Imogen Heap Interview

Imogen Heap

British singer-songwriter-producer and two time Grammy nominee Imogen Heap spearheaded the DIY music movement by turning a fledgling career into an online phenomenon.

The recording and manufacture of Heap’s third solo album – the recently released Ellipse – is likely to further cement the singer’s reputation as “the first download diva.”

Building up to the release of a third solo album ‘Ellipse’, Imogen Heap further honed her expertise as an Internet marketeer by recording 40 video blogs to keep fans fully involved throughout the entire process of the making of the new record, including the brick-by-brick building of a home-based studio.

Heap’s loyal fan base, fully entrenched in every creative element of her development, eagerly anticipated the release, yet Heap herself displays an unusually self-depreciating attitude for a self-sufficient artist who has elicited such remarkable attention…

I understand you rebuilt your studio before embarking on recording your new album, was that a stressful process? I didn’t just rebuild it; I built a studio from a shell of a room that used to be my playroom when I was a little girl. It was quite an ordeal, I stupidly thought it would take about a month, got a carpenter in to make a few units and then eight months later after I’d completely tore out all of my hair and spent a load of money finally ended up with a fantastic studio.

What does your studio contain now that your old studio was lacking? Not that much actually, it’s just I wanted to make the space work for me – the acoustics are much, much better. I did get in a 5.1 system but actually haven’t used it; my grand plan was to do a surround sound version of the new record, but I didn’t have time. The biggest thing I guess is the big icon desk, the Pro Tools desk, which is slightly unnecessary but looks good. The other main thing is my Perspex piano. It looks like a glass, see-through piano containing all my sequencing and Logic set-up, with a Pro Tools set-up by the desk.

Your debut album ‘I Megaphone’ had a quite prominent use of piano, do you still write on piano? Yeah I do, for this record I pretty much wrote all the songs on the piano because I wanted to go back to basics; I wanted to have the songs completely written before I went in and did all the fun stuff. I wanted to get the emotional, songwriting side of it and that burst of ideas solid so that when I finally built the studio I could just go at it with the music, get all the vocals down first and then build the tracks around them.

I read a quote in which you admitted that writing the album was a “long process of self-questioning and self-doubt”, which surprised me as you come across as very confident and evidently have a natural talent. There were days when just the thought of going down in the studio put the fear of God into me, just because you’re facing who you are every day; can I do this? Am I really capable of going in there and finishing this – am I conning myself? There’s such a lot to take on because there’s nobody with me to egg me on. You’ve got this whole massive monster to take on every day; 13 songs swimming around in your head and I found it really difficult, yes.

In what way would you say Ellipse is different from your two previous solo albums? I don’t know, it’s still hard for me to look objectively at that because I still feel very much in the thick of it. I felt when I was making Ellipse that I was a lot more confident to explore. I’ve never really thought in advance that I’m going to make a particular type of album – I just go in and start (hopefully) chasing this ‘thing’, and eventually end up a year-and-a-half later with an album. I just want to be true to the songs but didn’t want to make Speak For Yourself take two.

Did you take a different approach to the recording process at all? Well, because I was filming the whole thing for a “Making of…” DVD I was very much aware of that. When I was making a sound in Logic or Ableton I would think, “That sounds a bit like a glass harmonica,” and then instead of just making the sound in the computer I’d think, “Why don’t I just go and make a glass harmonica”, that would be so much more interesting. So, I’d open the kitchen cupboards, bring out some glasses and think visually. Even the song, Between Sheets, I actually brought down my bed sheets. Even though you’d never be able to tell that the sound is a mixture of snare brushes across the microphone and rustling sheets, I’d know it’s there – and it makes good telly. The DVD will start from the first beginnings of my songs when I went on my writing trip to Maui, just speaking to camera, which then turned into the vBlog on return to England.

From a production perspective the album sounds very intricately arranged. Yes, the way that I work drives me mad and I wish I didn’t work like that sometimes. I like spending hours and hours toying with sounds and getting into the nitty-gritty of it. I don’t use stock sounds, I like just messing around and sometimes I have no idea how I got to the end point; it’s like I have this feeling about where I want a song to go and so I’ll start playing around with different things. I guess I used a lot more real instruments, instead of crafting so much more inside the computer. It’s not really about MIDI for me; it’s about moulding audio and processing it rather than using MIDI. I do like to get physical with it.

