The Making of: Jacob Collier

By Lily Amiclo • September 7, 2021

Jacob Collier skipped the method book on every instrument he plays. He also just won his fifth Grammy. “When I was a teenager, what I wasn’t willing to do was wait for something to be possible before I did it. I would just do it anyway,” he says, sitting in his London home studio, wearing dinosaur pajamas. “I’d put a bass in my hands and try to figure out what it would be like to be a bass player.”

Pajamas aside, Collier isn’t your average bedroom producer. His first viral success was a YouTube video he made as a teenager, in which he reimagined Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely.” It was only a handful of years before Collier was signed by Quincy Jones and luminaries across genres, such as Herbie Hancock and Chris Martin, would herald him as a musical genius. To those who know only the "genius," his personal philosophy might come as something of a surprise. Collier believes that any bedroom producer can do what he does and, in fact, it's this belief that drives his career. It is his steadfast conviction that anyone is capable of acquiring his skillset and creative spark that landed him on Zoom with Producers Against Misogyny.

Collier’s suggestion that anyone could do what he does is laughable on first thought, but he makes a compelling argument, “What would you do if you already knew what to do?” Collier simultaneously feels like your gentle, kind-hearted older brother and the quirky old professor who shakes your brain around with the perfect balance of philosophy and insanity. Collier poses this question, before declaring that it’s possible to invert a skillset; by which he means, if you can appreciate a work of art, you can invert that experience and use it to create. Collier is willing to jump into the deepest possible waters for things he has yet to master. He is proof that innovating isn’t always knowing. Collier is the people’s professor.

The walls in Collier’s studio are decorated with instruments stacked to the ceiling; the Collier family home as a whole is brimming with music. His mother, Suzie, is on the other side of the wall teaching a violin lesson. Down the hall, his sisters might be heard playing the bass or singing Bach chorales. “I was brought up by women,” Jacob says with a smile. “I was encouraged to see the world in this way where everything is a question. I loved that, and I try to create from that standpoint a lot.” The four of them gather to eat every meal—unless Jacob stays up through the morning to work on a song. Suzie remarks, “[Jacob] really loves seeing nighttime turn into morning—at night nobody is awake so you’ve got that incredible silence within your space, which means that you can have more noise in your head. He might get up for a late lunch, and it will be lovely to see him.”

Suzie Collier is a renowned instrumentalist and conductor in her own right. She debuted at the Royal College of Music at the age of three and started teaching in her teens—a fact which, worn on someone else, might be more surprising. Suzie brought her three children up on her own and taught her eldest, Jacob, to walk in the same room that he used to make his Grammy-winning albums. There’s not a lot of separation between music and play in the Collier household—that’s not a coincidence, and Jacob gives full credit to his mom. “I felt like a chemist in a lab,” he looks back on his early music-making days fondly. “The thing I’m most grateful for as an adult was the time and space I was given to play.”

Jacob was barely a toddler when Suzie realized he had a different kind of talent. “I gave him a violin and, instead of wanting to experiment with his fingers, he used the bow as a rhythm machine. He used that to drive forward, possibly, the most ghastly noise on open strings, but he was using it because he could see that it was a tool for making something happen.” Suzie gave Jacob the room he needed to make his world and workspace into a musical playground, and this is an approach that he finds so conducive to creativity that he has chosen to carry it into his adult life. “Something inside of me very much said, ‘Whoever you are, you are my equal—if not greater,’” she says. “If you treat a child like that, they’re actually released to find who they are.”

When Quincy Jones came calling, neither Suzie nor Jacob—who had only recently finished high school—saw much of a point in signing to management. It took a couple of years to make it official. Suzie laughs, “Apparently, I’ve gone down in history at Quincy Jones Productions as being the person who said, ‘Uhm, could we just be friends first?’”

