 |
Imogen Heap Imogen Heap has a voice like no other, and an idiosyncratic approach to making electronic music that's just as distinct. When those two things come together it's a real treat for the listener. And when it came to making her second studio album, Speak For Yourself, she re-mortgaged her flat, and shut herself away for a year, despite being courted by several major labels at the time. A brave thing to do, but it demonstrates her single-mindedness, and passion for her music. We got the chance to speak to Imogen a few weeks after her album release, and found her in fine spirits, excited about promoting her album after working on it for over a year and a half leading up to its release.
PIXELSURGEON: Hi there Imogen- thanks for taking some time out to talk to us. Well, for starters I suppose, congratulations on putting such an excellent album together. How long did you work on it for?
Well I decided I would buy myself lots of new equipment on my birthday, to arrive on my birthday. So I started on the 9th December 2003, and I booked my mastering for exactly a year afterwards. So basically it took a year- the only song I'd written before that was Clear the Area.
So you wrote and recorded over the same period then?
Yeah, which was a bit of nightmare basically- I don't know if I'd do that again! I think if I was clever I'd get the songs together first, get them strong, and then go into the studio and make them all sound lovely. The biggest problem was with a couple of songs, where because I'm producing, writing and everything all at the same time, you get sidetracked from the song. And with Daylight Robbery that was the worst-case scenario. Every now and again I get requests for people looking for music for adverts or films, and they show me a 30 second ad, and describe what they want.
And at the time I was trying out some new gear, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to see how good it was to use. So I came up with this guitary, up-tempo song, which is something that I wouldn't ordinarily have done myself, but I was trying to get something together for this advert. And then people started to hear it, like my manager, and boyfriend, and it became a whole backing track for a song.
So throughout the course of the year, I'd dive back into Daylight Robbery, trying to write the best line to go over the top, and it was just the hardest thing I've ever done! I went back eight times, and I still couldn't figure it out, so eventually I asked the guys on my message board to vote for their favourite. I put three up there, and they voted the scenario about my bike ride across London to the studio as their favourite.
So- involving the fans in your creative process?
Yeah- they've become my A&R men!
Did you record lots of other material and pick your favourite stuff, or did you just create just as much as you needed?
Basically it takes me forever to get a song the way I want it, so there wasn't really room for writing 50 and choosing the best 12 out of that. It was literally, whatever idea came into my brain that morning, when I was starting a new song. Whatever form it started as it would end up being a song, whether at the end it resembled how it started at all. I never ditched an idea; I'd always make something work, no matter what it was about it I liked.
There were several major labels trying to sign you, yet you re-mortgaged your flat and went it alone. That must have felt empowering, but presumably a little scary too!
I hadn't really thought about it. The thing was I just didn't want the same thing to happen with what happened with Frou Frou. I knew it was going to take me forever, and I knew at the end of it, it would be the coolest thing in my life at that moment.
So, what exactly happened with the Frou Frou record then?
Well there were many different contributing factors to that. One of them was that we were in the States a lot, because it was going quite well over there, so as a result we kind of ignored the UK. And then when we came back to say hello to our UK company, everyone had disappeared! Our A&R man had left the company; our marketing guy had gone somewhere else - so we weren't exactly at the front of everyone's minds at Island.
So this time around, was it reassuring to know that if things didn't work out you could always go and have your pick of record labels? Or was that not something you thought about?
No! (laughs) I would definitely have seen it as a failure. I don't think I could have not finished the record. I had so much resting on it, my flat and everything, so if I go bankrupt it's because of this record. But this was the first time I've really found out what I'm capable of, what I can really do on my own. I'm not going to do it again, in the next couple of months anyway (!), and I haven't had a holiday yet, and I think I deserve one. But ironically enough, today I had a meeting with a couple of good labels in the UK, who are biting my hand off to sign this record, and it's just a great position to be in. So we're talking more about a label deal, than signing as an artist. Which is much more appealing because I have got my own label set up, and my team around me. Good things are happening at the moment with Radio 1 too, which is totally unexpected. I really didn't think they'd catch on to Hide and Seek, but they have.
The technology that someone can now assemble at home these days is extremely impressive. Okay so you recorded at a studio down the road, but you did it all on your own. Do you think you represent a larger trend?
Yeah- I know all the people I like to listen to are doing it, they're all doing it in their own backyard. And because you can free trial downloads of a lot of the software, you don't even have to pay anything to get into it, and see if you want to continue. And I think we'll see a lot of young ladies in the future, because in the past it was quite difficult for a girl to get into a studio, to be a tea girl or anything, to help around in the studio. And that won't be a problem any more because you can employ yourself to work in your bedroom!
