Unveiling entirely new universes

Inspiring reflections on creativity and life from singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Jacob Collier

“The wisest of us don’t really know what’s going on, but we do know who we are and what matters to us.” 

I discovered Jacob Collier through this interview with Colin and Samir that Jeremy Connell-Waite shared last week, and have gone down the most enjoyable rabbit hole since. I not only watched the entire 2.5 hour interview, but have listened to all of his albums and watched many of his videos. What an inspiring and original artist. I wish I had known about him and his work for the past 10 years! 

Listening to him I was reminded of Bulent Atalay’s description of transformative geniuses in his excellent book, Beyond Genius: A Journey Through the Characteristics and Legacies of Transformative Minds (which I would also highly recommend reading). Bulent defines transformative geniuses as follows: 

“Transformative geniuses rarely conform to any recognizable topography. They appear to leap from one summit to another, their creative efforts altogether redefining existing disciplines and often ‘unveiling entirely new universes’, a throwaway expression from the Caltech chemist Frances Arnold (Nobel Prize, 2018). Frequently, they are hard-pressed to explain how exactly they went about solving their problems. It is a combination of an insatiable curiosity, imagination, intuition, motivation, and intensity, often conjoined with surpassing intelligence, aversion to authority, and more than occasionally, a touch of lunacy.” (p. xv)

He writes about the lives, traits, habits, strengths, failings, and where possible the thought patterns of five individuals: Leonardo, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, and Einstein. I had enjoyed being engrossed in the lives of these five protagonists, and the connections to the ‘ordinary’ geniuses in their orbits. Since reading it last month, I’ve been pretty much non-stop listening to Beethoven. Supplanted this week by Jacob Collier! 

In the interview, Jacob talks about how he doesn’t appreciate it when people tell him he’s a genius, finding the label quite impersonal as “there’s no bridge there.” That it’s a way of writing him off as being outside of their understanding, but he explains how he rather desires being really seen and understood. That he’s also just a “flawed human being” who also has this “big world”. 

He’s very right, and I’m not trying to block that bridge, as on the contrary there is so much that deeply resonates in both the ideas he conveyed, and in his music, which I personally believe is in that universe-bending realm. 

His discussion about genius is one of the many moments of humility in the interview, and one that captures his understanding that the deeper thing in life that ultimately matters is real connection with others. 

I love when he talks about meeting Quincy Jones at age 19 and rejecting his offer to manage him. Something that surely would have been a dream to many. Rather, he tells him “let’s be friends”. He doesn’t see the relationship in a transactional way; he doesn’t want to “leverage” it. Quincy does later become his manager, but he starts off on his own, and they have clearly remained friends. This really speaks to me. A big part of why I wanted to start my own organisation was to be able to work in the way I wanted to, cultivating working relationships rooted in friendship and connection, with people I like and admire, who inspire me.

Beyond that, Jacob wants to make music his own way. When one of the interviewers asks him how he even knows what ‘my own way’ means, he responds quite aptly by pointing out that “the only person who would ever know that is me”. Very true. 

There is a deep wisdom that comes through in the interview about the supreme importance of knowing ourselves, who we are, and what matters to us. I agree that it’s a necessary foundation from which we can then go anywhere, resilient and open to all of life’s surprises. That it’s from that core of self-knowledge that we can be curious, asking good questions, experimenting, and “embracing the nonsense”, giving ourselves permission - that “it’s ok to be wild”. 

In my last set of reflections, I was inspired by a similar sentiment evoked by physicist Richard Feynman about the importance of valuing uncertainty and curiosity, and why that matters for politics. I think this interview conveys why this matters not just for politics, but for science and art, and for life more widely. It’s this part of ourselves that is connected to that feeling of what it means to be alive. 

While much of this feels very common sense, I also know from experience how so many people in various settings try to shut this part of ourselves down, and that it takes courage to be our full selves and to shake up the status quo. There are rules, and there are known or ‘normal’ ways of doing things. ‘But, we’ve never done this before’ is a phrase I’ve encountered all too many times in my life. 

Asking questions, pursuing new ideas that have never been tried, daring to create - even if we may make something that is ‘bad’ or if we are wrong - is all part of the creative process that leads to transformation, that changes our understanding of the world, and ultimately shifts something in ourselves too. 