If you want to get a peek into Jacob Collier’s brain, take a look at his studio. According to his mother, Collier “saved pennies” to make this room a reality; it’s his safe haven. He has microphones hidden in every corner, each of which he lovingly introduced; the room mics that his friend custom-made are “really cute,” and the Neumann U 87 is his “joy-bringer.” Collier has put an enormous amount of time and effort into building a studio that suits the way he works, “I’ve gotten used to the idea of this kind of an instantaneous canvas. Before you finish thinking of it, it’s done.” No matter where Collier is—sitting at the drums or pacing around to ambient sound as he wrote “He Won’t Hold You”—something will document his creative flow as he conceives of ideas. The only thing missing from his studio is the computer, but that’s in the bathroom to keep the room quiet.

Collier rose to fame from his YouTube channel, where he would put together endless frames of Jacobs singing and playing arrangements of his favorite songs. His first foray into video editing was much like every other aspect of his life; someone gave Collier the basic tools he needed to explore and another one of his creative outlets flourished from there. In this case, it was an iPad that he borrowed from his sister and a lucky copy of Final Cut Express. The music technology teacher at the Purcell School for Young Musicians, Aidan Goetzee—or as Collier affectionately refers to him, Mr. G—in one very big way, made everything possible for the precocious student that walked into his classroom. When Collier came asking about Final Cut, Goetzee was afraid he couldn’t be of much help. They had a little conversation about the software, and that was the end of it. As Collier recalls, “I came back the next day to ask [Goetzee] about something else, and it’s kind of a long story, but when he left the room he hid a little CD inside of something he was giving me. It was Final Cut Express.” To 16-year-old Collier, that was everything, “I’m forever in his debt.”

Millions of views later, Collier has not lost touch with the feeling that comes with being given the tools and opportunities he needs to thrive, though nowadays, he spends his time putting his philosophy into practice by opening the door for his friends. When Brooklyn-based artist Julia Easterlin got an Instagram DM from Jacob Collier asking her to play upright bass on a live session for Paste Magazine, she made sure to be clear that bass wasn’t her main instrument. She is a highly accomplished musician, so Collier—true to his own start with bass—interpreted that as a coy “I don’t really play, but actually, I shred” type of response. Easterlin anxiously played along in rehearsal as Collier called chords out to the band in real-time. She pulled it off and laughs about it now, “I saw the light go on in his head. It was like, ‘Oh, she wasn’t kidding.’” They became fast friends and ended up going to the studio after the actual gig to record vocals for, what would become, “He Won’t Hold You.”

From the very onset of their friendship, Easterlin experienced Collier’s philosophy first-hand and quickly understood that his “most impactful skill is a personal one.” She, accurately, notes Collier’s ability to springboard his friends into embracing their own abilities, “That’s certainly something he did for me. He’s eager for other people to experience their own joy.”

The joy doesn’t end there. Collier has been on the other end of a surprise DM—one that left him starstruck. SZA was feeling insecure about the harmonies on her follow-up album to Ctrl and scrolling through Collier’s feed when she decided to send him a message. What manifested as a result of the succeeding series of events was a record-breaking collaboration, “Good Days.” Collier got free rein for his contribution, “Honestly, she just said, ‘Whatever you hear, do it.’ All I did was sit here and sing a bunch of stuff.” Collier played the audio message he got back from SZA when he sent her what he did—in it, she’s ecstatic, “Stop it, stop it! Wait. Can you be on my whole album? I really mean that.” That clip has a forever home in a folder on Collier’s computer for moments when he needs a boost.

When most people think of a fan base, we tend to think of the screaming teenagers in the stands of Beatles concerts in the 60s, but for Collier, his fans are other musicians. Collier has so many collaborators that the music world could establish its own Erdős number system around him. It’s a symbiotic relationship because he truly thrives on enriching other people. With the amount of energy that Collier pours into creating that space for his peers, it is no wonder that his reach within the music world is felt so deeply. It’s evident in the comment sections of his earliest videos, “So this is what living in the time of Mozart felt like,” and, “Were you bitten by a radioactive music teacher that gave you superpowers?”

