Having just released her new record, Sparks, Imogen Heap has a fine eye to detail when it comes to creativity. She creates her own music, writes her own songs and of course, does her own mixing and production for them too. With the success of her 2009 release Ellipse, she earned herself a Grammy for Best Engineered Album in the Non-Classical Category. Just recently, she also co-wrote and produced a song with elegant pop star Taylor Swift for her recent release, 1989. For a low-key musician, I wouldn’t necessarily say she’s been quiet as of recently and with a baby due anytime now, she still managed to accomplish many things, even during her pregnancy.
I find it amazing that you compose the music and write your own songs. It must be a rewarding experience to be able to create something that’s your own. What challenges do you face when doing this and how have you overcome them?
“They’ve always come hand in hand [her songs] with me. I’ve always written my own songs and I’ve always, you know in some form, like not in the beginning when I had producers who helped me teach me how to make them into a record. It kind of all comes together for me. It’s like I’m hungry, I have an idea for a meal, I’m going to make it and then over the years you get better at how to present that. It feels very odd to sometimes write something for somebody else and then somebody else produces it or somebody else finishes it off and you’re like “no, no no no!” Because in my head it’s all finished. It’s how I see it as a whole being.”
With your latest release, Sparks, it feels like you’ve taken a lot more musical risks compared to Ellipse and Speak For Yourself. How did you endeavour this approach and what made you more inclined to add such a vibrant array of tracks to the record?
“Well, the last records that I’ve made has been quite conventional in a sense that I would kind of block off a period of time and I would close my studio and I’d be like ‘Oi! Nobody talk to me for a year.’ And then I would go in and I would try and make the songs from scratch because I’ve never had anything written before. I keep a little diary but at the moment, if I write a song or have an idea, I’ll put a little marker on it where it says ‘s’ in case it might be a song idea but I’ve never ever gone back to them because really, I want to write about something that’s happening then in my life or something that’s on my mind. I don’t tend to write loads of ideas all the time, so when it comes to an album, I wouldn’t usually have gone “right, okay now I’m going to write an album, I’ll give myself a year” because it takes a long time to write and record and produce it and it’s quite complex inside the arrangements and stuff.
“If it was just a band coming in and playing the songs, maybe it might not take so long. I just thought instead of doing it that way and kind of having to put my social life on hold and my family life on hold and I’ve never felt like I’ve moved forward in anything other than getting maybe better. So instead of doing that and getting on the touring cycle, I would do it in a kind of natural flow in which I would be able to feed the inspiration I get from touring or from collaborating or from going out into the real world and then I would come back and write a song for a couple of weeks, produce it and release it when it’s relevant to me. So that was a plan, and I thought if I did a new song straight from a new project every three months, that would take me three years to do a twelve-track album, which is the normal album cycle. Although, I actually ended up doing it [Sparks] quicker. I did it in two and a half years and I made fourteen tracks and I made a pair of gloves, with a team of people I climbed the Himalayas and I kinda kick-started a wall garden in my village with an organisation to bring that back to life. So many things happened. So it’s funny, you think you have less time to do things but actually time expands to the work or work expands to the time given. I gave myself short periods of time to do projects and managed to do it all. I managed to do a lot more than I would normally have and as a result, I’ve made a great group of friends, I’ve kinda got back into socialising, I’ve gotten back into talking to people rather than just spending hours on end on my own.
“I’ve made a bit of a home for myself here and kind of tune into myself, a little bit and not always think about music, music, music, and projects, projects but actually being able to look at me and go, “you know, I’m 35 now, what do I want from life? I can’t just keep going on to the next project and the next project. Why am I doing this?” So intensely, I discovered that I needed to look a bit deeper and decided I wanted children. But if I was gonna go from the age of 17 to 32, I was basically making a record for a year, tour it for a couple of years, do a promotion and then make another record and I just done that four times and I was a little bit bored of it [touring and making records] actually. So yeah, that’s why it [Sparks] sounds so diverse and different. It’s because it was over a longer span of time and I wasn’t concerned so much with writing a cohesive album to sound like it belonged in one particular era of my life or period of my life, even though it was a period of my life stretched over and what was more important to me was to engage in life and kind of really sponge that all and turn those into songs, those moments.”
You also filmed the whole process in the making of Ellipse and shared that video online, being a technology enthusiast, do you feel like interacting this way has brought you closer to fans?
“I don’t know if you’ve seen the new website, it’s something I’ve been working on for a while now. But for me, the really exciting thing about it is that it actually doesn’t look very exciting because it’s not about the website. It’s not about how the website looks. It’s about what comes into the website. And my idea for a long time was to actually try and draw every single thing I’ve done over the years. I’ve tried to have it on a timeline and to be able to connect everything through tags. I feel very desperate on the internet, I feel like I have many different parts of my personality in separate little corners. Like Twitter having little tiny short, moments and then there’s YouTube with videos and all that which are kind of more funny. But there’s never ever like a cohesive ‘me’ anywhere. So I wanted to draw all of those platforms into my own website. When I post the link, you will see Twitter responses, YouTube responses, Soundcloud responses all next to my own post on my own website so that I can kind of see everything that’s going on and be who I want to be on whatever media I choose on my own website. So it’s kind of these peripheral websites that become a service to me rather than I become a service to them. So I think the idea is that it kinda grows organically to whatever people are looking for on the website.”
You must have a lot of patience seeing as you self-taught yourself how to play the guitar, drums as well as a few percussion instruments. Do you think that having patience is an important quality to have as a musician?
