JACOB COLLIER - Endlessly Curious

'Actually, I had a dream about Sting last night. I think he liked it, which was good,' Jacob Collier jokes about his cover of The Police's 'Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,' from his genre-defying new album Djesse Vol. 1, just released last month.Featuring orchestral flourishes, hip-hop breaks, and everything in between, the latest release from the 24 year-old wunderkind multi-instrumentalist is sure to impress even the most skeptical of listeners. It's the sound of genius unbound.After returning from a gig at MIT (yes, he plays gigs at the famed research university), Collier talked to Keyboard about his latest musical journey, a massive four-album project that will be released over the next year.For any other artist, the cacophony of different sounds on your new album Djesse might seem a little bit planned. But it feels like a natural extension of your curiosity. Oh yes, absolutely. It’s so freeing being in the 21st Century as a young creative person, because it’s not about “this box, this box, or this box.” It’s about where can your mind lead you in terms of a world to be creative. And this year, I had so much music to make that I wanted to make four different records, and so such became this four-album journey. The first one is probably the most ambitious of them all in some ways, because of the sheer number of musicians involved. I mean, the orchestra is 60 musicians. So every time that one 'take' is recorded, that means that’s 60 individual microphones and then 10 room microphones all around. And sometimes there’s overdubbing. And then I recorded 400 tracks on top of those guys. It’s this great big world of sound. It’s all about space and it all surrounds you. In order to kind of construct that as a format, it’s just many, many hours. It was all written in January. From January 2nd until January 28 when I flew to Amsterdam, I wrote and arranged all of the music. So I had to go with my first thought every single time, and I think making four albums in the year doesn’t leave you that much wiggle room for ideas. It’s like, “That’s the idea you have today? Then that’s the idea you’re meant to have today.”I think that’s the way art used to be. Before automation and computers, a song was recorded and that was it. There was no, 'Let’s leave that to the mix.' Yeah. I think what’s interesting nowadays is that the mixing and the production elements and the sort of spacializing of sound can become part of the art form. I’m a firm believer in the gesture that began the thing being a fast-moving thing. And then once the thing is there, then you can go concentrate on following that thing through right to the end of the line. I think that if you start by contriving the process and start by being too 'magnifying glass' into the thing, then you can completely lose track of the journey. And for me the four-album thing - obviously they’re each an art within their own right, but it’s one massive journey. So for me, it’s super important to bear that in mind.So you wrote the material for all of the four albums in one month?Just the first album. I woke up on January 1st and it was like, “Well, I guess I’ll get started then,” and I decided to do this thing. I went downstairs - because my bedroom is on the first floor of my house and then I go downstairs and there is the room. There’s this magical space that I’ve been creating in for 24 years. I sat in there and I thought, “This isn’t quite like normal because I’m not playing all the instruments on this one.” I’m writing for other musicians to play. So it has to be playable, it has to be enjoyable to play, and it has to be coherent as a sound. I grew up listening to orchestral music all the time, and I sang in operas as a boy. I’ve always been so creatively ravenous for information and for sensation caused by music that I think by sort of conscious osmosis - I’ve sort of gone [makes inhale sound] with all this classical music. But I’m not writing classical music at all. I’m writing music that in some ways it draws from so many different pots that it’s hard to say that it’s one particular thing. But the sound world is basically the orchestra so there’s something so enormous and so huge about the thing, which I really love. I wanted to get my hands filthy in that world and be like, “Well, what happens if you join a piccolo with a harp with a celeste?” I’ve heard it on recordings, I’ve heard it in concert halls, but let’s try it for myself.How did you begin the process? In [Apple] Logic, which is the piece of musical software that I use. Nowadays you can get pretty realistic orchestral sounds. So what do is I’ve got 60 tracks of orchestral instruments. I recorded every single part on that on a MIDI keyboard, so you hear a fairly realistic idea of what it’s kind of going to sound like. Obviously, the articulation is completely wacko. It’s all wrong. But the vibe is enough for you to write music and songs based around a world. And that I then transferred into Sibelius, which is notation software, and sent it over to Jules Buckley and his team, who sort of said like, “This note doesn’t exist on the oboe,” which was really useful. And that was it. We printed out the charts. I flew over to Hilversum for a week and we recorded the thing. When you say that you would “follow the idea through,” do you mean that you would have an idea and you basically chased it until