“Festivals are the best because you can’t control anything, and for a control freak like me, that’s a wonderful experience.”
― Jack Garratt
“With every milestone that I’ve come across, there’s always been a little note at the bottom that’s said, ‘Don’t worry, there’s another milestone coming up.’”
― Jack Garratt
“The thing that was most constant when I was growing up was just complete support and adoration from my parents.”
― Jack Garratt
“I would sing around the house, and I would always play on things just because instruments were always there, but I didn’t show any genius as a child. I wasn’t a prodigy or anything like that.”
― Jack Garratt
“Performing outside is always kind of strange. Usually, you can’t hear something, whether it’s your voice or instrument, but it’s a fun challenge.”
― Jack Garratt
“The most important thing for me is to have as much control over what’s going on in front of me as I possibly can, so because of that, I don’t play to a click track, and I don’t have anything on the grid. Everything is triggered by me. Everything is played by me. Everything is within my control.”
― Jack Garratt
“I get inspired by the sounds that evoke an emotion from me. That’s what I am drawn to; that’s what turns me on.”
― Jack Garratt
“The best music is the music which brings out something of you that you didn’t know was there before, or you did know was there but had avoided.”
― Jack Garratt
“I spent my entire childhood going ‘look at me, look at me, look at me,’ before realising I needed someone to look at me for more than just what I was showing off for.”
― Jack Garratt
“I got to a point when I was 20 that I dropped out of university because I felt I didn’t have any purpose, and I wanted to find a fire in me.”
― Jack Garratt
“My mum would play Stevie Wonder around the house, and I remember just loving the songs and feeling so blown away by how much was going on.”
― Jack Garratt
“I genre-hop quite a lot. I love manipulating genre and deconstructing it and making it irrelevant. Genreless music is great because it means you get to write in any genre that you like.”
― Jack Garratt
“I like making sounds and putting it together, I’m not just a singer or a producer.”
― Jack Garratt
“I’ve purposely made my music to be challenging and different. There’s some electronics, R&B, blues, Motown, country, jazz and lots of soul.”
― Jack Garratt
“My mission is to just keep creating music. If it helps people in some way, then I’m doing the right thing.”
― Jack Garratt
“I grew up with parents who really encouraged me to listen to as much music as I could.”
― Jack Garratt
“I’ve always found myself to be most free and creatively open when I’m on my own.”
― Jack Garratt
“I find myself working ten steps ahead of where I actually am on my laptop or keyboard, but I know what the ten steps are. I just haven’t got to them yet.”
― Jack Garratt
“I didn’t do myself any favours. I would be resentful of my own ideas even before I’d said them out loud. But music was always the most consistent and peaceful thing for me. So I taught myself to be my harshest critic rather than just a mean voice in the back of my head.”
― Jack Garratt
“I wish I was a prolific writing wondrous boy genius – I wish I was Stevie Wonder – but I wasn’t. I was me. I wrote terrible songs about girls I was head-over-heels about. As soon as a pretty girl looks at me, that’s it – I’m in love, and I should probably write a song about it!”
― Jack Garratt
“I got my first laptop, what I learned to do everything on, when I was 17 or 18, and I had no idea what I was doing. I’d only ever produced on an 8-track before. When I was about 13 and writing songs, I would write on that. It would literally be eight tracks, and that’s all I had.”
― Jack Garratt
“The ‘Remnants’ EP was the first time I got to really explore myself as a producer, and I got the insane idea of doing it on my own in my future career.”
― Jack Garratt
“I’ve been naturally quick at learning things, and I learn by doing things, so if I sit beside someone who is actively doing something, I look at how they do it and absorb the way in which they do something and find my own comfortable way of reimagining that, or using certain techniques in my own way.”
― Jack Garratt
“I don’t listen to much music on the go because I tend either to be writing my own music or wanting a break from the music around me.”
― Jack Garratt
“I want my music to sound good on whatever people are listening – laptop speakers, those crappy little white ones you get with your PC.”
― Jack Garratt
“Tech gives people more opportunities to be themselves in front of other people. Sometimes that’s great; sometimes it’s bad.”
― Jack Garratt
“The reason I’m scared of flying is because I’m not in charge. Being so far out of control terrifies me.”
