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Listen to the interview - Interview1 Interview2 Interview3 Interview4 Interview5 She remembers when she was twelve, "I just had so much to say, but there was nobody there to listen. So I ended up writing songs." Now everyone is listening to Imogen Heap. She is making enough noise in the industry for you to take notice, and, believe me, it's a beautiful noise you need to hear. And, she's doing what she does best, making completely original and innovative music. Her music recently featured in movies and television, such as The Chronicles Of Narnia and the epic season two finale of the hit series, The O C. I was fortunate enough to buy tickets to her show in San Francisco last year. What an eye-opener….or, should I say, ear-opener. Hers was by far and away my favorite concert of the year, and I attended multiple shows last year, including my first Stones concert. Imogen is a one-woman-band. She plays keyboards, piano, and a string of electronic equipment…plus the mbira, a new word I learned during the interview. She totally fills any concert venue with her soaring vocals and inventive sounds from her collection of electronic instruments. She also paces her dynamic performance with a song using a grand piano. If you’re not familiar yet, you must take a listen. Go to her website: http:www.imogenheap.com and buy her record, “Speak for Yourself”. Luckily, she’s currently on tour. Imogen will be playing the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles on November 30th and December 1st or you can catch her, along with me, at the Warfield in San Francisco on December 3rd. She then travels then on to Portland and Seattle. Do not miss her. Chatting with her was as interesting as her music….read on… Imogen Heap: Ian, this is Imogen Ian Crombie: Hey Imogen. Thanks so much for spending this time for the interview.What was your first introduction to music? IH: The piano in our living room. My mom and my dad had this fantastic piano. My dad was very good at sight-reading, but could never string two notes together of his own accord unless they were written in front of him. And my mom was the opposite. She had no idea about sight-reading, but she could play pretty much any instrument and get a decent sound out of it, apart from possibly the bassoon. She was naturally very creative. So I got the best of both worlds. As a kid, it was much more fun to bang on the piano than it was to squeak a toy. IC: I read in your bio that the piano was your toy. IH: Yes it was. IC: And you were classically trained right? IH: Yes, I did my grades, but didn’t go any further because I got a record deal pretty quickly. I did my grades more of an excuse to be involved in music, not because I wanted to be a concert pianist or anything. It was just a good excuse to get out of lessons every now and then. And as a result of figuring that one out, I learned the cello and the clarinet. I had a go at the trumpet and failed miserably. I did theory and the orchestra. Just did anything I could do you see. IC: When did you first get into songwriting or writing music? IH: The songwriting side of it came much later. I went to boarding school. I used to write songs for the end of the year and sort of rubbish Christmas Carols just to be doing music and I like ordering people about! I got to conduct all my peers in my year to sing my song that I’d written. When I was 12, I went to boarding school. I didn’t get along famously with everyone. I didn’t really understand about boys and friends and hanging out and socializing. Anything more than boys, what’s that band I’m thinking of? Brof , anything like that, I had no idea about it. I literally just got home from school, went straight to my piano and played all day long. So, when I went to boarding school I was a little bit of a freak in there. And, I wore very odd clothes because I had no idea about the latest fashion. I’d be wearing my brother’s hand-me-down cowboy jeans and my mom’s Flamenco Spanish top and strange hats from weddings my mom had been to. I’d come up with something very strange and end up wearing it every day. People just steered clear of me. I had so much to talk about ‘cause I’d just arrived at boarding school and there were boys and alcohol and smoking and things I’d never experienced. I just had so much to say, but there was nobody there to listen. So I ended up writing songs. But not really even writing songs, just singing streams of consciousness, just singing nonsense, improvising. There was a girl who was at school and she was so nasty to me, she was really awful. She would throw my favorite teddy out the window and put lighter fluid around my bed in the morning so I’d wake up to a ring of fire, and she’d pin things to me. She wasn’t very nice. So I really hated her. But obviously, I was the one being bullied and I couldn’t retaliate because I was shy. I used to go and play the piano every night. Her name was Lucy Bradley. She