While the majority of the nominees in this year’s Grammy Album of the Year category came from artists who’ve achieved huge commercial success - Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and eventual winner Beyoncé, for example - Jacob Collier was one of two notable exceptions (the other being André 3000, for his ambient space jazz odyssey New Blue Sun, although he did previously shift plenty of units as part of OutKast).
Collier’s nomination, for Djesse Vol 4, followed his previous Album of the Year nod for 2021’s Djesse Vol 3, and the musician says that he’s proud of the fact that this puts him in a category of one.
“I heard the other day that I'm the first artist in history to be twice nominated for Album of the Year without ever having charted,” Collier told the A Bit Of Optimism Podcast. “None of my albums have ever been on any chart. I'm personally deeply proud of this. I was gonna say, I love that. It's kind of a cool stat.”
While Collier’s work has been warmly received by many critics and demonstrates high levels of musicianship, much of it isn’t exactly what you’d call ‘chart-friendly’. His rhythmic and harmonic choices are often ‘challenging’, to say the least, and there are plenty of melodic flights of fancy, too.
And, although he was happy to be in the running for this year’s Album of the Year Grammy - and won one for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella, for his version of Bridge over Troubled Water (with John Legend and Tori Kelly) - Collier doesn’t have a burning desire for this kind of validation.
“I mean, there's no such thing as Album of the Year,” he says. “This is made up. Someone made that up. I'm deeply honoured to be included in the number alongside such luminaries. I'm not taking it too serious.”
What’s more, there’s no sense that Collier has any kind of grand plan for creating Grammy-friendly albums.
“None of us really know what we're doing, we're just playing around,” he admits. “I don't sit around thinking, you know, ‘I'm bloody brilliant’, so much as just ‘what an interesting time to be Jacob,’ you know, and ‘what an interesting time to be making music’. Because I've made a very unconventional album that is deeply irreverent in many ways. And for it to be counted, as you know, one of those [Album of the Year nominees] is, it's just kind of a thrill.”
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