― Jack Garratt
“I will have a playlist ready that I’ll play out to the audience before I walk on stage, and I’ll listen to that same playlist in the room, so by the time I walk on stage, I’m in the same frame of mind the audience is.”
― Jack Garratt
“With the BBC Sound list, it’s just humbling even being put aside those other musicians – people like Alicia Kava, who I am a huge fan of.”
― Jack Garratt
“I believe that musical instruments are created because they are supposed to be played. There’s not an instrument that’s been designed to not be playable – it kind of defeats the point.”
― Jack Garratt
“All I do is hope that someone feels something from listening to my music.”
― Jack Garratt
“Who am I to sit here and say I’m going to change the face of music?”
― Jack Garratt
“I find it hard to not like music if it has passion behind it and good integrity. Only if it’s made for the wrong reasons and shows a lack of respect for its audience will I find something to dislike.”
― Jack Garratt
“I am only interested in celebrating music.”
― Jack Garratt
“I spent 19, 20 years of my life being terrified about what I looked like. I was a ginger white kid.”
― Jack Garratt
“I enjoy the music I make because I have to – if I didn’t, I wouldn’t want to make it, and I wouldn’t want it to be heard by other people.”
― Jack Garratt
“When I was younger and played acoustic guitar music, I got a lot of Sheeran comparisons, along with guys like Paolo Nutini and James Morrison.”
― Jack Garratt
“I find it really difficult to turn my head off. I find it difficult to zone out.”
― Jack Garratt
“I watch cartoons a lot. I’m a big ‘Rick and Morty’ and ‘South Park’ fan.”
― Jack Garratt
“I was put through piano lessons when I was a kid. I say ‘put through’ because it was fun and I loved it, and it’s been beneficial now, but it was difficult because, although I can read music, I much prefer just playing and improvising and at least finding my own way to play an instrument.”
― Jack Garratt
“It’s difficult sometimes to go and see a show and enjoy it and not go and see a show and critique it.”
― Jack Garratt
“I studied at university for a term and a day, and then I dropped out.”
― Jack Garratt
“I was studying primary school education. I was going to be a teacher. I was going to get my teaching qualification and have that as my safety net and then tackle the music industry.”
― Jack Garratt
“I just hope people enjoy ‘Phase’ as much as I’ve enjoyed making it. I hope it’s a good reaction.”
― Jack Garratt
“As a kid, I could just pick up melody and harmony instinctively, and that’s why I can play lots of instruments.”
― Jack Garratt
“Music has always been part of my family’s life. My brother, sister, and I all have the same ability to pick up an instrument and play.”
― Jack Garratt
“I wanted to be a teacher because that is all I knew. It was a great course on primary school education, in which I could specialise in music, but I ended up dropping out after I was honest with myself about what I really wanted to do with my life.”
― Jack Garratt
“The only intention I’ve ever had creatively, as a musician, is to be as different from myself as possible.”
― Jack Garratt
“I don’t want to write the song that I wrote yesterday, and I don’t want to write the song I’m going to write tomorrow; I only write the music I’m writing now.”
― Jack Garratt
“Genre hopping is something I intend to do, and I intend to do it forever and ever because I think genres are boring.”
― Jack Garratt
“Lyrics are really, really hard, I think, or at least they’re really hard for me. Some people can channel lyrics faster. I find them very hard to find, so because of it, they take me a long time, and I really think about them.”
― Jack Garratt
“I hope that I am, in a way, helping and touching other people with my music, and being a musician and having this as a job gives me a sense of purpose beyond my own selfish needs.”
― Jack Garratt
“I’m ultimately a perfectionist who doesn’t believe in perfection.”
― Jack Garratt
“There is a pressure, but my job essentially is not to listen to that pressure, not to buckle underneath that pressure, but instead to continue making music in the way that I have been making it.”
― Jack Garratt
“Winning the BBC Music Sound Of 2016 poll has left me feeling pretty stunned at the end of one of the most emotionally and physically intense years of my life.”
― Jack Garratt
“Ever since I was a little kid, my ears and my hands would talk to each other very well, so I could pick up instruments quite easily.”
― Jack Garratt
“I found a way to connect with lots of instruments rather than just fixating on one of them. I just loved making noise on anything.”
