“I didn’t just want to pick the same songs I’ve done before for lists like this,” says Jon Hopkins, referencing previous “best of” lists that included the likes of Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys. He says some of the choices were “agonising” and the list was tweaked “many, many times” before arriving in its final form. “I’ve had to be very ruthless in what I deleted!This time he focussed on some of the lesser-known songs and albums that have inspired him throughout his life, as well as “more recent” music that proved influential while making his new album Ritual. “They are all songs that are fascinating to me but in very different ways.”
Hopkins has chosen everything from the classical composers he discovered while studying piano at the Royal College of Music in London to the likes of his early favourites, Ozric Tentacles, a band he found on a mixtape from his brother while getting stoned in his bedroom as a teenager. There are sounds from travels across the world – the music that soundtracked a road trip across rural America and a recent journey to Zimbabwe – and abstract, experimental tracks from the likes of Bon Iver, Adrienne Lenker and Brian Eno too. “It turns out, it’s quite an unusual range,” Hopkins laughs of his choices.
Many of the songs here mirror some of the creative choices on Hopkins’ new album, be it via their story-like structures, their exploration of the very nature of creation, their experiments with sounds that create a feeling “like light dancing on water” or the rituals their creators went through. On both Ritual and in his Baker’s Dozen, there’s a feeling of freedom. “I suppose one of the fun things about getting older and having been releasing things for 25 years now is that you just don’t care so much now about being cool,” he laughs. “So I just went overtly mystical and put in weird whispered magical incarnations and numerology and just stuff I’m fascinated with.”
It also links, he says, to what he learned in his time working with Brian Eno in his early career – something he thinks may have now come full circle. “The one thing I learned from him is just to not overthink things,” he explains. “It’s all about you enjoying yourself… look for the bits that bring you joy. I blindly follow that now and I trust that the broader intuition is there behind the process.”
He says, in fact, that Ritual was the most joyous record he’s ever made after many experiences of struggling in the studio. “There was this thing that David Lynch says – I don’t know the quote word for word – but there’s this feeling that everything artists do has to be born out of pain and you have to be tortured – and he just absolutely disagrees with that. I hadn’t actually found [what Lynch said] to be true until recent years.” Hopkins says working with others and enforcing limits has helped. “Perhaps working eight or nine hours in the studio isn’t as productive as doing four hours and using the rest of your time to have a joyful life. So when you’re back in there, you’re nourished and weirdly, you do more work. Not being so rigid led to much more joy in the studio.”
From his home in east London, Hopkins finds his list of 13 choices and wonders where to begin. We start with a song that brought him, like the making of Ritual much joy…
Jon Hopkins headlines this year’s Green Man Festival, which takes place this weekend. His new album Ritual is released on 30 August via Domino.
To begin reading his Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Record’ below
