Jacob Collier is the most talented musician on the planet.
I’m not exaggerating.
He composes and arranges music that leaves even the smartest musicians dumbfounded. If you want evidence, his arrangement of Lionel Richie’s ‘All Night Long’ won him a Grammy earlier this year.
And so when I heard he wrote a song that moves into a musical key that none of us have heard before, I was super curious.
In typical music, there are 24 keys: 12 major keys and 12 minor. Every song you hear on the radio is in one of those keys.
So here is where Jacob Collier breaks that boundary: in his song ‘All I Need’, as the second chorus hits, the entire song is transposed up half a semitone. Instead of a traditional key change, moving from C to C sharp, the song moves from C to C Half-Sharp.
Here is a link to 10 seconds before the key change. When you listen to it, sit back and feel the key change happen. How does it feel to listen to music in a key that isn’t in any other pop song?
To me, it’s other worldly!