used to wander back up to our dorms just before I finished. Once I’d finish playing, I’d always see her ahead of me. I thought that was because she’d been out on the town, having fun with boys, being naughty. But one night, she came in while I was playing and singing. She sat on the filing cabinet and looked at me and she was really crying. I just ignored it because she was a bitch to me. I just carried on playing. It was time to go, so I said, “we’ve got to go back to the dorms now.” We walked back and didn’t say a word to each other. I realized then that she’d been listening to me. Every single night, she’d been listening to me play the piano. She was going through a really, really awful time at school herself. And as a result of that, she was bullying everyone else to make herself feel better. I learnt a lot from that. She encouraged me to write songs. She really enjoyed it. So I wrote one for her, I wrote about what she was going through, about my friends and about boyfriends that I started to go out with at school. They were unfaithful to me and so I wrote songs about them. IC: Thank goodness for broken hearts. IH: Yes, where would you be? Otherwise, I’d be writing songs about my dog. IC: Hide and Seek was such a big song in the OC. I’m sure people point to that all the time. How did that change things for you, having the song used in the OC? IH: It brought a ton of new people my way. It was great that it was something like Hide & Seek to do it. IC: It’s such a sensitive song, an emotional song, so much space and such a wide range of notes. Do you think of those notes in your head? Obviously, the vocoder can help you reach the notes…. IH: It’s actually a harmonizer. The way I wrote that song was, I’d pretty much done the rest of the album. I think I felt like, for me, what I was trying to do was I was trying to see what I could do as one singular musician putting together an album . I wanted to find out what I was capable of. By the time I did Hide and Seek, I’d done all the complicated songs, I’d done the programming. I felt like I’d achieved something. When it came to me pulling something together very late at night through the harmonizer, I had fragments of the song before I started that night, but nothing formed, nothing full. Just lyrics, like “hide and seek” and “where are you” and “what the hell’s going on”. I had that and a basic chords structure for those lyrics. Everything else was open for suggestion. I just started playing through my harmonizer that night, really late at night. I’d had a bad day in the studio and I just wanted to throw an idea down. Four and a half minutes later, Hide and Seek had evolved. Just, as if, out of the blue. When I look back on it, I had kind of been working on it, on and off, for quite a while. It had just been figuring itself out in my subconscious because when it finally came to just throwing the idea down, it all came out. The melody, and the way the notes in that really high section keep going up and up and up. I was improvising, I was jamming with my own voice. I hadn’t done that before. I hadn’t actually used this piece of gear before. I was just experimenting with it. It was set up as a four note polyphony, so there were only four notes no matter how many notes I played with my fingers. Even if I had ten fingers down, it was still only choose four. I felt like I wanted to go a certain way melodically. That’s how it ended up like it did. It’s a new way of writing for me and it really freed me up. I’ve learned something doing that. Since then, I really felt like I’ve figured something out in a short space of time. IC: I did see you live in San Francisco. You’re very interesting to watch. There is so much going on, with you building the patterns. When you go in to do your record, have you saved those patterns or is it something you develop each time? In other words, does it change each time you go out and play? IH: There are some things that are pretty much set. I spent a long time programming drums and sounds in the studio and I just couldn’t do that live. It took me months to do that kind of thing. There are loops that I turn into samples, like four bar samples or one bar samples that I trigger-off or set them off and they continue until I change them. Obviously the piano, I’m playing live and that changes every night. It’s difficult because the way the record was constructed, there are so many different parts that come in every minute or every second. It’s strong in that it has many different characters about the album. But there’s never like one guitar or one piano line. It’s very cut up and very disjointed. IC: You had a cellist with you in San Francisco, do you normally have other musicians with you on tour? IH: I’m building more and more it seems as I go along. I wanted Zoe to go along because the last time I toured the states, it was just me. I love Zoe, she’s really amazing. I heard her on the internet about a week before I went on tour. I