Total Ellipse of the Heart Issue #41

Imogen Heap on flamingos, Twitter, and the comforts of home

By Selena Fragassi
Published: August 1st, 2009 | 12:00am

After a break-up left Imogen Heap single during the recording of her latest album, Ellipse (Sony), she found love in a very different place – with her nearly a million followers on Twitter.

“Every album I’ve ever done, I’ve always had a boyfriend, but this was the first time I was making a record single and it was a very different experience. I guess I didn’t realize how much I need or appreciate having that encouragement to keep me going,” Heap admits. After a freak lightning storm fried her London phone lines, the musician is all too happy to chat about her new love: “Twitter became my surrogate boyfriend. When I was really down about the album or just had a lack of self-confidence, it helped to get a huge surge of love with Tweets that would say, ‘we love everything you do, just carry on.’”

As an avid blogger, Heap also discovered moments of tough love with her online devotees who kept her on task for finishing the album. “Working on my own, I don’t have a producer or record company to bug me, which is a good thing,” she said, asserting a creative independence she has long grasped. “Blogging helped me because I could see a diary of what I’d done. And once I’d blogged about something, I had to finish it because [the readers] were expecting me to blog the next day to tell them I’d done what I said I was going to do. If I didn’t have deadlines like these, I don’t know if I’d ever really finish anything.”

Heap, who allowed herself one year to record 2005’s acclaimed Speak For Yourself (Sony), missed her birthday deadline to complete her hotly anticipated follow-up, but for good reason — she’s committed to doing everything herself. “A lot of the responsibility falls on my shoulders because I don’t have a band to pick up any of the jobs,” she said, citing a list of post-recording tasks like press shots, interviews, “costume” shopping, and even developing the album artwork. “It’s hectic, but at least people know that when they see something with my name on it, it’s done by me.”

As a perfect example of the former Frou Frou singer’s commitment to her solo projects, she decided to pull out of a gig that gave her the chance to achieve her dream of scoring a film soundtrack in order to focus on completing Ellipse. The film, a Disney documentary about flamingos, gave Heap the opportunity to spend months coursing the migratory patterns of the original pink ladies in the Serengeti. Although she opted out of the project, the experience itself had a lasting effect on her latest album’s experimental sound. “I loved watching the flamingos and trying to figure out how to translate the rhythm of when they take off into music. Listening to nature really made me think differently about recording sounds, and it made this album much more atmospheric.”

Closer to home, Heap kept her ear to the ground, capturing the natural creaks and purrs of the childhood home she now proudly owns. “I wanted to bring the house into the album because it means so much for me to be here and keep it in the family,” she says. “I thought that maybe if I put the house in the music, then maybe the music would be able to keep the house going.”

For a singer who admittedly seeks comfort to create, moving on from the arms of a lover to the haven of home sweet home likely gave Heap the breathing room she needed to conquer greater lyrical depth. “I feel like, this time around, the songwriting is really confident. The last record was, in many ways, an overall expression of me not wanting to be in a relationship, but this one is about many different things,” she says, citing issues with her body, depression, and two-faced personalities as prime fodder. Four years after her hit album, Heap has clearly learned how to Speak For Herself, and as the title of the new album Ellipse illustrates, she’s not ready to end the sentence.