In My Room Jacob Collier

• 1 Woke up Today 04:40
• 2 In My Room 04:49
• 3 Hideaway 06:52
• 4 You and I 04:21
• 5 Down the Line 06:39
• 6 Now and Then I Think About You 00:53
• 7 Saviour 06:08
• 8 Hajanga 06:03
• 9 Flintstones 03:10
• 10 In the Real Early Morning 06:09
• 11 Don't You Know 09:10
• Total Runtime 58:54

Info for In My Room

Originally recorded, arranged, performed, and produced entirely by Collier in the music room of his North London family home, In My Room went on to win two Grammy Awards, with critics hailing him as a modern musical messiah. In the decade since, Collier's career has skyrocketed; he has amassed seven Grammy Awards, collaborated with over one hundred artists across a multitude of genres, sold out global arenas, and pioneered his famous "audience choir" phenomenon.

Jacob Collier is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, arranger, composer and producer, based in London, England. Hailed by many as one of the most prodigious and innovative musicians and thinkers of his generation, Jacob has proven himself worthy of every superlative that has been used to describe him. Spreading joy amongst a multitude of generations with a glorious child-like energy, an old soul, a knowledge of music that is second-to-none, and a tremendous warmth of humanity, Jacob’s style is flabbergastingly unique, combining elements from every genre under the sun — and his world is easy to get lost in.

Jacob, who is mostly self-taught, has been creating music for all of his 23 years. In 2012, he began to share some of these creations with the world via YouTube. These self-produced multi-layered multi-tracked audio-visual creations, borne from his family home in London, began to attract ears from all over the world, racking up tens of millions of views. One day in 2013, Quincy Jones’ ears reached Jacob’s sounds, and he signed Jacob to his management label, to help bring some of his ideas to life.

In 2016, Jacob released his debut album, “In My Room”, which was entirely self-recorded, arranged, performed and produced in his home in London.

Jacob then set out to bring his room to the stage. With the help of MIT PhD student Ben Bloomberg, he designed and built a groundbreaking one-man live performance vehicle which defies the musical laws of nature, featuring a circle of musical instruments, six simultaneous multi-instrumental loopers, a custom-designed vocal harmoniser instrument, a real-time reactive multi-Jacob video screen, and one Jacob in the centre of it all, The first ever performance was held at the Montreux Jazz Festival, 2015, where Jacob opened for Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. Minds were blown; goosebumps were risen. Jacob set out to tour the world.

From winning two Grammy awards for his debut album, to playing 150 shows in 26 countries on his One-Man-Show World Tour; to collaborations with Hans Zimmer, Herbie Hancock, Pharrell, Tori Kelly, Snarky Puppy, Metropole Orkest, Samsung and Apple; to speaking at the TED Conference 2017; to harmonizing hundreds of fans’ #IHarmU melodies to crowdfund his musical adventures; to teaching masterclasses and confounding music theorists around the globe with chords and rhythms that shouldn’t exist; to improvising circlesongs with musicians on the streets of the world; to simply walking through the rain — Jacob’s life is full of different colors. He learns new things every day.

Jacob Collie

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Jacob Collier
series of viral YouTube videos are what first made him a star, and caught the attention of Quincy Jones. On 2016’s In My Room, which won 2 GRAMMYs and a Jazz FM Award, Collier sang, played, and produced everything himself. And he made it all in his childhood bedroom. In My Room led to collaborations with Herbie Hancock and Hans Zimmer, performances with the likes of Pharrell, a TED Talk, a BBC Proms concert and much more. After releasing that astonishing gambit, he decided he wanted to open the process up to the world, to allow the music and musicians that had influenced him to participate in the very songs he wrote.

On January 1, 2018, Jacob woke up in London and began something bold: He sat down and started composing for an orchestra for the first time, giving himself just four weeks to finish an entire album before flying to The Netherlands to record the songs with the Metropole Orkest. That was only the first day and first act of a year of new musical adventures for the British singer, multi-instrumentalist, and production wunderkind—the dawn of a profound period of musical dialogue and discovery that is now poised to dazzle the world.

That morning, Collier started making Djesse, a four-album cycle composed entirely during 2018 and featuring contributions from a global cast of his musical inspirations. It is one of the most audacious recording projects to emerge this decade from someone who has already established himself as one of music’s most brazen and electrifying new minds. Djesse is a universal wonder.