asked her to go on tour with me. I offered her to be involved in my show as well. The last couple of tours I’ve done have each been different. The last one I did in the UK was with this band called Nemo, a British rock band. I’m really a big fan of theirs and I love the idea of having a band on stage with me, but not a load of session musicians, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love their energy and I just wanted an excuse to get up on stage with them. The UK tour was me doing as I did in San Francisco, when you saw me, with lots of bits of gear and different arrangements and that, doing it myself. Then there’s like five or six songs like “Daylight Robbery” and “Loose Ends” where I’ve got the band in there. They’re also triggering off stuff that I’ve given them to play. So it was good, I really enjoyed it. For the London show it was different again. I had this fantastic trumpeter who came in. He also opened that day as well and he came on and did some stuff. IC: What’s that other instrument you play, it’s like on wood with springs? IH: It’s called the array mbira. The array being the scale that this guy invented who lives in San Diego, and the mbira is an African instrument. It’s a beautiful instrument. IC: Is it sound that inspires you? Is it the sound of the different instruments that inspire you to write? IH: Yes, sometimes exactly it’s that. There’s a song I’ve just done called Glittering Clouds. I was commissioned to write it for “The Plague” CD and everybody had to write a song about the plagues of Egypt. There are lots of people like Laurie Anderson Rufus Wainright on it. I got the locusts. When I was off on tour in the UK I was messing around on the mbira and came up with this little pattern which is really, really lovely. I recorded into my Ableton Live, no, Garage Band. It just inspired the whole pace of the song and everything. Most of the time, when you’re writing a song, there’s never a formula, unfortunately. Some people do, and they write hits every time and that’s great for them. But, I don’t do that. It’s very haphazard and very unplanned. IC: Is there a particular time of day that you’re most creative, first thing in the morning or late at night? IH: No, I go through months of not writing anything. I haven’t written anything for ages. It usually comes when you have been extremely busy and then you suddenly have a break maybe of a couple of hours, or you’ve just had sound check and you have that couple of hours with nothing to do. Then your brain is just dying to do something creative. IC: You’ve been in the input mode up to that point probably IH: Yes exactly. A lot of ideas do come in soundcheck. If every single idea I came up in soundcheck I made into a song, I just wouldn’t be able to do it. I’m always coming up with loops and melodies and things and occasionally I remember to store them on my compact flashcard. At the end of the day, when I come off tour and I have to write a B side, I just pick something out that I like, and start working on it. But there’s hundreds of little tiny ideas. I stopped writing in diaries and stopped having these little books that I keep around. IC: That was going to be one of my questions..(laughs) IH: No, I stopped doing that ‘cause I have so many of these things around and I never looked at them. They were just like nonsense, and I never even looked at them. By the time I get around to writing a song, I feel differently about something. I don’t have time to sift through it all. I tend to not do that so much now. Every now and then if I really feel strongly about something, or if I’ve had a fantastic time and I’m on the plane. A lot of ideas come on a plane. IC: because you’re locked in, you have no choice IH: Yes, exactly IC: I want to thank you so much for sharing this information with the West Coast Songwriters. IH: Thanks, I enjoyed it. After the interview, a short section from her bio: Look up British singer/songwriter Imogen Heap on the online music forum Myspace.com and scroll down to the ‘Sounds Like’ box. Sounds Like No other – reads the pithy, but accurate description. In fact, truer words have never been written about the hypnotic vex of songs on her stunning second solo album Speak For Yourself. From her earliest memories of improvising at the piano “it was the biggest toy that made the best and most noise” at home, hour after hour in the sleepy village just outside of London where she grew up to the electro-zen-like fugues she hears in her head when riding her bike through the streets of England’s most fabled city, the classically trained, techno geekess, Imogen has always preferred a left-of-kilter soundtrack of her own making to any by-the-book-coda of pop music. The stirring current of songs flowing through Speak For Yourself ripple with an alluring intimacy rarely found in the electro-inspired genre. “That’s because, I like to believe I’m genre-less!” quips Imogen |
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