― Jack Garratt
“When I perform live, I’m doing a lot, but I kind of black out. I don’t think about it too much.”
― Jack Garratt
“The most difficult thing for me as an artist, as a creator of music, is lyrics. But everything else, I just do it.”
― Jack Garratt
“People forget that, for example, Adele wasn’t always the Adele we know. Sam Smith wasn’t always the Sam Smith that we know.”
― Jack Garratt
“I’m just here to do the best that I can do with the music that I make, and I’m not making it for any other reason than I feel like I have to. These ideas have to be created because they’re in me, and if I leave them in my head, I’ll go crazy.”
― Jack Garratt
“I wanted to create a body of work that I was proud of. It’s come from honesty and integrity, without forcing anything from myself, the ideas had to come instinctively and organically. Whether that translates to people in that way, it’s kind of out of my hands now.”
― Jack Garratt
“I had a passion and a soul in me that was screaming to be heard, and I had to let them out in as honest and challenging a way as I could.”
― Jack Garratt
“When I was a kid and writing more acoustic songs, I was doing it more for the attention than for the love of the music. I knew I needed to change something because I wasn’t having fun and wasn’t liking the songs I was writing.”
― Jack Garratt
“If you can fool every single member of the audience into thinking you’re confident and you deserve to be there, everyone will jump on your side.”
― Jack Garratt
“It’s amazing to be nominated for the Brits’ Critics’ Choice Award 2016. It’s such a significant award that highlights the importance of new music, so it’s a genuine honour to have been nominated alongside some other incredible new acts from the U.K.”
― Jack Garratt
“I’m always working on new stuff.”
― Jack Garratt
“Every single pair of trousers I own has a plectrum in it.”
― Jack Garratt
“For me, creating music is just as relaxing as sitting down and doing nothing.”
― Jack Garratt
“My grandfather was a church organist and would sing in choirs and was a musical genius to a certain extent.”
― Jack Garratt
“The music in my family has always been there; it’s been quite an obvious trait that seems to have trickled down the bloodline.”
― Jack Garratt
“I would go to school and try to talk to my mates about music and playing instruments and stuff, and they would turn around and go, ‘What’re you talking about? Shut up.’ And I realised that I was the weird one.”
― Jack Garratt
“I remember, from aged six to nine, I was loud and abrasive and loved making noise and loved playing instruments and doing all those things. When I was about ten, I realised I could get attention by doing that, so when I was eleven, I started writing songs.”
― Jack Garratt
“People don’t want to hear the same song 12 times in a row on an album.”
― Jack Garratt
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as perfection. But I’m a perfectionist. I don’t believe in the idea of perfection, but I will strive to achieve it.”
― Jack Garratt
“I’ve always said that I would only ever release something that I would want to listen to as a fan.”
― Jack Garratt
“I feel the best way to respect my audience is to not give them what they expect from me… ’cause it’s fun that way.”
― Jack Garratt
“I remember listening to ‘Songs In The Key Of Life’ as a kid. Stevie Wonder has an ability to manipulate pop into something globally obtainable. Anyone can listen and enjoy it because there’s something for everyone. That woke me up to the possibilities of pop music.”
― Jack Garratt
“I was a huge pop music fan as a kid, but the bands I was into were like 5ive and N-Sync. It was like watching a cartoon. There was so much going on, and the production was so well mixed. Stevie Wonder was able to give you those melodies and production but back it up with such creative integrity and real musicianship and artistry.”
― Jack Garratt
“There’s a stigma attached to ‘pop music,’ like it’s a taboo word. It used to make my skin crawl when people said it, and I’d say, ‘I’m not a pop star! I want to be a respected musician!’ But I think people have changed the way they think about it.”
― Jack Garratt
“My guitar setup is inspired by Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
― Jack Garratt
“I saved up my pocket money when I was about five or six years old. I just wanted to buy a CD, and at that age, I didn’t care about what it was, and I ended up buying ‘The Teletubbies Say ‘Eh-Oh!” I started off strong.”
― Jack Garratt
“I’m fascinated by film scores, especially film scores for children’s movies because they have to be able to entertain an audience that isn’t interested in music yet.”
― Jack Garratt
“I listen to podcasts when I run because it means my mind still gets stimulated by something else.”
― Jack Garratt
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