Beyond that, one of the other aspects that stood out from the conversation and also struck a chord was about the way he talked about contributing to YouTube: “I was contributing to a conversation that was already happening. You learn, you gather, you share… We’re constantly all learning, none of us really know what’s going on. The best thing we can do is be open”.

Later on, he discusses the evolution of his music, from re-harmonising songs of others that he likes, to intentionally fostering collaborations with other artists who he admires and wants to work with, and to rather spontaneously coming upon the experiments with the ‘audience choirs’ that he’s now become known for conducting. 

This again reminded me of a point that stood out for me in Bulent’s Beyond Genius - that those we have considered as geniuses throughout time have not entirely invented new ideas or concepts from left-field, but in various ways have built upon the knowledge and foundations in their fields, adding through their ingenuity and imagination a perspective-shifting contribution. 

Moreover, their motivations came from a thirst to learn and to contribute new knowledge. It’s striking that the five transformative geniuses Bulent writes about are all autodidacts, as is Jacob Collier, teaching himself all sorts of instruments, and even re-inventing the guitar in some ways. Together with Ben Bloomberg at MIT, Jacob also invented the Harmonizer, a new instrument that enables instantaneous real-time choirs, so that he was able to do a one-man show with 12 instruments, 3d cameras, a looper, and a harmoniser. 

I admire the intentionality behind his many collaborations, which are clearly in a spirit of friendship, creativity, joy, learning, and pushing the boundaries of what’s been done before. One of the big sets of questions that emerged for me from reading Beyond Genius is about the distinctions between individual and collective intelligence and when and how we need to elevate or value one over the other. A lot of my own work has been rather focused on the conditions that are needed to enable collective intelligence to emerge and to thrive. Drawing on research from various fields from psychology to politics and business, which has shown that diverse collaborations tend to lead to better outcomes. 

Yet all of the examples from the book and from Jacob’s oeuvre highlight that there is also something special and necessary about recognising that we also need conditions that enable individual intelligence to be nurtured and thrive, and that there are clearly people in the world whose intelligence is of another order. They clearly also learn from and work with others, but it is the combination of their intelligence with that wonderful mix of character traits mentioned earlier - insatiable curiosity, imagination, intuition, motivation, and intensity, as well as aversion to authority - that leads to transformation. I think that many people are in circumstances where they don’t benefit from these enabling conditions that encourage one to think beyond the status quo, try new things, follow passions, and ultimately have agency. 

At one point in the interview, Jacob talks very powerfully about how everybody is trying in their own ways, and sometimes failing, to love. That when we look at the ‘blundering world leaders with sometimes devastating consequences, we need to remember that everyone is just trying to love. Because there’s nothing else to live for. Sometimes we have to look hard to remember that. They love a part of themselves that destroys, or love the feeling of power or lording over. And it’s been that way since the dawn of time. Now is a prevalent time for all these forces.’ He goes on to say that:

“You honestly get to decide what the world is for and where you are in it. It’s up to you”. 

I think this is partly true. Of course in an absolute way it is true. But many people for all sorts of reasons don’t feel like they have the agency to decide what the world is for and where they are in it. Either their family or their friends or their coworkers or teachers, or the wider set of social norms which we are all in some ways bound by as well, have imposed a sense that the world is a certain way, and that certain people have a certain place in it. To question or challenge this is not always easy and can even be dangerous. These are the enabling conditions that I’m referring to, that I think need to be questioned when we think about both individual and collective intelligence.

How can we get to a place where everybody truly feels like they are living the life they want to live in the world they want to be living in? 

Certainly, having sources of inspiration is part of that journey. Jacob Collier is only 29, so time will tell what his legacy will be. But even if he stopped writing, producing, playing tomorrow, I think he will have left a transformative impact on the future of music. 

The interview opens with a reference to a set of contradictory quotes about him in a recent BBC documentary. One is by Chris Martin, who thinks upon first hearing his music that this must be from the 16th century. The other is by Jacob’s mother, where she says that he was really born at the right time.

It reminded me how poet Ben Johnson wrote of Shakespeare that “He was not of an age but all time”. Perhaps the same is true here. 

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A few videos worth watching: