Jacob Collier's First Interview: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Jacob Collier’s story is one of boundless curiosity and connection—a message in a bottle that changed the tide.
According to some analysts, over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s roughly 720,000 hours each day. And nearly half of all daily uploads - around 2.5 million - are music videos.
This onslaught of content is like a firehose that we, naive and well intentioned though we may be, try to drink from. We’re flooded with countless dispatches from far flung places, like messages in a bottle. So much great work gets carried away in the rush, possibly forever, possibly to be resurrected or discovered in the future. It’s hard to know what will become important later, and what is simply part of the ongoing churn. Often we know better what we meme than what we mean.
But out of the morass, some things will inevitably last. Today’s content creators become tomorrow’s stars. Some go viral. Some go far. Some get famous. Some get rich. Some launch lasting careers. There are those who even become iconic.
And then there are those very few who manage, by sending out their messages in a bottle, not just to contribute to the conversation, but to change it. These are the disrupters, the iconoclasts, the tide turners. Jacob Collier is one of those.
A Portrait of the Artist
At 30 years old, Jacob Collier’s story has been told and retold repeatedly in videos and on social media, in college classrooms and backstage hangs. For those who are aware of him, it goes without saying because he is not so much a popular figure as he is a fact of life. For those who are unaware, it’s hard to categorize or encapsulate his influence. For many musicians and music fans, just to invoke his name is enough to evoke a whole world view, a sense of musical and aesthetic sensibilities, a harmonic and visual approach. He was called The Colorful Mozart of Gen Z by the New York Times in 2022.
With six Grammys to his name and another three nominations this year (including for album of the year) he plays to audiences of many thousands in arenas and hippodromes, and has become famous for leading an “audience choir” where he conducts the crowd in multi part harmony.
Collier is a ubiquitous collaborator, educator and musical personality, and has spent meaningful musical time with a large collection of past Third Story Podcast guests including Becca Stevens, säje, Lawrence, Victoria Canal, Jon Lampley, Michael Thurber, Jake Sherman, Lau Noah, and Michael League.
He’s on a short touring pause, but will resume the world tour in the summer of 2025 to support his latest album Djesse, Vol. 4 (it’s his fifth solo release in the space of 8 years, and the last in a four album, 50 song musical project he launched in 2018). His own records are, among other things, a kind of unraveling manifesto of his genre defying musical journey, and feature collaborations with artists he admires ranging from John Mayer to John Legend, Brandi Carlile to Kirk Franklin, Sam Amidon to Steve Vai.
When Quincy Jones - who was first a champion, then a mentor, then a manager, and ultimately a kind of elder relative to Jacob - first presented a 19 year Collier on stage at a small showcase during the Montreux jazz festival in 2014, he described the young musician as using the “most modern, hip chord substitutions I ever heard.”
There’s a video online of Jacob showing his harmonic ideas to Herbie Hancock, who once said about the young musician, “I thought I was good with harmonies, [but] no, he was all over my stuff and past that.”
During a now legendary COVID era livestream conversation between Collier and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, as Jacob riffed the Coldplay song “Sparks”, Chris stopped him at one point to say how humiliating it was to hear his music elevated to such levels, comparing himself to Salieri and Jacob to Mozart. “You’ve gotta stop man, this is embarrassing now,” insists Chris.
For some, his exuberance can be exhausting, and the flood of ideas pouring out of him can feel unmanageable. Without question, he sees more possibilities in the music than most, he sees the matrix. But it can be hard to keep up with him as a listener.
After seeing him live earlier this year, my friend, the critic Nate Chinen wrote on his Substack that “Collier has zero chill onstage; he’s a Golden Retriever puppy in a squirrel sanctuary.” One of Nate’s primary complaints about Jacob was his seeming preoccupation with being liked, and that he may be caught in a kind of “bond feedback loop” with his audience.
Regardless of what you think of him, the global influence he has had on harmony, rhythm, technology, education, audience engagement and running an independent artistic career are unquestionable and some of that may be circling back around to influence Jacob’s own conception of his work. It would be hard not to.
There is, however, another side to him that is more interior, more homebound and patient, led by a natural curiosity and sense of wonder. For the majority of his life, Jacob’s most creative work has been done in a small room in the quiet of his mother’s house in north London. His mother, Suzie Collier, an accomplished musician and music teacher, encouraged Jacob to follow his passions and pursue his interests from a very young age, and he often retreated to his room to do it.
He even named his first album In My Room as a tribute to that space and his artistic philosophy, perhaps best embodied in the song “Hideaway”. And some of his most beloved songs, like “Little Blue” and “Make Me Cry” sound like I imagine he probably feels when he’s in his room.
Collier came of age at the dawn of YouTube, at the intersection of affordable recording software and unlimited access to information. In high school, he began posting videos to YouTube - sending actual messages in virtual bottles - which he made in his music room at home and the rest is history, or in his case, future.
Jacob Collier’s story is one of boundless curiosity and connection—a message in a bottle that changed the tide.
Jacob Collier and me
Sometime in 2013 I stumbled on a video of a kid singing a sophisticated multi-layered a cappella vocal harmony version of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely”. I don’t know how I found it but it blew me away.
He was so young looking but his vocal range was wide, his harmonic concept was deep, and his visual language was developed. The production was simple and contained: vocals and a melodica solo that showed him to be a hip and swinging piano player too.
He had a twee, boyish sense of style. He was unconcerned with the kinds of things most professionals would think about - like audio quality or polish. I got the sense that this was a special person and that the video was somehow important.
