Wander-Lust Imogen Heap's career as a big-haired techno-pop singer was progressing at a word-of-mouth pace until last week. Instead of the musician's usual tract of starting out alone in his or her bedroom with a four track, moving on to collaborating with a musical partner or producer and then becoming well known enough to work with a number of high-profile contributors, London's Imogen Heap turned that diagram on its head. Her first album, 1998's I Megaphone, was aided by three big-name knob twiddlers. From there, Heap pared down to one collaborator to form a group called Frou Frou (their hit single "Let Go" was prominently featured in the film Garden State). Now, Heap has reduced her creative endeavors to truly solo status. She self-produced her recent album Speak For Yourself, spending the better part of a year alone in a one-room studio. Now Heap will attempt to take her vocal-heavy electro-orchestral-pop (that runs along Bjork Street, right where it intersects with PJ Harvey Way and Kate Bush Boulevard) on tour. Real Detroit: I've been wondering about your live show ... Imogen Heap: How the hell do I do it? Yeah ... well, I kind of figured it out today, you see. I'm not quite there. I mean, I've been doing shows - I did a full tour with the Hotel Café tour, which was just a half hour set - it's the same set-up that I'm doing, I'm just trying to do more with it. Unfortunately, I've only got two hands and I've only got two feet, apart from these elbows and things, that I'm trying to get things in. It's me, a mother keyboard on a stand and then I've got a two-tiered stand. On the top tier is my mixer, where I'm bringing things in and out and cueing and then my laptop. To the right of that is my Digitech Vocoder, which is how I made "Hide and Seek," by singing into this box and basically playing the chords and the box makes my voice sing those things. And then on the bottom tier I have my keyboard and a little MIDI keyboard that triggers and I bring in and out effects and things and then I've got a sampler and a little sequencing synth bass drum box thing. Then I've got the pedals and an acoustic - one acoustic instrument - which is a thing called an mbira, which is basically an oversized gigantic thumb piano - I play a lot of my tinkly sounds on that because I want to bring that kind of electronica that's on the album, but at the same time I don't want to just be pressing buttons and bringing things in and out, I actually want to play. I want to perform ... RD: You also made this album almost entirely alone. Did you have any safety valves to keep you sane during the process? IH: In the beginning, the first three months, I did go completely mad. I wasn't getting any sleep, I was really fretting over things and wondering why I wasn't getting any inspiration, and then I realized that I actually have to get out of the studio every once in awhile, because I was just doing it seven days a week - I felt like I was slacking otherwise. I didn't realize that you know, it's just seven days of complete nonsense and no work's been done because you haven't been inspired and had input from the world. So I did, in the end - I had a day off in a week and made sure I did something that day. Sometimes I would go see a band or go down to the Tate Gallery or do something or go see a family member or a friend - if I still have any - The one thing that I did actually was that once I had about 80 percent of the record done, I'd kind of come to a bit of a halt and I needed to spend time away from it to come back and be really, really fresh to it. I didn't want to go anywhere too far away, so I took my bicycle - because I wanted to go alone and I wanted to have completely no music in my head. I didn't take my iPod or anything like that - and I took my bicycle and rucksack, and I just cycled from the head of the river Thames, which is in a place called Kemble in Gloucestershire about 400 kilometers away, to the end of the river Thames, by the Thames barrier. So I started from the Thames at a little tiny puddle in a field next to a big rock and slowly followed it, becoming a stream, becoming a river, becoming an estuary - I did that for a week. I knocked on people's doors, bread & breakfasts, at like 4 o'clock in the afternoon and asked them for a room, and just went to the local pub, walked through the fields of sheep and cows and things and would go to a local pub and get up in the morning and go. It was great. I came back [from the trip] and I was all refreshed. And then I did so much work in that last couple of weeks before I finally finished [the album]. RD: Your music frequently ends up on movie soundtracks ... IH: I've always, since I was a little girl, wanted to write music for an orchestra and I kind of imagined myself as, you know, big tail coat, conducting orchestras around the world, playing pianos, you know, things like that. That's what I wanted to do as a kid. And then ended up singing for a living, which is a great job, I'm not being downhearted about it, but I really, really do want to write music for films and get in there with orchestras. The skills I had a little bit: like when I was a kid, I could really write down music like pretty well - like think of something in my head and I would know how to write it out - completely lost that ability now. Spent 15, 20 years in front of a computer ... 15? No, well, I started to work with computers when I was 12. As soon as I started to do that, basically, anything written down sort of went down the toilet. But I very much want to get that back, so I'm quite excited about working on a film with someone who's from that background. And so I can get [those skills] back, because I was planning to do studies in classical and contemporary music arrangement and composition and you know, I never got around to it. So maybe this will be my apprenticeship ... |