that song was done?What I meant by that particular comment actually is further than the recording process. Once you’ve recorded the song, there are so many choices you can make about what to do with that sound. Say you record 60 tracks of orchestra - those could be right up against your nose - very close to you, or they could be extremely far away, or they can be all around the side, or they can be right in the center, or they could be very dry or very wet, or very crisp or very low and throaty. So you have all of these kinds of sounds. I guess it’s up to me as the one producer of the album to make all those kinds of decisions about what would align with the original vision for the song. This first album is all about the acoustic sounds that are huge, and Volume 2 will be about the acoustic sounds that are much smaller and more delicate, and the third album is about sounds that aren’t really acoustic at all. They’re kind of completely mangled and strange and hip-hop-y and groovy and pop-y, which is cool. And Volume 4 is revolving around this extraordinary church choir from Huntsville called the Aeolians of Oakwood University. And so that’s kind of where the sound reopens. In some ways, the four-album cycle is almost like the story of a year. It begins at dawn in winter when it’s so cold and so blue, and it’s this world where everything’s waking up for the first time. And then spring comes in. And album two takes it into summer and album three takes it through autumn and into winter. Everything dies off again. And album four is the kind of rebirth of that cycle.The opening of the record reminded me of the movie Fargo. It has that kind of Celtic cold.Celtic cold - I love it! Exactly. It is that. It’s like the world is still asleep and “Welcome to the world,” almost like waking up for the very first time.Back in 2016 you told us what Quincy Jones had taught you. You said, “He taught me many things, the importance of simplicity, the philosophy of framing a song as opposed to concealing it, the essentiality of knowing one’s history and the cultures of the world, the necessity of leaving your ego at the door so you can allow space for God to walk in the room, the importance of listening twice as much as you speak, and the balance of science and soul to name but a few.” I was struck by that because I feel like it's sort of a template for what’s happening on this record. There’s an investigation of different kinds of world views, and there’s a real sense of patience to the music. Do you feel like you’re putting some of his life lessons into action?Oh, definitely. In my eyes, there’s not too much that can possibly be different between somebody’s life and somebody’s music if they’re aligned correctly. And Quincy has been a huge part of my life. And so for that reason, it becomes a huge part of my music. Obviously, he’s also inspired me as a musician in so many ways. But yeah, it’s extraordinary I think to be around that particular guy just because he’s seen it all and he’s engineered so much of that and so much of the progress. He’s such a world traveler and he loves going and putting his fingers in different pies and thinking ‘I think I can make this recipe work.’ I’ve thought of myself a little bit like that I think with this album, sort of thinking, well, in order to achieve this kind of feeling I need to go to Morocco. So I went to Morocco for one of the songs on the first album, a song called “Everlasting Motion.” And this guy called Hamid El Kasri, this kind of Maalem of Gnawa music, kind of elevated this music to this whole other level. I’ve been a fan of his music for 10 years, but never in my wildest dreams did I think he’d write to this email I sent him. It took him two and a half months, but he did in the end. I flew to Casablanca and it was like meeting the king. He sat there with this huge long pipe and said something I didn’t understand.Photo by Morgan Hill-MurphyI’m surprised he had email!It wasn’t his email. It was Hicham’s email. Hicham is his manager. But yeah, Hamid speaks no English. He used to work for the king for 20 years, and no one ever leaves the king. Once you work for the king, that’s your life. And as far as I understand it, he asked the king if he would grant him the freedom to go and become a musician because that’s what he did around the court all the time. And the king said it was fine, and so he did. He went and became a musician and thank goodness he did because the vibes that he’s able to conjure are second to none. He’s an extraordinary musician, but I’ve always loved those rhythms that have this weird lilt to them, like they’re not quite straight. And Gnawa has this [mimics rhythm], like wonkiness, and I love that vibe. There’s something so spiritual about it. I could sit in the room and record things with the same wonk of groove and never achieve anything close to what that man is able to bring to the music. So I think to me it’s about plotting this route through all these different musical worlds and genres, guided by what sound world they belong to. So something belongs to a 'big sound' world, a 'small sound' world, a 'closed sound' world, and an 'open sound' world. And I’ve been ciphering my ideas into these different pots for the whole year, which has been really fun actually thinking, “Oh, I think I can marry this world with this world.” And in this day in age, why not?I was reading that you’re about to