It's hard to say that one way of doing things is the best for everybody all the time.
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.
Music is just another language, but it's very special because it crosses everyone's borders.
I'm a firm believer that embracing the imperfections of making music is so much of what makes something groove. Getting rid of these imperfections runs the risk of removing a lot of the magic that makes this music really special, and diminishes music's ability to connect with us as human beings. We are all imperfect, after all.
Even if nobody was listening to it, I'd still be making music.
The bottom line is you need to be authentic, you have to be really honest to yourself.
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'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.
I have lots of strange ideas in the back of my mind.
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.
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.
I think that the journey of self to truth is always kind of a gnarly one.
I'm a firm believer in the saying that goes, 'If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans,' kind of approach.
I suppose for me, with 'Djesse,' I realized fairly early in the process that I also needed a character to walk this path, which in some ways is me, and in some ways is not me. I think of Djesse a bit like the infinite child who can see everything and walk into everything as light as a feather and just alchemize.
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.
I want to write orchestral music. I want to get a group of singers together and sing William Byrd songs.
The Proms are everything life is all about: people coming together, and joy and music and celebration and togetherness.
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.
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.
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!'
