Much has been said about piano and
synth ingénue Imogen Heap’s connecting
with fans via Twitter during the making of
her latest release, Ellipse. It’s been championed
as the latest example of the “new
music business model,” where devoted
fans enjoy a new level of access to their
favorite artist. Heap does not disappoint,
as her over four hundred thousand followers
on Twitter can attest. From studio session
microblogs to video diaries and even
live meetups, Heap’s fans have been a part
of her album. Here, Imogen reflects on the
journey, which started in the virtual world
and took her around the real one.
Scroll down for our interview as it appears in the October 2009 issue. Trouble seeing the videos? Click here.
What made the process of making
Ellipse unique, compared to your past
works?
The main difference was that I consciously
decided to write the songs first and get the
body of work before I went into the studio.
The main reason for that was that I didn’t
have a studio. I’d just gotten back off tour,
and then within an hour of being home on
my couch with all my bags around and my
gear in tatters, I just didn’t want to be
there. I didn’t want to have go back into
normal life. I knew I had to write a new
album, but I felt like I wanted to go somewhere
else. And I thought, “Well, I don’t
need to write it in the studio. Why don’t I
just go somewhere pretty, somewhere I’d
love to visit?” So, I spun Google Earth
around a few times and decided to find the
place furthest away from any other landmass,
and that turned out to be Hawaii. I
then went into Google and typed in “luxury
apartment; self-catering; grand piano;
Hawaii” and I found this brilliant place
which is on the rainy side of Maui. It was
really like a honeymoon place, but it was
just me and my beloved music.
It was the first time that I’d ever been
away on my own and I think the first time
that I’d really come to terms with what just
happened, because since I was 17, it’s
just been completely non-stop. I haven’t
had any holidays. The songs I wrote
were very different from Speak For
Yourself. [This is all] a long way of saying
that I wrote the songs before I went
into the studio.
What gear did you bring with you, or
made sure you had, when you traveled
to write the songs?
I wanted to have the piano because I wanted
to get the essence of a song written before
I started work on it [in the studio]. That was
a real conscious decision, ’cause for the
last record I didn’t do that. I wrote it all and
programmed everything all at the same
time. It was a big mess. And as a result of
that, I would sometimes finish the backing
track before I’d even come up with the
lyrics, or vocals, or anything. And then I
would have to crowbar in a melody around
what I’d written, and as a result, it wasn’t
really meshed together. I like the vocals and
the music to all move around each other,
and it’s not just a lead line with the backing
track. They all intertwine. So, yeah, I had
real troubles on the last record with this one
song called “Daylight Robbery,” and I didn’t
want to go there again. But I had the opposite
problem with this one, because I wrote
the songs, and then had trouble deciding
what kind of backing tracks to go with them,
or what I should do with them.
The piano was the main thing, just to
write. But I also brought my laptop, GarageBand — to throw down quick ideas – and
Pro Tools. I had Ableton Live 7, which I
found really useful. I think it’s brilliant. I had
a little Korg MicroKontrol and a couple of
mics — one for the piano, one for my voice —
and I took my Sonic Studios DSM-6S/EH
microphones with me. They look like headphones,
but they’re really microphones. And
I had a preamp and a little 24-bit WAV
recorder, so I could walk down the beach,
or into Tokyo, and record the songs.
What happened when you went into
the studio with your songs?
When I got back to London, I made this big
decision to take on my family house, which
is a big deal emotionally, and monetarily as
well. I then proceeded to take all of my
gear in and for eight months, I built the studio
from scratch in my old playroom. I
bought a ridiculously large desk — a
Digidesign Icon — and I thought, “Yeah,
that’s basically like a big remote control for
Pro Tools.” I have to be honest and say that
I don’t actually use it because I’m just so
fast inside Pro Tools with quick keys and
editing. The way I work, it doesn’t fit with
getting up, finding the track. and turning
the knob. I’d like to think that I could do
that and get faster at it, but no matter how
fast I got, nothing’s as quick as just going
boop inside the computer. But it looks very
impressive! And I love the scrub wheel.
That’s my favorite bit of the desk.
So I built the studio. I designed it and we
got carpenters and acoustic paneling and
funny plaster in the ceiling. I thought it would
take a month and I’d be at work finishing the
album within a year, and it took eight months.
So all that time I was frustrated because I
wanted to be working on the record, but
there were people working in the house.
And once the studio was finished?
Where do you start? I needed some limitations.
I needed to be reinforced like bookends
so I could work within it, because it’s
impossible to create with a completely blank
canvas, with no edges to it. So, I decided to
start recording the sounds of the house. I
recorded the sound of me just running
around it, as I did as a kid. And I took the
steps and the rhythm of how fast I ran to be
the first song, “Not Now But Soon,” which
actually didn’t go on the album, but it went
on the Heroes soundtrack.
The song “Bad Body Double” uses
some interesting human body and
vocal sounds for rhythms. What
inspired that, and how did you capture
the sounds?