embark on a full band tour. Are you excited about that?I’m so stoked about it. I’ve spent about a year nursing this band idea carefully because I want it to become its own thing. I don’t want to impose all of this grandiose musical kind of worlds that I’ve been working into this thing if it’s not going to fit. But I just did this gig at MIT a couple days ago, and it was actually our first time playing together as a band. It’s going to be wacko.Who’s in the band?The band is a drummer called Christian Euman from the US who’s extraordinary. I think the bass player is my favorite bass player in the whole world, called Robin Mullarkey from the UK. And an extraordinary Portuguese singer called Maro, who’s based in Los Angeles. All of these musicians play a multitude of different instruments. And I still have my circle, so I’ve got my bass and my guitar and my percussion and my harmonizer and the piano and ukulele and all sorts of things. But we’re able to rotate and switch gears, and we’re also able to trigger some sort of weird Moroccan sounds, like orchestral snippets like “Whoosh” or “Whash” or something like that. So what we can do is we can build these worlds, but everything you hear onstage is generated live somehow, which is different from the one-man show because the one-man show relied heavily on pre-recorded playback that I did in my room. I’d layer instruments on top of each other - two, three, four, five, six instruments, and then it would hit into the chorus and I wouldn’t be able to play them all at once so I’d have the drums play back on the playback and I’d be playing bass and singing something and playing harmonizer at the same time. But for this band, we can play all the instruments live and also we can interact. It’s really nice to be able to sit onstage and think, 'I don’t have to carry this whole thing on my own,' even though it’s something I love to do. It’s wonderful. It’s like growing this family that I’ve grown and it’s crazy cool, but I think it’s going to be yet another evolution of this music, which is evolving before my very eyes. It’s a matter of how can we extract parts of these songs that’s going to work for this communication onstage and this process of bringing the music to life in a whole different way.We talked a little bit about “Home” and the opening of the record. Again to me, that one captures in a short amount of time a lot of your sense of harmonic adventure. Where did your daring sense of vocal arranging come from?It’s hard to say one particular place. I’ve always been such a fan of the human voice because everyone has one, first of all, so everyone can participate on some level. Also, you can be so adventurous and so precise with it, but you can also be so silly with it. And I think it’s possible to achieve levels of humor that you can’t achieve on any other instrument. Like, if you play a chord on the piano, it sounds great probably if it’s a cool chord. But if you sing that chord, you have every choice in the world for each of those notes - how you want that note to feel and where you want that note to go. That’s super cool. And obviously you can sing words. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but when you sing harmony, something crazy happens and it makes my brain go crazy. So I always find these sort of alternate routes to different tonal centers. For example just by thinking, if I want to sing that particular note I would want it to go “do-da-do-da-do-da” instead of looking at the piano and thinking about everything kind of vertically, like “stack, stack, stack.” When you sing chords, everything has to work horizontally as well as vertically. And so for me, the sort of adventure about writing for voices is discovering where those different melodies will take you, and sometimes for me recently they’ve taken me between semitones. So I’d have five chords and three notes, and so one melody would just go in between semitones, and you can’t do that on the piano. So I think for me, part of it is just having listened to Bartok and Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten and Earth Wind & Fire, and Herbie Hancock and Clare Fischer. I could go on and on and list names, but really I think this sort of fearlessness that you talk about is more of a human decision than it is a musical decision. It’s thinking, “That note doesn’t belong there but I’m going to make it work. I’m going to find a way to get a D# to work in a D major chord just because there is one here and there is one here and we need to get to this place. Let’s find a way to make it work.” It’s almost like solving puzzles. When you sing each of those notes, you have all of the license to make every part a melody. You can get away with murder and it’s wonderful.I also think it’s interesting having Take 6 on the record because they were the first kind of mainstream vocal group of my generation that veered into that territory.For me, too. I hear that in some of your writing.It was a revelation as a teenager thinking I’ve always loved voice, I’ve always loved harmony, and here come these guys who are doing everything that I’ve ever wanted to do with voices. And so I listened to them obsessively for so many years, and then later befriended them, which was absolutely surreal. I had this concert last summer at the Royal Albert Hall in London for the BBC Proms series, which was really extraordinary for me growing up on that