Now the track Hide and Seek appeared on the finale of the second season of the OC. Unfortunately I didn't see it, but could you tell us a little bit about how that came about? Because as far as I understand it, the song hadn't been released at that time?
It happened in the States, because I have this great company who are employed, well they take a percentage of anything that they procure, for film or TV. So, the people at say, Six Feet Under, or the OC, say that they need something for this particular spot, what do you think would work? But the OC also used Goodnight and Go in an earlier episode.
Hide and Seek is a fantastic track, but also a brave choice for a single in a way, because it only features your voice fed through a vocoder. Was that a brave move do you think?
Yep! It is quite brave isn't it! But I really didn't expect it to have that effect. Actually that's not true- I knew that if people heard it, because it's so unusual, and it's like a hymn, it's not any particular genre, so the fact that Radio 1 has picked up on it is amazing, because obviously more people can hear it. I think it started in a way because Jo Whiley is a fan of the O.C., and so she played it, but then people like Zane Lowe and Scott Mills, they never watch the O.C.
How many vocal layers are there in the track roughly?
Well there's actually only two real mes in there at any one point, and then the rest of it is going through the vocoder. It was a real magical mysterious evening when it came out of me. I'd had a bit of a nightmare in the studio that day, and everything was playing up. I didn't want to leave the studio without something to say for myself. Also because I had people on the blog that I had to prove that I'd done something that day! So I picked up the vocoder, which I hadn't really used much, plugged it into the minidisc, just to record whatever came out. And literally the whole song (apart from the lyrics), the exact melody, the exact timing of the breathing and everything, the two melodies coming in together at the end, all happened in the space of like ten minutes. I really love the song for that reason as well. I didn't have to slave over it. There are some songs that I find it difficult to listen to, because I remember it took me however long to sort out that chord or whatever, but Hide and Seek was like a dream come true.
Another track of yours, Let Go, which you recorded along with Guy Signworth as Frou Frou, plays at the close of Garden State. Did you ever speak to Zach Braff about it?
That whole cycle from Frou Frou getting the request for that song to be used, and the movie actually coming to the UK, must have been about three years. We got this email from Zach's people, saying that he was working on a movie, and that he was putting the soundtrack together first, even before he'd done the film. And we quite liked the way he was doing that, and that he was doing it on his own. He had a previous title to the film, which wasn't Garden State, so we approved it, and said 'yeah yeah go ahead that's fine'. And then two years later somebody rang us up from LA saying 'I just heard Let Go on the telly' and we said 'What? A Film? What film?!', just because the name had changed.
What did you think of the movie?
I loved it- I've seen it a couple of times now. The first time I saw it, I was waiting of course, for the moment when the song came in, but the second time I saw it I could just watch he movie, but it was brilliant- I really enjoyed it.
Your music has been featured on several soundtracks and adverts, but would you like to actually record a full soundtrack for something?
Yeah- I would love to. But I'm under no illusion that it would take up to a year to do a film score, so it'd be something that I'd probably do a few years down the line from now. But I think I'd need a little bit of an apprenticeship with somebody, be a fly on the wall with somebody amazing, just for a couple of weeks, before I even think about attacking one on my own. When I was kid that was what I wanted to do; not necessarily writing for film, but music with orchestras, and arranging, and travelling around the world conducting, and playing the piano, so I secretly thought I'd like to make the work out in the future.
The whole album has a really large, layered sound. It really drives through, and in a way it's hard to think of as an album that's been put together by one person. How do you go about building those epic arrangements? Do you experiment on the keyboard, write any actual music down, for instance?
It's pretty different every time. The best ones happen when you've got a lyric or a melodic something you can bounce off, and usually that's the case. But I do have little gadgets that I carry around with me, that I make little loops on every now and then, and bring them to the studio and do them properly, or I'm constantly singing into my mobile phone in a club or whatever, just singing some unrecognisable bassline or something. So I start off with a little idea like that, and then rhythm usually comes next.
I like to create sounds; I don't like to use samples. I do actually play the 'cello and there's a little bit of that in there. I play the clarinet, and even though in the end it doesn't sound like clarinet at all, things start from an organic state, and then get completely messed up in the computer through various plug-ins. I don't used MIDI particularly either- I mean I use it if I want to get really intricate with a part, but basically I like to bring raw audio into the computer, and then edit everything on a grid. So I don't use loops or anything like that, I program it all in the computer as audio.
