Jacob Collier on creativity and discipline - Bulletin 11/11/19
The latest podcast interview on songwriting from our former pupils, Simon Barber and Brian O’Connor (“Sodajerker On Songwriting” - previously mentioned in relation to Colin Hay) is a quite wonderful episode with the prodigiously talented, young British multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, producer and double-Grammy winner, Jacob Collier (no. 147 - previous interviewees include Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Johnny Marr, Elvis Costello, Burt Bacharach, Sting and many more).
Listen, in particular, from 15m 40s to 17m 45s where he speaks about collaboration with other musicians as follows:
“I’m going to let the thing that I thought would happen go in favour of what’s happening... collaborating, for me it’s a sort of life exercise. It’s like, how can I strip down things that I expected to happen, but maintain this point of the narrative of my piece and for this to feel like something that’s mine, without taking my hands so off the wheel that there’s no momentum in the room, but not having my hands too on the wheel so that momentum is strangled...”
I also love what he says later on about the music room in his house (the son of two professional musicians - his mother is a violin teacher) where he does the bulk of his composing, arranging and recording. For his double Grammy award-winning debut album, “In My Room” it was literally where the whole album was conceived, written, recorded and produced by him alone. As a young boy, he used to observe his mother teaching violin in that room. He loved how she would “extract the energy from the student, extract the answer from the student, rather than give the student all the answers... (she would) ask the right questions”.
From 26m 30s into the interview, he says that in education if someone is creating something the value of the thing is in the act of creation. It’s not in the result or outcome of the creation.
“It’s like, ‘that picture’s great, you should draw more pictures!’ Or, ‘That picture isn't very good. Both those can be damaging judgements because it becomes this result-oriented thing where the value of the thing I’m making defines my own creative output and worth. Whereas, a child’s creation... creating is the thing that’s worth investing in... That room was not where ‘I got things done’, but where I just ‘played around’ and some things would stick and some things wouldn’t, but the value was (in) the ‘play’.”
Interesting, he also talks about his need to impose his own deadlines to provide a focus to his ‘play’ and his creative energies, but without them being too goal-driven.
Now, obviously, such an educational approach is easier to allow in a primary school setting, but there are nonetheless lessons for us to take on board in our own work and also in our spiritual lives. The balance between creativity and discipline is one that underpins the call to allow God’s Holy Spirit to inspire us from within so that we might know and do his will. Meditative prayer is, in a sense, spiritual ‘play’, allowing the Spirit in our hearts to re-create us from within. The discipline of a pre-formulated prayer (the Our Father, etc...) can be used to introduce us into the right spiritual mindset before we then let go of the words and set our hearts free to rest in His creative presence. But, even in a classroom setting, we can invite the Holy Spirit into our hearts so that we might better encourage and develop those moments of spontaneity during a lesson that can lead to unexpected but quite wonderful and memorable experiences for all concerned.
I’ll finish with a quote from our Founder, Fr. Jean-Marie De La Mennais:
“You are too afraid of not doing things well. Act with more simplicity and freedom of spirit and everything will turn out better.”
P.S. Check out these videos of Jacob Collier:
Let’s start with one of his more “out there” compositions/arrangements from his 2nd album:
And the latest single from his 3rd album:
Then, a track from his first album, showing him in his “room” where he does most of his recording (first album earned 2 Grammys, recorded in this room). https://youtu.be/4v3zyPEy-Po (takes a couple of minutes to get going).
A TED Talk performance:
And finally, excerpts from his incredible BBC Proms debut last summer:
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