Jamie Cullum – HuffPost 10.6.14

Mike Ragogna: Jamie, what advice do you have for new artists?

Jamie Cullum: I think it’s good to just do without thinking too much of the consequences. So much of the really good stuff happens with that. Obviously, now you can broadcast everything you do straight away, technically, you can start getting feedback straight away and you can get so caught up in what other people think about what you’re doing it’s quite hard to develop and make mistakes and get on with it. You really should be getting on with it. You can put stuff out there, that’s great, but you really need to do it without thinking, because you need to develop. And it’s great to imitate your heroes as well. Imitate your favorite people as much as you want and through imitation, you will become the person you want to be eventually. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. If you want to sound like Prince, listen to a ton of his records and make a few things that sound like Prince. Keep doing that and eventually your true person will come out of that.

MR: Is that the process you used?

JC: Yeah, I think so. When I started out in one of my bands I was trying to be Ben Folds, in another one I was trying the Harry Connick, Jr. thing. In another band, I was playing guitar, trying to be Jeff Buckley, then I was a DJ on the weekends thinking I was a member of The Beastie Boys. Eventually cut to twenty years later and maybe I operate somewhere between all those things. Or I try to, anyway.

MR: For somebody with as broad of a taste in music as you have, how do you ever become satisfied with your recordings?

JC: You don’t. That’s the great thing about it. You’re always searching for that satisfaction because it always eludes you. That’s why you keep going, why you keep trying to get better and keep searching. That’s actually the beauty of it. It’s an old and much-hackneyed thing to say, but the destination is an illusion. The journey is the whole point.