Bledsoe: Imogen Heap’s breakthrough song still stays in the game

Imogen Heap

Imogen Heap

Imogen Heap has a brand new album out, but her 2005 breakthrough song “Hide and and Seek” was just recently on the top of the pop charts in an extensive sample adapted by Jason DeRulo into the song “Whatcha Say.”

“It’s great. I love that song and I’m glad it’s getting a new lease on life,” says Heap in a call before a show in Salt Lake City. “That song has had such an amazing journey. When I was recording that album I thought, if anything, that would be the song that people would skip over.”

The song is a cappella with Heap’s voice layered into an almost otherworldly effect. It began catching on over the Internet and soon became an underground hit. Heap says the song has since been covered by everything from choirs to kazoo bands.

“Maybe it’s because it doesn’t have any genre. It doesn’t relate to anything. It has it’s own little bubble. Maybe it’s because it’s really hymn-like.”

That sparked the sales of Heap’s album “Speak for Yourself,” which turned out to be filled with equally enchanting pop songs that did have instrumentation. Her new album, “Ellipse,” is even more song-centric.

Heap says the disc is a personal breakthrough in that she decided to write most of the songs before she sequestered herself in the studio to record.

“I thought what’s the point of being here in South London when I could be in Japan or Hawaii or somewhere? Why not go somewhere beautiful? I couldn’t afford to that before. So I went and wrote half the album.”

When she returned, she wrote the other half of the album while waiting for her home studio to be completed.

Heap first became enchanted with electronics when she discovered an Atari computer system with a midi system at her boarding school. At 15, she attended music school and two years later her senior project was heard by manager Mickey Modern who helped Heap get her first recording contract. Heap released “i Megaphone” in 1998 and later formed the band Frou Frou with Guy Sigsworth. During those she met guitar legend Jeff Beck at a songwriting conference.

“Before we met I didn’t know who he was,” says Heap. “If you knew me you’d understand.”

Beck showed Heap some guitar chords and then accompanied her on some songs. Later, he asked her to sing on his album “You Had It Coming.” Beck returned the favor by playing on Heap’s song “Say Goodnight and Go,” a highlight on “Speak for Yourself.”

“He just played for an hour over this loop,” says Heap. “I was just in heaven.”

The tough part, says Heap, was deciding what few seconds would be used on the recording.

While electronics provide the primary instrumentation for Heap’s work (and her performances), it is unlike much electronic music in that it is emotional.

“One of the main goals with any piece of music is it has to make me feel something,” says Heap. “You can piece things together and be kind of clever and some people might get off on that, but, at the end of the day, it’s all about what it makes you feel. It’s how it speaks to you. I’ll spend hours and hours on a vocal or something then the next day come in and listen to it and says it doesn’t make me feel anything and then scrap it.”

While Heap could be performing in much larger venues on this tour, she decided to perform in small rooms.

“I didn’t want to come back and do a bunch of big shows, right off,” she says. “It felt wrong to do a bunch of big halls. I wanted to see the whites of their (the audience’s) eyes!”

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