187: Imogen Heap

Imogen Heap has to put her daughter to bed, then she can talk about what she’s been working on. She can tell you about her latest single, “Last Night Of An Empire” which she released on December 9th. Coincidentally, that’s also the day she launched The Creative Passport, a verified digital ID for Music Makers. In fact, December 9 has always been an auspicious day for her. It’s her birthday and “everything is just a little more special on that day”. 

While her daughter sings herself to sleep in the next room, Imogen talks about creating the Mi.Mu Gloves that she invented for her own performances before developing them for commercial use. “They are the world's most advanced wearable musical instrument, for expressive creation, composition and performance.”

As the night unfolds, she’ll tell you about her app (ImogenHeap.app) where she connects regularly and directly with her fans (self proclaimed “Heapsters”), sharing song demos, weekly live stream concerts, works in progress, and casual conversations about herself and her life. She’ll explain that she’s building her own artificially intelligent bot called Augmented Imogen. 

She’ll remind you that she also owns a recording and performance facility called The Hideway built in an 18th century house in East London, which you can visit any time via an Oculus compatible virtual reality tour. That sums her up: she’s a traditionalist in some ways, she plays instruments, writes melodies, and cares about the creative craft. But at the same time she’s a futurist, constantly looking for new areas of technology and distribution to explore. 

Even though it’s now close to 11pm where she is in England, and you’ve been talking for nearly 2 hours, she’ll gladly relive some of the major moments in her storied career “I’ve just done so many random things,” she says. Like making her first record I Megaphone when she was a teenager; forming Frou Frou with Guy Sigsworth and their unlikely post-factum success; writing the song “Hide and Seek” and being a witness to its many lives; working with Taylor Swift and with Jeff Beck; and composing the music for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child which opened in the West End before moving to Broadway. 

Imogen has the kind of dizzying energy that truly creative people possess. She’s ready to build the team, to engage with the crowd, to share the experience. But first she just has to put her daughter to sleep.

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