A lot of the drum sounds are created by just drawing a waveform on the screen, and messing around with it, tuning it down, reversing it, shredding it, whatever. For the first day I'll just have fun, and try and be really spontaneous, and then I'll try and write the song over that. And then I'll spend forever writing the lyrics, and getting the vocals absolutely perfect, and build the track around the vocal. I never take the vocal out of the mix. People ask 'Oh who mixed the album?' but I didn't actually have that stage.
So with your classical training in 'cello and piano and so on, where did your love for electronic music begin? Was it a gradual process, or can you pinpoint a specific moment?
I suppose I enjoyed playing round with just a keyboard. I got my first hilarious keyboard with bossa-nova presets when I was about nine. When I went to boarding school, that was when I first got my hands on a computer, because the music master there, who was a complete idiot, he'd bought all this gear, which at the time I guess was pretty good, it was like a Mac Classic 2 and Notator, but he had no idea how to use it. But there was this enormously fat manual, which I decided to get stuck into.
And when I actually started to do my GCSEs, when I was 13, becausde I did it a year before, basically I was the only person in his class. Nobody else wanted to do GCSE music because he was a complete idiot, so I was there on my own every other day. So as soon as I realised I could have a string line in my head, and then I could hear strings playing, that was amazing to me. I could have drumns, and piano and everything, and didn't need all these people to help me create it.
So from the age of 12 I got into that, and gradually built up my studio. I went to music school when I was 16/17 to do my A-Levels, and I learned more about the production side. And then we set up Frou Frou about 5 years ago.
So when you play live, how does it work? Presumably you need to take some other musicians with you?
If I'm doing gigs where I can do whatever the hell I like, for now I'll make do with one double-bass player, who will be sampling his or herself as he goes along, creating all the string layers. And then another person would be a percussionist, with Marimba, Vibraphone; and he'll be doing all the tinkly sounds. And then there'll be a drummer, who'll have lots of triggery pads, and make it all sound very techno, and then there'll be me with my strap-on keyboard, or my crazy hybrid plastic-piano-thing, and then there'll be a trumpet player. Does that sound like a plan?
Have you any idea when you might be doing that?
Um, I'm going to the States in September, I'm doing a tour there called the Hotel Café tour. It's just a really low key, four artists travelling on the road together, in a bus, and it's five weeks long. Every time we go to a different city, different artists will turn up for a couple of days and travel with us. But before that I've got a couple of radio slots, like one on 6music. But there's things coming in so I have to get that together really.
You've played gigs with many artists- like Rufus Wainwright and Lamb. Can you tell us a little bit about your favourite experiences?
I think the Rufus one was the most fun. Because that was when I was quite young, after my first record. And when I first turned up, and saw him rehearsing, I really didn't like him. I didn't like his voice, I didn't like the way he stood, I didn't like anything about him. And he had a similar thing with me, so we didn't really like each other for the first week. But after that we actually became quite fun people around each other, and he let me come on at the end of his show and sing a song with him. So we ended up having a great time, and it was really good for me because I was only 19/20.
So do you get chance to listen to much other music then? Or is that the last thing that you get chance to do?
It does actually end up being he last thing that I do, which is really silly because I absolutely love listening to good music. At the moment, my days are really filled with boring stuff, like sorting out how many records to put into the shops, and finding the money to get them manufactured, and stuff like that.
But I have been doing other stuff, like this competition. Basically, I sent out this crazy email that I put together, with an animation of me, and the video of Hide and Seek, and lyrics. And it comes up as a mini website, within your email, so you don't have to go onto a browser. The idea was that people would send it to as many people as possible, via a form, and the winner would be the person who sent it to the most people. They can bring a friend, and then they get to stay in apartment for three nights and four days, and I cook them dinner, and play them a few songs on the piano.
So this girl from Toronto won, and they've just left actually. And she played the piano, and played a piece on the piano that she'd written for me, which was really nice. But I have been listening to a couple of things. I'm really enjoying Khonnor's stuff at the moment, this band from Denmark called Carpark North, I really like them, and this guy called Milosh.
At the moment you're promoting the new album of course, but what's next? Is more in the pipeline?
I'd like to get to the stage with this record where it starts to feel like it's taking care of itself. To really try and support any reaction that we get from Radio 1, and I'm going to release Hide and Seek as a physical single, because there seems to be a bit of a demand there. So that's gonna happen, and then when I get back from the States, I guess I'm gonna have to start thinking about the next single, and doing some shows over here.
Great- well thanks for your time Imogen, and good luck with everything that you're planning, and the album.
Thanks very much!
|
