Upclose with Imogen Heap
Experimental music virtuoso Imogen Heap just became the first female artist to ever win a Grammy for Best Engineered Album with her latest record, “Ellipse.” She tells Penny Zhou how to make an award-winning album.
HK Magazine: How is your new album “Ellipse” different from the last one, “Speak for Yourself?”
Imogen Heap: I wrote my last album in the studio. But for the new one, I was on a writing trip for three months. It’s like taking a break. For “Speak for Yourself,” I felt like I had something to prove to myself, like, “I can make funny sounds in the studio.” But I don’t feel like I was showing off on this record. I calmed down a bit, with more confidence in my own skin, and just organically and naturally taking the songs where they wanted to go.
HK: And you made your old home into a studio and recorded the album there?
IH: Yes. When I came back from my trip, I went to my family’s old house, and turned the playroom into a studio, and worked on the album for eight months. I recorded lots of noises from the house—the tap dripping, the shower, the boiler, the heating—and put them into the first song.
HK: Why are you so interested in audio engineering?
IH: When I was a little girl, I used to play with casette tapes, beat-boxing very badly over them, and playing the cello over here and the piano over there, and then I would end up with a new track. I’ve always been intrigued with building something from scratch, and seeing how far it can go from there. I just want to craft things.
HK: What part of the music-making process is your favorite?
IH: My favorite phase is the actual programming, production process of a song, the creative sound-shaping part. I love when everybody in the studio just gets into the flow and works till six in the morning.
HK: Tell us about your beautiful music video for “Canvas.”
IH: It all came from a video that a couple of my friends had made. They filmed themselves in the snow in Norway, painting onto a black canvas with white paint. And it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Then I wrote the beginning of the song for this image. And we made this music video using that same idea.
HK: Have you been to Hong Kong before?
IH: I ended up coming to Hong Kong on my writing trip, and stayed there for two days. I got a random phone call asking me if I could play in Beijing on the second day so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted to. But I did go up to the Peak, and I wrote part of the song “Tidal” while I was there. For me, Hong Kong is very high-tech, and everybody speaks English. But I found it quite hard to find places that weren’t for tourists. I was hoping to stay there a bit longer so I could explore the villages where there weren’t so many foreigners, an older core of the city.