Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I enjoy exploring music so much.
Having an idea is easy, courting one can be difficult.
I think that the journey of self to truth is always kind of a gnarly one.
I love the interaction with people online, I love engaging with the fans.
Making music with other people feeds spontaneity, and lends ideas to your solo work.
The bottom line is you need to be authentic, you have to be really honest to yourself.
Music is just another language, but it's very special because it crosses everyone's borders.
D is a wholesome key. It's not bland, like C. It's not neutral. It's probably on the bright side.
It was what I did after school. I'd learn a song in choir that day and I'd sing it, all the parts.
I love songs with, like, six or seven or eight different things going on at once, and that's just me.
I want to write orchestral music. I want to get a group of singers together and sing William Byrd songs.
It's not like I wake up and think, 'Now I'm going to go to work.' It just feels like a continuing exploration.
I just became accustomed to being all the members of the band. That was something that was really exciting to me.
I'm a firm believer in the saying that goes, 'If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans,' kind of approach.
The Proms are everything life is all about: people coming together, and joy and music and celebration and togetherness.
As a member of a generation who have been subjected to much over-stimulation, it's hard to say I fit into any one category.
I always wanted to, at some point, sit down and consider how to plot out one piece of work, one album, from start to finish.
There's an amazing power that music has, and it definitely had its power over me as a boy. I just saw fit to keep exploring it.
AI as a tool in music-making is fine, but it's always going to be the humanity in music that makes people want to listen to it.
I jumped into a world of musical learning that was very much led by myself and then I drew from the music that was all around me.
My mother was this force of nature when it came to both communication with people and the whole of learning music. She's a champion.
You can get people to follow very intricate pathways of musical information, but it feels like a nursery rhyme or a children's story.
I'd say that I'm a really quite a joyful person in general, but I think the idea of joy can be extremely complex, and rich and varied.
There's one song that I recorded called 'Saviour' and every single sound from that song was actually recorded in a shipyard on my iPhone.
I find it difficult to stand up for what you are and what your essence is, and seeing that clearly can be an unbelievably hard thing to do.
I suppose technically I could say I'm based in jazz, just because it's the school of thought that I've been encouraging myself to operate within.
The only reason I create something is because I'm chasing a feeling. You can use a bunch of musical or psychological operations to achieve that result.
The whole life of a song doesn't end with the way that it sounds on the record. How does this song grow? What works live? What do people like to sing along to?
The thing with music education is that it is good at teaching technique, but not texture. You only learn about that from listening to music and experimenting on your own.
I'm one of those people that's listened to so much music, I feel like I've soaked it all and not rejected anything, so it's all present there when I'm in my inventing room.
Music is like cooking for me: you mix the ingredients together in one big pan and see how they end up. Through experimenting, you find what you really like and stick with it.
You always have those moments of standing outside your own life and thinking, 'This is kind of bizarre and quite wonderful.' And I think those moments always catch you off guard.
A lot of the music that I really love, and a lot of my favourite music and a lot of my favourite things and a lot of my favourite people, these can be experienced on many levels.
Really, I was brought up with music as a second language. My mother was extremely encouraging of the sensitivities of my brain. It was this sense of curiosity but never pressure.
I was given this music programme called Cubase, one of the first multi-layering programmes, when I was seven, and I graduated to Logica at 11, and that became my primary instrument.
I always created things, layered things on top of each other. That hasn't changed at all. With this first album, it was basically a celebration of that process of inventing and building sounds.
The world of Stevie Wonder - in particular, the kind of overflowing joy that exists in every single thing I've ever heard him do, every note he sings - that is so deeply inspiring to me in every way.
In my experience, my music has drawn people of all ages, which is a real wonderful thing. And at my gigs you get everyone from six year olds to 90 year olds. And I find that really quite moving, actually.
I love to zoom in and study why a chord is making me feel a certain way, but then I've learnt to zoom out again. Because if I'm not actually feeling it, there's not much point making it in the first place.
The whole 'Djesse' project is, like, the paramount example of something that has evolved alongside me creating it. It started as one album, and then I realized that I had too many ideas for just one album.
Parents write to me, or come up to me after shows and ask me 'How can we get our children to be as excited as you obviously were as a child?' It's not necessarily what they want to hear when I say, 'Don't make them practise!'
It just so happened that I had this place called YouTube where everybody in the world could do exactly what they wanted to do and it's potentially one of the most exciting times I've discovered in the history of anything ever.
It's a really interesting situation, because when you make music at home all the energy goes into the process, and touring's all about the energy going outward. I had to learn how to do that transition, but once I figured that out it's so much fun.
It's funny, I guess when I was growing up, I didn't really think about being an instrumentalist, per se. I didn't think, well, I want to be a piano player, or, I want to be a guitar player, or even, I want to be a singer. I just wanted to be a musician.
I think of what I do for work as playing/jamming. Music for me is so much fun so I don't take my work very seriously in terms of not being humorous, but I take it absolutely seriously in terms of taking the time to make it as rich and glorious as possible.
Djesse,' essentially, is this spirit. It's this sort of character, very much with some childlike energy, which permeates all of this music... The first album represents kind of pre-dawn, to that moment at the end of the morning when everything's very much alive.
Music is one whole force. And I think the Proms have always represented very clearly that music is a universal language, one that everyone can speak. I've just followed my goosebumps in every direction and have found a recipe for what my music feels and sounds like.
Woke Up Today' is a number of different sections compounded together. There's the melodica solo section which is three divisions; there's the really funky thing in eleven before that, there's the chorus and verse and there's the ending which slows down and speeds up.
So the language of musical harmony is an absolutely extraordinary one. It's a way of navigating one's emotional frameworks, but without the need to put things into words, and I think that, as with many other languages, it doesn't matter how much you know about a language.
I grew up in this room filled with musical instruments, but most importantly, I had a family who encouraged me to invest in my own imagination, and so things I created, things I built were good things to be building just because I was making them, and I think that's such an important idea.