Was there this eureka moment when you knew the record was finished? Erm, no, it was frantic as always. Even though I knew I had at least a year to work on it, the time just kept running away from me. I met Mika and he wanted to do a song, so that was two weeks gone, then Nitin Sawhney asked me to do a gig and guest on his record too, and there was something with Jeff Beck. All these things which I never had to do following my first record, because nobody was in the slightest bit interested [Laughs]. There’s actually less and less time to be creative, which is a constant battle with me at the moment. I don’t think it’s to do with locking me away but finding a way of making music and also going out and being with people – because making music is such a solitary, isolating thing. I don’t want to make another record where I work on this big thing for two years and put it out, it just feels so anti what everything’s about these days, which is instant - make a song and there’s no reason why it can’t come out the next day. And creatively I would prefer that because then I can get it out of my system.

It sounds as though you’re leaning towards working more intuitively. When I have a song it has a feeling, it has a personality, and I don’t quite know what clothes it’s going to wear. Over the course of a month or two weeks you have this feeling of what it is and then start slowly peeling away the layers to find the core of it. Some songs you have a real clear idea of the sound you want, but other songs, such as Tidal, I had absolutely no idea, just the feeling I wanted to give it. When I lost track of that feeling I went through seven different versions of the one song. That’s when a producer would come in quite handy, when you’ve forgotten what a piece of music’s about.

Many musicians have told me they often don’t know where this need to make music comes from, and that they almost act as a conduit for this outside entity. Yes, I like to think of it a bit more like that now actually. I saw a TED talk (ted.com) where a woman was talking about how artists all have this pressure on them and that it’s all down to them if they don’t come up with a song that’s any good. It’s suggested that it would be better if artists believed in this ‘force’ or guardian, or even a muse, which is in the corner of the room and ‘it’ decides whether it wants to give you a good idea or not, which kind of removes the pressure for you. I love the romantic idea of that, but in reality of course you blame it all on yourself.

I suppose if you’re pressured to do something you start thinking about it too much, and make ‘decisions’, all of which detract from the creative process. The only pressure is my own; I’m my own worst enemy. It really gets to you and I sometimes just have to go out and get away from the studio; but at the same time you don’t want to do that because you feel like you haven’t deserved it.

I understand the album was mastered by Simon Heyworth, who is well-known for working with Mike Oldfield, Eno, Gary Numan and Depeche Mode, did you feel he was a suitable choice because he had that background? The reason why I chose him was because of a dear friend of mine called Jon Hopkins, who was the keyboard player in my first band. His album Contact Note was mastered by Simon, and knowing that Jon had just done it all in his bedroom studio - then hearing it in my studio, I just felt well if Simon can also make mine sound really warm and close, and not completely squashed, I’m going to try him out. And [working with Simon] I didn’t feel like I was on conveyor belt of other artists waiting in the lobby, it was a real experience. He’s got a lovely pad in Devon and we’d test out all the converters and choose three different types of dither. Because I work on my own I really wanted to have just one extra confirmation that it’s not completely rubbish.

Sound engineers are almost becoming unfashionable or perhaps unnecessary these days, do you feel working with Simon added more to the finished product than you expected? I think Simon is absolutely brilliant; what he adds is really just pulling it together. Over the course of 16 months, even though I tried to mix one vocal and take the level of that vocal and match it up to the level of the next song, what I loved about the way Simon works is that he’s not putting his big stamp on it, he finds what is good about the record and then after two weeks he’d rethink and send me another version. In fact, the one I’ve finally gone with is the third master, which has less limiting compared to what I’d been listening to in the studio.

“There were days when just the thought of going down in the studio put the fear of God into me.”

