6x Grammy-award winner Jacob Collier has just released his new album Djesse vol. 4. Jessica Watts caught up with the multifaceted artist to learn all about this project and more.
[clip, “Djesse”]
In today’s world of music, there are so many talented artists that it’s often hard to keep up. One you may not know of is 6x Grammy award-winner Jacob Collier, an English singer, songwriter, instrumentalist and producer. Not only has Collier won Grammy awards for his own music, but he has also won for his writing, including being a writer on SZA’s “Good Days.”
[clip “Good Days”]
I attended Collier’s press conference to learn more about his new studio album, Djesse vol. 4 and what’s coming up next for this multifaceted artist. Djesse vol. 4 is the fourth and final installment of Collier’s album series. Starting with Djesse vol. 1 released in 2018, and volumes 2 and 3 in 2019 and 2020, respectively, the albums have skyrocketed Collier’s success and popularity. I asked Collier about what he’s looking forward to most this time around.
[JACOB COLLIER] This quadruple album has been six years in the making. So, it’s quite a hefty chunk of life in there. It’s quite emotional that it’s coming out, it’s kind of surreal. I tried to calculate the number of clicks and drags it’s taken to complete this album. We’d be in the millions, for sure. So, yeah, it’s just been a massive ton of work, but I can’t wait to just hopefully free a bunch of people. I think a lot about freeing people. And that’ll be, that would feel really good if, if this album can hit people in the soul. That’s my big, big hope and dream, I suppose.
Collaborations have been a major part of Collier’s music career. Throughout the Djesse series, Collier has collaborated with other Grammy award winning artists such as Ty Dolla $ign, Daniel Caesar, and Tori Kelly. Djesse vol.4 is no different.
[COLLIER] It’s ended up being an album very much in celebration of humankind, I suppose. It kind of sounds a bit like that too, it’s like a huge amount of human voices. There’s actually 100,000 people on the album, which is a long story, but basically I’ve been conducting audiences all around the world and recording them, and so they’re all on the album. So yeah, I guess, in essence the story has become about learning, exploration, my personal inspiration – exploring the world, storytelling, and just having a bunch of fun.
[clip, “Witness Me”]
Djesse vol. 4 contains collaborations with Shawn Mendes, Brandi Carlile, Lizzy McAlpine, John Legend and many other talented artists. Only ¼ of the album is without at least one featured artist. So, how does Collier make a name for himself when there are so many voices on his album?
[COLLIER] My job as a collaborator is to essentially scale my universe to be compatible with somebody else’s, but without reducing it in scale in a sense. Because I think there’s a myth about collaboration and life, which is that if you are too big and take up too much space in a room, then there’ll be less space for other people to find themselves. But I think one thing I’ve really learned over the course of the last six years is It’s just the kind of transformative nature of being to scale in a recording studio and not kind of shrinking down my ambition or my ideas. And I find that when I do that, there’s actually more space for the people around me to be big and be comfortable and feel confident.
Since he began his music career at a young age, Collier has exceeded the expectations and genre binaries that exist in the music industry. From alternative, to jazz, to R&B, to folk, the Djesse album series as well as Collier’s entire musical repertoire avoids being pigeonholed, and pushes genres outside of where they have ever been before.
[COLLIER] I tend to find that audiences actually really appreciate not being bent to, you know- like if you bend to your audience, I think that your audience can like it, but they can also kind of lose trust in you in a weird way. And so I kind of think the best thing I can do is to make stuff that I really respond to with awareness of the audience and sometimes using the audience. And so I definitely value my audience greatly in the creative process, but I feel like my job is, ultimately, it’s just to be honest. I kind of can’t help it at the end of the day.
Ultimately, what Collier wants listeners to feel while listening to his album is joy.
[COLLIER] Joy to me doesn’t come from being glad or, or like stoked or happy, particularly. I think joy comes from being alive, you know, and like how dynamic that can be. You think, Whoa, there’s a lot going on here. And to be at one’s full dynamic range, that to me is joy, joyful. Being able to receive and absorb any frequency of emotion or life and roll with that. Feels like…I guess it’s like catharsis, I would say. If there was one word I’d use to describe the feeling of joy, other than joy, it would be catharsis. You know, the idea that energy can come out and energy can come in, and that’s something that’s worth celebrating.
Music has been known to be a universal language that unites people. It can be that sense of catharsis and make you want to sing the lyrics at the top of your lungs. Collier hopes the Djesse album can make you feel that way and more.
Djesse Vol. 4 is out now.
For WNUR News, I’m Jessica Watts.