I immediately forwarded it to a small handful of friends and a few people in the jazz business who I thought might be interested in it, including the producers Matt Pierson (who went on to manage and produce Samara Joy), and the late Tommy LiPuma. Tommy called me within a matter of minutes after seeing the video and asked me who this was and how he could be contacted. So I did some research and found an email address for the guy, who, I learned, was called Jacob Collier.
At the time, Jacob was an easy to reach 18 year old, and on his website he suggested some possible reasons why someone might contact him, including “to give some feedback, offer free food, or get in touch for no reason.” This openness was indicative of his disposition - he was friendly, accessible, and ready to receive the world.
Finally I reached out to him in October of that year and wrote:
I'm a tremendous admirer of your arranging, your singing, your playing, your videos, and your general approach. Thank you for the inspirational music. [...] I've been following your videos for a while, and I've turned some of my friends on to your work as well. I think a couple of record producer friends of mine have already been in touch with you as a result (Tommy LiPuma and Matt Pierson). [...] I'm so pleased to be writing to you just to open the channel of communication.
Looking back at this now I realize that what I was not able to offer was an interview, because this was before I had launched the podcast. It must have been one of the mounting reasons why I ultimately started it - there were just too many interesting people out there in the world and I wanted to talk to them!
Jacob responded:
Leo! Thank you so much for such good vibes...what an honour. You're a legend!
Both Tommy and Matt have been in touch, which has been such a huge privilege for me. Want to say such a huge thank you for passing my sounds on!! You are so kind.
Please absolutely give me a shout if you're heading over this side of the pond, and I'll buy you a drink! Until then, all best and cheers so much! : ) Jacob
To be clear, I was not and still am not a legend but it gave a sense of his general enthusiasm, and also that he was maybe not entirely clear yet on who was who.
Jacob continued to make videos, at first he kept with the a cappella concept but then got increasingly more complex, adding more instruments and more production tricks and raising the stakes, like this version of “Fascinating Rhythm” from 2014. Those who followed along could feel him expanding in real time. This was the first artist I can remember discovering on YouTube, and whose success was owed almost entirely to the platform.
While I was playing in London in November of 2014, I reached out to him again, this time to set up an interview. By then I had started The Third Story. At the time there were no real interviews with him available online, he still hadn’t traveled to the US or performed live outside of London.
Jacob invited me to his house to meet early one evening, and when I arrived his mother greeted me warmly. He was still heading home from college. His mother offered me tea and cookies while I waited for him. When he walked in, he was a self possessed, affable, very approachable guy who was both at ease with himself and with me.
The interview itself was a revelation. Although I was able to keep up with everything he said, I was stunned by the facility and scope of his musical mind. In fact, part of his gift was in making another person feel somehow that they were as smart as him, just by being part of the same conversation.
He was a sponge, absorbing new information by the minute and integrating it immediately into his thinking. He had a deeply sensitive way of thinking about sound which was heightened by his perfect pitch, synesthesia, photographic memory, and physical dexterity. He was at ease with himself and his own talent. But he was also still basically a kid who still knew that he was still new.
Ten years on, that conversation is still compelling - maybe even more so than when it was made, given all that’s followed - and it serves as an important document for those who have paid attention to his incredible ascent. From what I’m able to find online today, it is the first interview of its kind that exists with him.
A few months later, Jacob and I found ourselves once again in the same place, this time in Cleveland for a recording that Tommy LiPuma was producing for the trumpeter Dominick Farinacci. Tommy - who had been eager to contact Collier when I shared the first video - had convinced the young musician to do two arrangements for the record, including the Horace Silver classic “Señor Blues”, and join the recording sessions which were being held at the Tri C Community College.
That album also featured Christian McBride, Larry Goldings, Gil Goldstein and was recorded by Al Schmitt (all would become guests of this podcast). I was there to collect interviews and stories about the Dominick project including a panel discussion with most of the team, and to have a conversation with Jacob onstage at the college where we looked at some of his recording sessions and talked about how he made them. This kind of open source approach to showing his work has become one of his trademarks - to share his process and to use his own creative approach as a kind of teaching tool.
The Cleveland conversation with Jacob captured the excitement and energy around seeing him in person for the first time. As far as I know it was his first trip to the States as an adult, and you could feel a sort of electricity around him. In the short time since I had seen him in London, his star had already risen significantly online. We all knew that he was on the edge of blasting off.
After that, Jacob and I flew from Cleveland to New York together and I remember that we talked about songwriting and performing live, two things he was just starting to do in earnest.
I saw him in person one last time, in September of that year, playing a duo show with Becca Stevens at Richard Bona’s club in New York. Jacob and Becca had met during the recording of Snarky Puppy’s Family Dinner Volume 2. and they developed a sibling like relationship, sharing videos of the two of them making music and being generally creative and goofy together. The New York show was absolutely packed with musicians and jazz business people who were eager to talk to Jacob.
He spent the next year making In My Room and developing his concept as an artist. The album featured a mix of originals and covers, and while he wrote some beautiful pieces like “Hideway” which pointed to a strain of sentimentality that would begin to run through his compositions moving forward, it was his arrangement of the “Flinstones” theme song from the record that would win him his first Grammy.
I sent him the occasional email or text message for a few years after that but he was basically gone - I had managed to catch him before he was too well known, and now he was everywhere all at once, but unreachable in any state. As I prepared for this episode, for example, I attempted to talk to him again 10 years after our original meeting, and it was made clear to me at every turn that it was just not going to be an easy thing to make happen.
Fortunately I have this snapshot that captures a moment in time, a portrait of the artist as a young man. Ten years after his first interview, I’m reminded why I started this podcast: to document history as it’s being made and make a little history along the way.
“If you mean business with your art you have to completely disregard everybody else and say it doesn’t matter what other people think.” - Jacob Collier
Very interesting article on Jacob