concert series. I invited Take 6 to sing on it just because I’ve always been such a huge fan and there was this one arrangement of a song called “All Night Long,” which I really wanted them to do their thing on. So they came and did that and Hamid El Kasri came and Becca Stevens and Sam Amidon, who were two later collaborators on the album. But singing that song there made me think, “You know what? We should record this.” I’d already written the arrangement and I’d already recorded the orchestra, but it was lacking that kind of church thing that they bring to it, and it was crazy. And so I reached out to them and said, “Hey, what about it?” And they said, “We’d love to.” They did it remotely. They sent me the tracks and I was like a kid in the candy store at the room in London just thinking how many times have I sat in this room and listened to you guys sing and now I get to drag you around in Logic. It was just crazy.“With the Love in My Heart” is the first video from the new album. A myriad of people on YouTube said something to the effect of, “I don’t think anything could be as crazy as this music, but the video is!”I’ve always been a fan of trying to visualize the different musical elements that are going on. Nowadays, people love to watch almost as much as they love to listen to music. So for this particular song, which is such a trip, it’s such a journey, I wanted to sort of build up the multiple Jacob world which I’ve been inhabiting for many years, but do it in a weird, wacko way. I thought one way to do that would be to do something with mirrors. So I sent this vague treatment out to a ton of different musical directors and this guy, Nobumichi Asai, came back to me from Japan and he said, “I’ve got this crazy idea. We’re going to do this and this and this and we’re going to have you running around and there’s a bird flying around. They’ll be infinite Jacobs at one moment and they’ll be hypercubes full of Jacobs and all insane things and you’ll be playing a number of instruments, and it will be wild.” And I was just taken. And so I flew to Tokyo, filmed the video, and it was a 20 hour shooting day. It was grueling. I left not really knowing what it would look like because all I’d done was do a bunch of wacko stuff in front of green screens and mirrors. And then he sent me the first cut and it was just like being smashed in the head with a hammer. It was extraordinary. I think the trick with that song, actually the trick with anything that is kind of virtuosic and has a ton of information, is to tell a story with it. It’s very easy to say here’s a bunch of chords and grooves and things that are going to blow your mind, but that doesn’t leave anything in your heart and actually leaves you a bit cold. And for me, I’ve never listened to music for the reason of technical delight. I don’t even particularly like most of that kind of music. So I think for me as a sort of technician, the challenge has always been to bring the fullness of the language that I’d loved exploring to something that is storytelling and something that can take you on a trip and put you in a different world. So that music video I think was a really nice example of that vision. It sort of took it to the end of the line.“Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” really touched me because I grew-up with The Police and I even recorded with Andy Summers on a few of my albums. That song still feels relevant all these years laterIt’s one of the greatest songs ever written. You can’t argue with it. And I’ve always loved it, always. I’m a huge Sting fan and a huge Police fan. I’ve always thought one day I’ll do “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” and every time I’ve begun to start it’s felt wrong, but somehow with an orchestra in tow it felt like the right moment to do it.It feels almost Bobby McFerrin-ish. There’s levity in it, but not in a flippant way. Thank you. The thing about a song that good is that you can reinvent it to a certain point without losing any integrity of the song because it just holds itself so well. That was an absolute delight to arrange and to perform it at the BBC Proms. Hats off to Sting. Besides Logic and a MIDI keyboard, what types of things do you like to use when you’re putting ideas down?There are so many different aspects of the process sonically that I think for me part of the process is just sitting in this room filled with instruments and just seeing where I’m led. But there’s a central MIDI controller in the room, which is a Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol.The 88-key one?It’s the 61-note one, and I built it into my desk. That model’s now been discontinued, which is a real shame.Interesting that you’re using a non-weighted keyboard.For me, I got used to non-weighted keys on the road playing the harmonizer, which is this custom built MIDI controller based instrument where I can sing a note and play notes and it will sing all the notes I’m playing. And somehow the sort of speed of ideas that I got used to be able to go, “I’m hearing something like [sings melody].” It was less of an experience sitting down at a piano and thinking “I’m going to deliver these sounds,” which for me is where weighted keys sort of come into their own when you’re referring to hammers and acoustics and strings. For me, having such speed of ideas as I do when I’m creating, the semi-weighted keys made a ton of