There’s not that many female musician’s that actually make electronic music to such a technical and proficient standard as yourself, do you feel slightly unique in that respect? I don’t actually think that my music is very electronic; maybe what you mean is a girl that goes in and does the engineering and mixing, and more of the production. When I think of electronic music I think of Squarepusher or Clark, so I feel a bit like a fraud when people say ‘electronic music’, even though I use electronics and like electronic music. I was just really lucky that when I was twelve I came across an Atari computer and discovered this thing that I could play piano into, or a flute, cello or timpani part, and didn’t have to wait for the local school orchestra to attempt to play my ideas, I could play them into the Atari with some MIDI nonsense and hear it speaking back to me.

I never felt studio technology and computers as being this scary thing, even though I’m not suggesting for one minute that I could open up a computer and tell you what goes on inside, but I’ve always felt it’s my friend. I like to do things myself; I don’t like to rely on other people. I want to look back at my life and say that’s really what I was like when I was 18, or 27-30 with this record, and be able to see who I was rather than a collection of people who helped me do that – even though I did have guest musicians here and there. But that’s really important to me; putting my flag in the chronology of my life.

Have your expectations changed? Is critical acclaim more important to you than sales might have been at the start of your career? My management don’t talk about sales, for me I just feel like I’ve done a great record – I’m really proud of it. Thankfully, with things like Twitter and YouTube, my career’s already doing what I want it to do. I’ve already made the connection and the reaction is great, and for me that’s all it’s about. Critical acclaim is lovely and record sales are good, but as long as the people who I hope are going to fall in love with Ellipse get to hear it I don’t really mind. A constant thing in my life is that I know there’s all this amazing music out there and I just don’t know how to find it – I don’t have the time to find it. More and more people are making records in their bedrooms, which invariably are the ones that I love, those idiosyncratic artists who just do their own thing – they’re the one’s we don’t get to hear because not enough people have invested in them yet.

You’ve been making video blogs, or ‘vBlogs’, for several years throughout the making of the new album, was this an enjoyable process or did it ever become distracting? I really enjoyed it but it is a lot of work - even though there’s only ever one ten-minute take. When people see me as confident and up-tempo it’s because I’m happy about all the things I have done or achieved over the previous several weeks, whereas in reality that’s maybe 5% of my emotion condensed into extreme excitement. That’s my way of exposing what I do, even for my family and friends who have no idea what I do in the studio – there’s no way for me to explain it. To tell them I “mixed” this song - they’re like “Mixed, what’s that? Things you put in a bowl, like an omelette?”

“I don’t want to make another record where I work on this big thing for two years and put it out, it just feels so anti what everything’s about these days.”

Were you ever concerned that you were giving away too much of the album through the vBlogs? I did a little bit, but I can’t help myself and in retrospect I gave away so little. In the beginning I knew the tracks would never end up sounding like that anyway, it’s more the process that I wanted to give away. More towards the end of the album I was aware of holding a little bit back because I don’t want the surprise to be less than exciting for the viewers.

You mentioned before that you place pressure on yourself, so did doing the vBlog add pressure to provide timely and fruitful updates for your online fans. Yes, that definitely added to my pressure. Unnecessarily, because really they just want it when it’s ready. At one point I said it would take a couple more months and then in reality it was three more months on top of that. I felt bad about keep having to move the deadline; it’s that thing of not foreseeing that there will always be something else that happens, so I’ll know next time to include the unexpected.

I’m actually starting to think about doing live improvised sessions called Cafι Heap, where I can interact with people and they can actually suggest to me live to “go minor”, “modulate to this”, or “sing Hide And Seek”. I did a little, very spontaneous version of that just the other day on USTREAM.

Do you feel a sense of detachment being so popular online as opposed to the traditional fame of being on television and thus everyone knowing who you are in the street? I’d actually feel much more detached if I’d just done it on TV because it’s very one to one million, whereas online I feel very connected to them. On Twitter you’re talking, collaborating, chatting, so no I don’t feel detached in the slightest, for the first time I feel very connected and in control of my own destiny and career, and fantastically liberated as a result of that. It’s not anymore about the record company putting out a video or somebody reading a newspaper; it’s right from the horses mouth – I’m right here.