“I think both patience and impatience are very important. I’m very impatient as well sometimes. If you’re patient, you can take a very long time to make a record and do not much else. You could take 7-8 years making a record if you’re super patient but maybe you’re also kinda missing the point of it as well, and I think it’s good to be a little impatient to get things done quicker. Maybe it [music] connects with you better and you don’t overthink things too much so you get a healthy balance of both.”
“When I was younger, I wouldn’t say it was patience when I was learning the piano. It was more like, I just want to be good and I want to get what it was out there. If I didn’t enjoy it [playing piano], I would have never spent the time doing it. I definitely know I can be very impatient especially when I want to go on and be something I love. If you love something, it doesn’t feel like you’re being patient. It’s like you’re hearing your baby crying forever and ever and you comfort them and make sure they’re okay, as opposed to hearing another baby cry and you’re like “oh for god’s sake, just take it away.” Apparently with your own child, you can definitely be patient with it.”
Your music has been used in films and TV shows and I find it’s your most notable track “Hide and Seek” that appears quite frequently. When you look back at your journey as an artist, do you feel like your music has made a large contribution to the pop culture world?
“I certainly think that song [“Hide and Seek”] has definitely had an impact which I never expected and it’s amazing. Amazing that one song’s journey can do to the life of a musician. You know it’s been in Jason Derulo, it’s been on Saturday Night Live, it’s in the O.C, it’s been in countless choir books. There’s something about it that makes it almost sound so hymn-like because it doesn’t have an identity, it doesn’t have a style of music, it doesn’t sink in. It’s also maybe a little bit gospel. There’s just so many different things, it’s like all the music has been stripped away and so as a result, maybe more people can feel that they can like it because it doesn’t distinctly belong to a certain style of music.
“It’s had an amazing journey. I definitely see how that song has impacted some people’s production and that’s really great; I love that. I was having dinner with a friend who’s a musician and she was saying I’ve somehow paved the way for younger musicians who are much more famous than me. Musicians who are like in their 20s and early 30s, who have had success on the radio. I feel like Speak For Yourself began that but it’d be nice to think that if there was some kind of influence, it was a good kind of influence, and it was adding to pop culture in a different way.”
Having been exposed to music at an early age, it was obvious that achieving success was so important to you. Looking back at the journey of your music career, what achievements do you feel most proud of?
“Actually achievement and success has never been important to me. The only thing important to me is that I’m able to keep doing what I do. From a young age, I never considered being a pop musician. I never thought I’d sing for a living. I made music, I studied classical music, played the piano and cello and I never trained my voice but I’ve always loved making stuff. Whether it was making christmas cards or whatever, I always loved making things. I discovered that I liked making music as well and other people enjoyed whatever it was that I made and so they encouraged me to make more and I suppose that’s the same. I still do write for me. I write because I want to achieve something out of this particular song. I want to try out this new type of production, I want to go to another country and turn that into a song. It’s like an excuse for living in a way.
“But yeah, it’s [making music] not really goal-driven. To me, success is not about record sales, it’s not about that. For me, I feel really successful in a sense that you know if I look into my inbox like doing this crazy website, I got the gloves going on, I’m still connected with my family really well, talking to somebody about a piece of technology which I’m not allowed to talk about, interviews and writing a song with Taylor Swift. There’s so many completely varied projects going on and for me that’s real success. If one doesn’t work out in a monetary sense, it doesn’t mean failure to me. Certainly not selling physical copies around the world and not spending two and half years out in the Himalayas is not the way to make money but what comes back from it you know. You get to go to a conference, or you get with a company like Senheisser or a different kind of tech company interested in working with you because you do things differently.
“So it comes around in the end and I’ve never had crazy runaway success. I mean “Hide and Seek” has really saturated people’s musical lives but it’s just kind of an awareness which opens many doors for me. I never had any of these big grand goals like, I wanted to be number no.1 and I wanted to be huge and famous because I’ve never had that. I was never disappointed because I’ve never strived to be that. I just want to make music and do projects and have fun and make stuff that is fun in the world that I think it’s necessary and for me to enjoy life more and hopefully it impresses other people too.
So yeah it’s funny when I got into a cab the other day, he asked me, “So, what do you do for a living then?” and I was like “Oh, I make music” and he’s like “Oh you’re a singer”? and I was like “Yeah, I do sing but I also make my music and I have my own studio ” and then he’s like “Oh right. What’s your name then? Have I heard of you?” and I was like ‘Probably not. My name is Imogen Heap” and 99% of the time they’re like ‘Sorry girl, haven’t heard of you. One day you’ll make it.” In my own way I have made it and it’s great to get a cab and not be you know, bombarded with questions like “Oh right, I saw you in the paper the other day” for me it’ll be a nightmare and for that I’m very lucky and when I do see people on the street, I can sense that they know who I am and it’s never an infatuated “Ahhhh, I’m gonna die”, they give me a nod and ask “How I’m doing?” respect kind of thing or they might come up and just tell me they’re a fan of my music and tell me a story on how they came across it cause it’s never on the radio.
“The exciting thing about the website is I ask fans to tell me their stories on how they found my music and I can connect all these stories together on my new site because one of the main reasons why I wanted to develop the new site is so that I can work more with photographers in my own circle. If I wanted to get a piece written up about a show I’m in and it’s great to connect. The next time I’m in Sydney, you can look up journalist, Blogger or whatever and make sure you’ve invited everyone that you’ve already met and then kind of grow in these relationships. It’s not just kind of this fleeting moment. I’m really excited about it and I feel like it’s the missing piece for me.”
Visit Imogen Heap’s new website HERE
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