In the beginning I thought it’d be amusing
to use my body and my voice to do all of
the sounds of “Bad Body Double” because
I wanted to have it a capella. Actually, it
ended up being fully produced. When I
started to work on it, I was doing the beat
and the bass line with my voice and clapping
and clicking. I got ten people jumping
around on squeaky floors in my hallway. In
the beginning, I just have one hand-slap,
but it sounded not quite strong enough, so
I tracked up a few [hands] slapping my ass.
I wrote it when I was in Japan. I was
surrounded by beautiful women, beautiful
skin, and gorgeous hair, just looking fantastic
and eating very healthily. I was feeling,
“What happened to my body?” I guess
after years of the studio, touring, no exercise
at all, and just eating on the fly, I felt
like this wasn’t the body that I should have.
I’m not even 30, and this isn’t fair.
So, it’s as if I have this nice 19-year-old
body that’s not sagging yet and has no
wrinkles or grey hair. But then, when I get
out of the shower, there’s my bad body double,
this other person that comes in front of
the mirror and looks a bit like me, but haggard,
and she’s trying to put on creams to
look like how I look. Sometimes she comes
into the bedroom and disturbs me when I’m
with a man, and the man can’t tell the difference.
He just thinks it’s me, but it’s not me.
It’s my bad body double.
What other techniques did you use to
get the sounds just right, especially
with pianos?
I went around the house, recording all the
different sounds of the pianos. And on
“Half Life,” there was a mic in the hallway, a
mic at the end of the dining room, and a
mic in the piano, so I’m switching between
them. Sometimes I did far away, sometimes
I did close. I wanted to get the [mechanical]
sound of the keys, so I took out the hammer
action from one of my pianos — the one that’s
out of tune and will never be in tune — and I
just recorded the sound of the keys. I went
over every single note and added the sound
of the keys so that it sounds more close.
There’re more examples of things in the
house. I use the tap dripping — I got the
drops and then tuned it to make it fit. And
you can hear me running a drumstick
across the banisters.
What will your live setup be for the
Ellipse tour?
I don’t know at the moment, but it will
involve a glass harmonica and a Waterphone,
and some looping device —
maybe just Ableton Live. I don’t know
what kind of gear is out there recently,
but I imagine it’s much faster and
smoother than it was four years ago. So
I’m looking forward to seeing what I can
do with it. I’ll take my Perspex piano, the
clear piano that I had built, which I keep
my computer in, a keyboard, my looping
stuff, little drum machines to build stuff
live, and a little mixing desk. And then I’ll
have another station which has my mbira
on it, and [Roland AX-1] shoulder-strap
keyboard, and then I’ll have my hang
[tuned resonating bowl].
With the level of interaction you’ve
facilitated with Twitter and your video
blogs, how did it affect the process of
making the album?
I think it’s very insular working on your
own in the studio and you easily get lost
in it. And I like having this kind of presence,
knowing that there was my Tweetdeck
program in the corner of the
studio, that there’s this hovering bubble
of people, waiting, there and ready.
When I was working in the studio and
feeling like I was not really getting anywhere
and needed a little break, making
a tweet and having a little chat
refreshed me, and I could go back to
the computer and carry on. Otherwise,
there’s nothing to break me off from
working, and that’s when I can get lost
and spend six, seven, eight hours working
on a sound and not get anywhere.
When it came time to record the
album, did you encounter dead ends,
or do you feel like you’ve learned
enough to avoid them?
Fifty percent of the time I just think, “I’m
completely bluffing this. I’ve no idea what
I’m doing. How have I managed to con
everyone, and myself, into thinking that I
can actually finish this record?”
Sometimes I go into the studio and everything
just feels really difficult. Nothing’s
working, nothing’s talking to anything else,
I can’t really get anything decent out of my
head, and I can’t make an interesting
sound. It just all sounds like crap. And
other days, I don’t even remember the
process. It just flowed.
I don’t really do very much stuff in
MIDI. It’s all audio, ’cause I get annoyed
by the kind of small micro-shifting that
MIDI does. It irritates me, and I have to go
into every single point and have it so it’s
dead-on, ’cause I’m really anal like that.
Pretty much all of my sound design is
done in Pro Tools, processing and playing
around with the audio like Play-Doh and
building blocks. I don’t have to think about
it. I know where everything is. It comes like
a train of thought and I’m not hindered by
not knowing how to do something in Pro
Tools. So I can work for five or six hours
on some sound and build something out
of just one noise, but it turns into 20
tracks of that same noise. And by the end
of the evening, like five in the morning, it’s
dawn. I’ve got no idea how I did it, but it’s
there, and I really like it.
Heap Help
Selected Discography: I Megaphone,
Details (with Frou Frou),
Speak For Yourself, Ellipse.
Website: imogenheap.com
Twitter: twitter.com/imogenheap
Video: youtube.com/imogenheap