Some might say you’ve almost set the template for how a modern musician can achieve success online, avoiding the pitfalls of the record industry. Yeah, it’s absolutely the way it’s got to go, it’s about the artist and the final piece of the puzzle, the listener, and all this stuff in-between is gradually being broken down because it’s about the relationship between myself and them. It’s not something I planned but really having that frustration in the past of reading a review or interview and thinking, that’s not what I meant or that’s not really what I’m like. Or when people saw me dressed up like this pond lady at the Grammy Awards and thinking, “what is that woman wearing?”, but the people who know me on Twitter know that I’m just having a laugh.

Imogen Heap interview, Barcode 2009©
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Imogen Heap
British singer-songwriter-producer and two time Grammy nominee Imogen Heap spearheaded the DIY music movement by turning a fledgling career into an online phenomenon. The recording and manufacture of Heap’s third solo album – the recently released Ellipse – is likely to further cement the singer’s reputation as “the first download diva.” Building up to the release of a third solo album ‘Ellipse’, Imogen Heap further honed her expertise as an Internet marketeer by recording 40 video blogs to keep fans fully involved throughout the entire process of the making of the new record, including the brick-by-brick building of a home-based studio. Heap’s loyal fan base, fully entrenched in every creative element of her development, eagerly anticipated the release, yet Heap herself displays an unusually self-depreciating attitude for a self-sufficient artist who has elicited such remarkable attention…
I understand you rebuilt your studio before embarking on recording your new album, was that a stressful process? I didn’t just rebuild it; I built a studio from a shell of a room that used to be my playroom when I was a little girl. It was quite an ordeal, I stupidly thought it would take about a month, got a carpenter in to make a few units and then eight months later after I’d completely tore out all of my hair and spent a load of money finally ended up with a fantastic studio. What does your studio contain now that your old studio was lacking? Not that much actually, it’s just I wanted to make the space work for me – the acoustics are much, much better. I did get in a 5.1 system but actually haven’t used it; my grand plan was to do a surround sound version of the new record, but I didn’t have time. The biggest thing I guess is the big icon desk, the Pro Tools desk, which is slightly unnecessary but looks good. The other main thing is my Perspex piano. It looks like a glass, see-through piano containing all my sequencing and Logic set-up, with a Pro Tools set-up by the desk. Your debut album ‘I Megaphone’ had a quite prominent use of piano, do you still write on piano? Yeah I do, for this record I pretty much wrote all the songs on the piano because I wanted to go back to basics; I wanted to have the songs completely written before I went in and did all the fun stuff. I wanted to get the emotional, songwriting side of it and that burst of ideas solid so that when I finally built the studio I could just go at it with the music, get all the vocals down first and then build the tracks around them. I read a quote in which you admitted that writing the album was a “long process of self-questioning and self-doubt”, which surprised me as you come across as very confident and evidently have a natural talent. There were days when just the thought of going down in the studio put the fear of God into me, just because you’re facing who you are every day; can I do this? Am I really capable of going in there and finishing this – am I conning myself? There’s such a lot to take on because there’s nobody with me to egg me on. You’ve got this whole massive monster to take on every day; 13 songs swimming around in your head and I found it really difficult, yes. In what way would you say Ellipse is different from your two previous solo albums? I don’t know, it’s still hard for me to look objectively at that because I still feel very much in the thick of it. I felt when I was making Ellipse that I was a lot more confident to explore. I’ve never really thought in advance that I’m going to make a particular type of album – I just go in and start (hopefully) chasing this ‘thing’, and eventually end up a year-and-a-half later with an album. I just want to be true to the songs but didn’t want to make Speak For Yourself take two. Did you take a different approach to the recording process at all? Well, because I was filming the whole thing for a “Making of…” DVD I was very much aware of that. When I was making a sound in Logic or Ableton I would think, “That sounds a bit like a glass harmonica,” and then instead of just making the sound in the computer I’d think, “Why don’t I just go and make a glass harmonica”, that would be so much more interesting. So, I’d open the kitchen cupboards, bring out some glasses and think visually. Even the song, Between Sheets, I actually brought down my bed sheets. Even though you’d never be able to tell that the sound is a mixture of snare brushes across the microphone and rustling sheets, I’d know it’s there – and it makes good telly. The DVD will start from the first beginnings of my songs when I went on my writing trip to Maui, just speaking to