

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.

I'm interested in creating a little sound world for songs, really crafting it, building it, and making it like a little doll's house with little things inside it, staircases and rooms and everything kind of relates to everything else. I've never seen it as drums, bass, guitar and vocals in very separate spaces.

When a piece is done, I mix it before going on to any other piece.

I like to explore a lot of textural, arrangement aspects in the studio.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

When you're making a record, you try to achieve stylistically what fits on you. Like a good old coat, you know what I mean?

I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever.

There's always a group of songs that I'm working at. Some of them are 10 years old, and some of them are just a few weeks old. I'm always trying to adjust these songs to some position where I can bring them to completion.

We spend a lot of time with MIDI keyboards and various processors, and we just figure it out. And all those things you hear in our songs work as submelodies and countermelodies, and everything has to fit.

I was completely fascinated by the studio process and layering sounds and creating soundscapes out of layering massive squalls of sound.

There's the drums, the music, the melodies, the lyrics, the production, the artwork: there are so many elements to making an album, and the drumming is just a very small fraction of what I focus on.

Usually, I write the music and am involved in the production.

When you're producing, you're really just making a series of decisions.

DJing is like a great tasteful art form.

It's easy for me to write songs but hard for me to write an album; that's been my experience.

The studio is my main compositional tool. And I used to be horrible in the studio. I didn't know any kind of technical stuff. But when you have something in your head, you've gotta figure out a way of executing it.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins.

I second guess everything I do musically, and I often could spend hours on, say, one snare sound.

I'm not really gonna stop. We've got so much stuff to do, so many songs we talked about, so many things to record.

I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

I love the magic of the studio.

There are seven songs finished and on par with any that are on Siren's.

I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.