The Elliptical World of Imogen Heap

Oct 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Geary Yelton

           
 

THE STUDIO-SAVVY SINGER/MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST RECORDS HER NEW ALBUM IN HER CHILDHOOD HOME

What synthesizers do you use?

I don't have that many. I've got my trusty Ensoniq TS-12, which occasionally I might fire up. I've got a little Nord Rack 3 and the [Korg] Electribe MX.

Any software instruments?

I've got Massive and all the Native Instruments stuff, and I like [Apple] Sculpture very much. I like things you can really bend and shift. I love just processing [audio] in Pro Tools. When I really start having fun with sculpting sounds, it's about 6 or 7 or 8 in the evening and everything's settled down and nobody's bugging me. I'll continue through the night if I'm having a good session. I really don't remember how I do things because I get so lost in it. It's like, if you're driving home from somewhere and you just know your way so well that you get to your front door, you've got the keys in your hand, and you're going, “Oh, how did I get here?” That's what it's like.

You're absorbed in the process.

Yeah, I totally don't remember the process. [I know I must] have some kind of process, but I'm so involved in it that I couldn't really relay it to you.

My friend Justine [Pearsall] has filmed me on and off over the last couple of years, as I've been building the studio and as I've been making the record. That's not going to be available [on DVD] until November because she's only just started editing it and she's got 350 hours of footage. That won't be like a super-techie, what-plug-ins-type thing. It's more like the building block of an album — [from the] seed of a song to building a studio to then finally staying up late at night and picking out all kinds of random sounds.

[She filmed me] going through the house and recording everything from the tap dripping to the banisters, and using that as my starting point. There are a few songs, like “Canvas,” where I really started on the computer, building sounds inside Logic, but then mostly I start with something that's acoustic, like the hang drum or the mbira or the piano or banisters or the light ceiling panels in my studio — which make a very nice timpani sound — and wine glasses at the beginning of “First Train Home.” And then it's really the way that I process them, edit them and mess with them [that] makes it sound not like where it started.

How do you go about writing songs?

With this album, I took a different approach. The last album, I built sounds in [Steinberg] Nuendo and in Pro Tools, and then wrote the song over the tops of tracks I'd built with loops and things. But with this one, I made a conscious decision to write the song first, in the old-school way, because I didn't want to get into the issue of writing a backing track and then spend two months trying to crowbar in a melody over the top of this thing I built that I loved, only to just take it all apart anyway to fit a vocal in. I really tried to get the song first, which is very different from the way I've been working for the last eight years. I wanted to just go and write the songs, which is what I did.

I went on a little writing trip, and I wrote most of the songs. The songwriting, in the beginning spark of the idea, that's really exciting because you're inspired to get in the studio and get working on it. But then there's the slog of writing the lyrics. Sometimes they don't come easy. I wanted to do that side of it in a beautiful place so I wasn't frustrated. I did all the writing away so I could just get to the fun bit of making the music when I got into the house.

That's why you've been traveling so much?

Yeah, well, partly because I needed to get my head emotionally around the fact that I was going to take on the family house. I didn't have a workable studio at the time, and I've never actually traveled, outside of work, on my own and gone to places I've actually wanted to visit. I've done touring — lots of Japan, lots of America, lots of Europe — but it's just the same routes that you go on. I just thought, well, I was 29, and I really haven't been anywhere on my own and just traveled.

It worked out great because I was in quite remote places. I'd have to figure out the language because I was sometimes in the middle of nowhere in, like, the countryside of Japan and trying to find food that I recognized from the local shop. In a way, that was great because it took the pressure off of me just sitting in a room every day, saying, “Right, I've got to write a song.” It was like, “Right, I've got to go down and get some breakfast; how am I going to do that?” (To hear Heap explain the inspiration behind the song “Bad Body Double,” see Web Clip 2.)

The instrumentation on the song “Earth” is absolutely stunning. It sounds as if all the instruments, including the bass and drums, are your voice.

They are indeed, yes. I could have gone the route of really processing the vocals to make them not sound like vocals, but I just thought that defeats the object. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the best sound out of my voice. And I spent ages editing them together. There's over 100 tracks of vocals on it, and it was absolutely completely doing my head in, just hearing the sound of my own voice for, like, three weeks nonstop. But I really had this vision, what I wanted it to be. It was really good fun to write that one.

I wrote the song called “Aha!” and I needed something to go after it because I felt like, in the running order of the album, it wasn't really working. So, I thought, I'm going to listen to “Aha!” and then I'm going to the first instrument that feels like it wants to be on the record. I went straight to the mbira and I played a chord. It started off being something completely different, but I knew I always wanted it to be vocals because I needed an a capella [track] on the record. So the vocals were written really, really quickly, and I went back and kind of perfected the sound of them.

That's where the [sings] “Da-da, da-da-dah” comes in. I wrote that in the shower. And then I was going, “Da-da, da-da-dah” as I was getting dressed and running down to the studio. A lot of really good ideas happen in the shower. I think it's the only time where, because you can't be in your studio, you're not distracted by all the other millions of things you have to do. Long showers — not very good for the environment, but good for creativity.