sense. So that’s built into my desk. The Yamaha U-3 piano is probably the place where I spend the most time just because there’s so much in the piano all the time. There’s chords and rhythm and melody and groove and everything like that. So that’s cool. And then one thing I did over the last couple years is I gave my room a little bit of an upgrade, which is a treat and I’ve been waiting so long to do it. Until I was 20 years old, I recorded everything on one [Shure] SM-58 microphone - drums, guitar, vocals - everything, just because that was the only microphone I had in the house. It was the one that I could afford and I made it work. I made it work somehow. So that was that. And then for my room mic I got a couple of [AKG] C414s, which are very standard, and a nice [AKG] C12 VR, which was cool. And for this album I wanted to kick things up even more so I got a couple of Mojave mics to record all the sort of strumming and percussion. My vocal mic is a Klaus Heine-modified Neumann U87, which is wonderful and glorious, and you can get so much color out of that thing. And Earthworks microphones over the drums and also inside the piano pickup and the back room mics. So really everywhere I am in the room I’m able to record, and that’s cool because I’ve been bringing collaborators into the room and saying, “You stand over there or stand over there and I’m just going to record you, because anywhere you stand you will be picked up.” I think that’s the thrill.What’s the front end that you’re using?I’m using a bunch of Grace preamps, which are stupendous. For the vocals I’m using a bunch of Avedis preamps, which have a 28k boost. I’m such a fan of that sparkle. Everything I believe runs over Dante. The computer’s actually in the second room. It’s in the bathroom so that the room is completely silent. It’s a lovely, lovely place to record. I’ve got a rack mount unit and things plug into the back of that thing so everywhere in the room things are kind of wired and visible. For me, I think however much invisible technology can be in a process, normally the better because you don’t want to be thinking, “Oh, I’ve got this idea. Oh now I need to plug in six cables and bring up my thing.” So for me, I think it’s about creating that creative space where every instrument and every piece of technology is secondary to the idea that you’re having at that moment.Can you talk about anything that you’re listening to lately that has inspired you?Yeah. There are so many innovators nowadays. I get excited when someone is willing to take one musical world and combine it with something completely different. Let me reel off a couple of names. A group like the Dirty Projectors, I don’t know if you know those guys, but there’s African guitar playing in there, there’s hip-hop big time because David [Longstreth] worked with Kanye for a little bit, and there’s a ton of wacko kind of production present there, super minimal. That’s who I’ve been a huge fan of the last four years. Bon Iver I think is tremendous because he started as a real folkster and is now entering into these glorious electronic worlds that he seems to create very well. James Blake, I’ve always been a big fan of because he doesn’t just do the electronic thing, he plays those sounds like instruments. And for me, when someone can take that level of granular production and make it feel musical, then that guy is a winner because that’s a hard thing to do. But really, most of my favorite musicians funnily enough who are still working, are on this record in some way, shape, or form. I’ve been able to sort of track them down and that’s been such a thrill for me. So someone like Lianne La Havas, who is on Djesse Volume 2, she’s such a genre straddler and she takes such risks with her writing. She could sing any song in the world and it would just sound drop dead gorgeous, but she chooses to write things that are a bit left of center and I respect her greatly for that. And so as I said at the beginning, it’s cool to be creative in a time where people are able to essentially do whatever they want. As a creative person you can always do whatever you want at any moment. But I think nowadays with the Internet, which is such a ticket to ride to any good idea, it’s just a matter of thinking what’s in your heart and mind right now? Just do that. For me, I’ve never, ever felt the need to waver. It’s just a matter of creating with a sense of ravenousness I think that drives me and drives my peers just to keep pushing that thing because there’s no reason not to nowadays.What’s interesting to me is that virtuosity is not looked at as geeky these days. It’s seen as cool. Years ago, a band like Snarky Puppy might have been seen as “too cerebral.” Now they’re trendsetters.Those pups dominated a scene, and still dominate that scene. What they did, and it’s extraordinary the way that they did it is that they brought that sense of fun into the room. Even when you’re watching the video, you feel the fun in the room. Someone will play a funky chord and someone else will go, “Oh!” People learn that it’s possible to get joy out of that side of music. As Michael League says, 'It’s music for the brain and booty.' Virtuosity just kind of for the sake of it I think can have a limited shelf life. For me, my favorite kind of virtuosity is when it comes directly from growth. I think what Snarky Puppy do so well is that they’ve grown up on such a