“I never planned to record a four-album project, but it occurred to me that there was so much music I wanted to write at this point that I might as well just write it all,” explains Collier, laughing. “I’ve always been a huge fan of going to the deepest waters of something I don’t truly understand and making something happen. It’s amazing to see how oftentimes when you just jump in and do the thing, something magical will happen.”

Take, for instance, “Everlasting Motion,” the ecstatic rhythmic centerpiece of Djesse’s first volume. For years, the musically omnivorous Collier had studied gnawa, a spiritual and relentlessly percussive ancient sound rooted in Northern Africa. He loved its hypnotic rhythms and the way its vocals seemed to unfurl in endless ribbons. Collier wanted to collaborate with Hamid El Kasri, a modern Moroccan master of the form. He asked around, eventually obtained an email address, and sent a note explaining his backstory and project. Nearly three months passed. Collier had essentially given up on El Kasri, assuming that either the email address he had found was outdated or that one of Morocco’s living legends simply had no interest in such a nebulous project.

But suddenly, an enthusiastic answer arrived: Come to Morocco, and make music. Collier booked a flight to and studio time in Casablanca, where he spent 24 hours recording with El Kasri and asking one of gnawa’s current wellsprings about the history of the genre itself. He left with new information and a radiant piece of polyglot pop, where strings and horns and funky bass dance in jubilation. It is a magnificent moment of ignored borders and a positive affirmation of Collier’s central vision for Djesse.

In one story and one song, this is the spirit of Djesse. (Pronounced “Jesse,” the album’s name is an extrapolation of Collier’s initials, though he’s not the character at the center of this epic.) In these four albums, all written and engineered and produced by Collier, he has taken the singular approach to arrangement and harmony that have earned him acclaim since he was a teenager on YouTube and paired it with the artists he treasures. In the process, he has traveled from Los Angeles to New York, Tokyo to Casablanca, Nashville to Abbey Road with a compact version of his home studio in tow. Documenting a year in Collier’s life and of his musical loves, Djesse is a monumental testament to creative exploration and collaboration.

On the first volume, his key partner is the Metropole Orkest, the 70-year-old Dutch ensemble that programs and performs with the aplomb and energy of youth. Led by conductor Jules Buckley, the Metropole continues to reimagine how modern symphonies can sound and how they should play. Alongside Collier, they animate the voices of El Kasri, stunning a cappella group Take 6, and the rapturous soul singer Laura Mvula. You hear Collier wink awake through a gorgeous vocal aubade, then assert his distinctive voice as an arranger and orchestrator, where the ensemble becomes new limbs with which to create motion and harmony. “Keep in motion/Stay unspoken,” he sings again and again. “If I’m broken/Keep me open.” There are sweeping ballads, classical beauties, electric R&B tunes, and a cover of “All Night Long” that swings from South America to the American South in seven minutes that rush past in an instant.

And that’s just the start. As the volumes are revealed, different textures and themes and sounds will be explored in equally astonishing ways. Jacob imagined Djesse as a grand journey through space and time, and the volumes follow his path. In addition, across the quartiles nearly two-dozen collaborators will be featured, from pop stars and folk songwriters to guitar wizards and soul singers. Collier stands bravely at the center of it all, the writer, producer, arranger, and singer putting himself in conversation with the musical world at large.

“I’m treating it as this great big puzzle. Piece by piece, it comes together,” he says. “An idea like this can’t come without obsession on every single plane ride, every single day, every single night, staying up to think about how it all fits together. Rather than being my four walls, this time my room is the Planet Earth. I have been able to call many rooms my room.”

In times of political turmoil, the assumption is that the artistic response should be one of bile and vitriol, the raised fist of barbed punk or plaintive folk or urgent hip-hop instructing us how best to broadcast our anger and how best to organize it. Djesse isn’t a disavowal of that idea so much as an alternative that stares into a darkness with an irrepressible light, a universal ecstasy. During these four volumes, Jacob Collier doesn’t merely embrace globalism or give it the deference of lip service. He lives it, sings it, arranges for it through songs that fight for something—music and its power to remind us of the connections we all share, the joy, and pain and humanity of being alive at all.

This album contains no booklet.