camera, which then turned into the vBlog on return to England. From a production perspective the album sounds very intricately arranged. Yes, the way that I work drives me mad and I wish I didn’t work like that sometimes. I like spending hours and hours toying with sounds and getting into the nitty-gritty of it. I don’t use stock sounds, I like just messing around and sometimes I have no idea how I got to the end point; it’s like I have this feeling about where I want a song to go and so I’ll start playing around with different things. I guess I used a lot more real instruments, instead of crafting so much more inside the computer. It’s not really about MIDI for me; it’s about moulding audio and processing it rather than using MIDI. I do like to get physical with it. Was there this eureka moment when you knew the record was finished? Erm, no, it was frantic as always. Even though I knew I had at least a year to work on it, the time just kept running away from me. I met Mika and he wanted to do a song, so that was two weeks gone, then Nitin Sawhney asked me to do a gig and guest on his record too, and there was something with Jeff Beck. All these things which I never had to do following my first record, because nobody was in the slightest bit interested [Laughs]. There’s actually less and less time to be creative, which is a constant battle with me at the moment. I don’t think it’s to do with locking me away but finding a way of making music and also going out and being with people – because making music is such a solitary, isolating thing. I don’t want to make another record where I work on this big thing for two years and put it out, it just feels so anti what everything’s about these days, which is instant - make a song and there’s no reason why it can’t come out the next day. And creatively I would prefer that because then I can get it out of my system. It sounds as though you’re leaning towards working more intuitively. When I have a song it has a feeling, it has a personality, and I don’t quite know what clothes it’s going to wear. Over the course of a month or two weeks you have this feeling of what it is and then start slowly peeling away the layers to find the core of it. Some songs you have a real clear idea of the sound you want, but other songs, such as Tidal, I had absolutely no idea, just the feeling I wanted to give it. When I lost track of that feeling I went through seven different versions of the one song. That’s when a producer would come in quite handy, when you’ve forgotten what a piece of music’s about. Many musicians have told me they often don’t know where this need to make music comes from, and that they almost act as a conduit for this outside entity. Yes, I like to think of it a bit more like that now actually. I saw a TED talk (ted.com) where a woman was talking about how artists all have this pressure on them and that it’s all down to them if they don’t come up with a song that’s any good. It’s suggested that it would be better if artists believed in this ‘force’ or guardian, or even a muse, which is in the corner of the room and ‘it’ decides whether it wants to give you a good idea or not, which kind of removes the pressure for you. I love the romantic idea of that, but in reality of course you blame it all on yourself. I suppose if you’re pressured to do something you start thinking about it too much, and make ‘decisions’, all of which detract from the creative process. The only pressure is my own; I’m my own worst enemy. It really gets to you and I sometimes just have to go out and get away from the studio; but at the same time you don’t want to do that because you feel like you haven’t deserved it. I understand the album was mastered by Simon Heyworth, who is well-known for working with Mike Oldfield, Eno, Gary Numan and Depeche Mode, did you feel he was a suitable choice because he had that background? The reason why I chose him was because of a dear friend of mine called Jon Hopkins, who was the keyboard player in my first band. His album Contact Note was mastered by Simon, and knowing that Jon had just done it all in his bedroom studio - then hearing it in my studio, I just felt well if Simon can also make mine sound really warm and close, and not completely squashed, I’m going to try him out. And [working with Simon] I didn’t feel like I was on conveyor belt of other artists waiting in the lobby, it was a real experience. He’s got a lovely pad in Devon and we’d test out all the converters and choose three different types of dither. Because I work on my own I really wanted to have just one extra confirmation that it’s not completely rubbish. Sound engineers are almost becoming unfashionable or perhaps unnecessary these days, do you feel working with Simon added more to the finished product than you expected? I think Simon is absolutely brilliant; what he adds is really just pulling it together. Over the course of 16 months, even though I tried to mix one vocal and take the level of that vocal and match it up to the level of the next song, what I loved about the way Simon works is that he’s not putting his big stamp on it, he finds what is good about the record and then after two weeks he’d rethink and send me another version. In fact, the one I’ve finally gone with is the third master, which has less limiting compared to what I’d been listening to in the studio.
“There were days when just the thought of going down in the studio put the fear of God into me.”