wide array of music that when they come to collaborate, they bring all these skills with them, and it doesn’t feel forced. It feels natural. I think for any musician - myself included, who is a lover of those dense chords, those crazy grooves, that weird music information, it’s framing that in a way where it is able to be invisible. It didn’t need to be present on the surface; you just need to feel that it’s there. You don’t need to be thinking: ‘Oh this is crazy’. I tell you, it’s a huge joy to go on tour and play music to the sorts of crowds you're talking about – incredible young musicians who have all the ears, and who are ravenous for information. There’s a massive appetite for it. You play some crazy Lydian dominant chord, and they all go, “Oh!” It’s crazy.The next few questions come directly from our readers. What was the most difficult counterpoint concept you learned, and how did you come to terms with it?Microtonal voice leading is pretty challenging. As I mentioned earlier on, you have a variety of steps, so you’ll have five notes and then say, two semitones. You have to get between those semitones. So that’s kind of counterpoint at its highest order because what counterpoint is is that mastery of melodies weaving in and out of each other like this to generate harmony. Someone like Johann Sebastian Bach is like the all-time master of counterpoint. Nowadays a lot of jazzers can fall into this kind of vertical trap: stack, stack, stack; chord, chord, chord. But I feel that counterpoint is very much relevant, especially when you’re writing for voices, and that’s something that I do all the time. And so I wanted to kind of push that thing a little bit so microtones sort of evolved. I kind of did it by mistake at first and then I realized it was super fun and I loved the challenge of doing that. But it’s taken me like three or four years to wrap my head around and I feel like now I’m at a point where I have some grounding of understanding it and I’m just beginning my journey.Who was the collaborator that taught you the most?Really up until this point, it has to be the orchestra just because of the scale of the whole thing. Orchestras don’t mess around, and you can’t afford to mess around with them! So I went there and I recorded and by the end of day one I’d learned as much as I learned in my entire life.You're talking about the Metropole Orchestra?The Metropole Orchestra conducted by Jules Buckley, superhero. I have to call his name out. He's incredible. But also Hamid El Kasri. To work with somebody that doesn’t speak your language gives you the necessity to formulate a language that both of you understand, and that has to be something musical. You have to work with what you have, communicate with what you have, and something has to come out of it, and that taught me a ton.If you could spend a day with any musician dead or alive, who would it be?It’s a left of center answer but I would probably say Benjamin Britten. He’s a composer from England. He’s probably still my number one harmonic hero. I sang in The Turn of the Screw as a 12 or 13 year old - three different productions of that, so I know every note. The way that he uses harmonic language to me feels so embedded in his experience of the world emotionally, and I’d love to know how much of that was conscious. As someone who consciously pursues emotional states musically and otherwise and enjoys the awareness of a multitude of different levels of emotional data at any one time, I just wonder how much of that was subconscious and how much of that he intended. And if he intended it, what his science was. Someone like that blows my mind. The amount of emotional integrity he can bring and the worlds that he conjures up, it’s beyond my wildest dreams really.Last one. Name some of your desert island discs. Can I bring up my list?You travel with a list?I keep a list of desert island discs. When I travel, that’s my one moment to listen to music so I always keep notes of the stuff that I listen to. I have a note here, which I can show you. It’s just thousands of thousands and thousands of albums.This has been like the last three years of my life, just every single album I’ll write down. I asterisked my favorites so I’m going to read you the first 10 asterisks I have here. Chris Thile, the mandolinist, playing Bach. He does Bach: Sonatas and Partitas Vol. 1 for violin. It’s absolutely freaking amazing. It’s just extraordinary. More albums, let’s see. Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. That’s an extraordinary piece of work. Dirty Projectors, I mentioned earlier. Bitte Orca is one of their albums. D’Angelo’s Voodoo is an all-time classic. That record is serious. I’ve always preferred Michael Jackson's Off the Wall to Thriller. Rod Temperton, the songwriter, was a really good friend of mine and just a profound disco head. He was just an extraordinary guy. I’ll give you a couple more. Laura Mvula's Sing to the Moon. It’s just an extraordinary album. I’m honored to have her on Djesse Volume 1. Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales is an all-time classic. We talked about The Police, but that was one of my absolute favorite childhood records. Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life would have to be one just because Stevie does everything on that thing and it's his brain child and I can relate to that. That is the greatest music in the world.