Jacob Collier shared his personal development journey, including his decision to decline piano lessons at a young age and his process of learning to play music for his videos.
JACOB COLLIER: I think you’re so right. I remember two things. One is I remember my mom offering me piano lessons when I was eight years old because all I would do all day long, is sit at the piano and play cluster chords, you know, [mimics chords], wow, cool! And I remember my mom saying, “Do you want piano lessons,” and I remember just saying, “No I don’t, I don’t want piano lessons at all, actually,” because I’m fine, I’m just going to go at my own, my own pace, and I don’t really want to be the best piano player, you know, I just want to be the best at being Jacob that I can possibly be. And she was really kind of with me on that, and I’m very, very grateful to her. The other thing I was going to say was when I started making videos, I realized that in order to play them for the camera, I had to learn how to play them. Because I would record these baselines, and I remember, back in the day, you know, recording one note at the time, and editing it into the place where it sounded funky, you know. Because I couldn’t play it, but I knew I wanted it to go [mimics the music], you know, and so I would go [mimics music] and then [mimics music] and then [mimics music] and I’d edit to go [mimics music]. And that was fine, you know, and obviously it’s – you know, you’d think, “Oh, that’s not the way it should be done.” But then I’d turn the camera on to do that take, and I just had to, I had to get it together, and so I did, you know? And at that point it wasn’t a matter of, oh, am I good enough, you know, should – am I really qualified enough to be playing the – you know, it was just, well, I’ve got such a defined objective that there’s no possible way I’m not going to get this together because I have to. And so there was something really joyous about that for me.