People love prodigies like they love magic tricks. Often, the shocking reveal of the child or teenager’s virtuosity gets in the way of widespread appreciation for the art itself. Collier currently stands in a precarious position—he’s a wunderkind in transition. This is changing with every Grammy nod and chart-topping feature that he adds to his growing list of victories, but today, a lot of people still know Collier more for his celebrity than his songs. With the box that the public imagination tends to put prodigies in, it is common for the young artist’s music to be positioned as secondary to the formidable talent and improbable skill that allowed them to create it. Jason King, chairman of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, points out, “Although the music industry is a young person’s industry in many ways, we have very limited expectations of what young people can do in the context of music.” One could argue that the classical—and even jazz—world has more of a structure in place for an artist like Collier. Many of the people who enjoy more traditional genres are also musicians. This is an audience that comes to the gig primed with an appreciation for the command of skill that Collier has. There is a lot of exposure for young people who excel in classical music; we have grown accustomed to seeing the 8-year-old that appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show debut at Carnegie Hall 11 years later—Alma Deutscher did just that.

Collier has the musician’s crowd locked in. That is precisely the reason he is able to create a back and forth between him and his audience at live shows, getting them to sing along with him in astonishingly beautiful harmonies. In concert at The Opera House in Toronto, Collier played his audience as an instrument—they sang in three-part harmony, improvising over each other as Collier conducted. It’s the kind of feat that could only be executed by an audience of roughly 700 musicians. But from the outside looking in, the overall prestige of Collier’s main fan base seems strange enough to some that it’s given rise to discourse that he might not have gotten to where he is fairly. Recently at the forefront of that conversation, Andrew Unterberger, Deputy Editor at Billboard, tweeted, “[I] think folks are actually underselling just what a disaster this album of the year crop is. The Jacob Collier nod is prob the most transparently industry-insider Big Four nom this century.” In the replies, he hypothesized to a follower that there was “no other explanation” for Collier’s Grammy nomination besides Quincy Jones’s industry influence. In the weeks leading up to the Grammys, Collier found himself getting asked what strings he pulled to get an Album of the Year nomination, “If I’d bent some rule or called up someone on the phone to get the nomination, I would tell you because I’d be like, ‘Do this, it works!’”

From the inside, however, Collier’s success very much looks like the natural course of things. Collier as the “musician’s musician” is a massive but very specific bubble. As he outgrows the prodigy box, Collier is building mutually supportive connections with the artists around him. And when you nurture a community, that community will nurture you back. That’s exactly what happened for Collier. And now, with his collaborations in the charts and five Grammys under his belt, he is making waves outside of his “musician’s musician” bubble.

Over the last decade, Collier has made the music world much more interesting with dexterous harmonies and star-studded albums featuring artists Daniel Caesar, Ty Dolla $ign, and Lianne La Havas, to name a few. If anything, the past year should be a testament of what’s to come: more collaborations with SZA, producing other artists’ music, and the completion of his four-part project, Djesse. Though in Collier’s eyes, he’s only just getting started. Suzie says he has “a zillion” books he could write and podcasts he could make, “Do they all have to happen? No. I think [Jacob] just has to ensure that he has the space in his life to be able to create. If he’s got the space to create, then he can develop into the person and musician that he needs to be.”

It’s easy to celebrate Collier as if he is pretentious—the very things that make him special are comically unrelatable to most people. King, who lent a hand in bringing Collier to critical attention with his profile for NPR in 2016, jokes, “It’s like virtuosity on steroids.” But Collier is also a wild-hearted artist who wears Crocs and fuzzy bear hats on television. It’s time to stop separating him from the things that make his work brilliant: Collier’s community of fellow artists coming up alongside him and the very playfulness that inspires him to make pajamas into formal wear. It’s hard to ignore the magnitude of Collier’s talent, nor should we, but let’s not forget about the guy who shows up to label meetings in a blue wig and takes the train into the depths of South Brooklyn for a friend’s gig whenever he’s in town. When Collier asks himself what he can bring to the world, he looks inward, “The most inimitable parts of your process are the weirdest parts. There aren’t really any rules here—norms are fun if you don’t take them seriously.” Collier appreciates that people will not necessarily understand what he is putting into his music, but they will get something out of it and then invert the feeling they get out of his work into their own inimitable version. He is an explorer by nature, “I like that [my music is] immune to being understood. I find that relaxing. It gives me purpose.” Collier doesn’t need answers to every question; he’ll always be making his own roadmap. ◼︎