Imogen Heap - Musical and Songwriting Style

Musical and Songwriting Style

For her solo work, as well as her work with Frou Frou and Acacia, Heap plays heavily produced and arranged pop incorporating elements of rock, dance and electronica. As a guest player and collaborator she has played rock (Jeff Beck), hip-hop (Urban Species) and theatre/film music.

I just love crafting and shaping sounds. Actually, many of the sounds that I work with start off as organic instruments - guitar, piano, clarinet, etc. But I do love the rigidity of electronic drums... I would record live drums, and then I would spend a day editing them to take the life out of them. I like to breathe my own life into these sounds, and I do try to keep the 'air' in the music. Some people think electronic music is cold, but I think that has more to do with the people listening than the actual music itself.

Heap extensively uses manipulated electronic sounds as an integral part of her music. She also mixes ambient sound into her music (such as the sound of a frying pan in use cooking food, in the background of her song "My Secret Friend") and has commented that "certain sounds give the music a width and a space, and that's important."

Heap states that her song lyrics come from personal experience, but are not straightforwardly confessional. She has stated "Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mum or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a lyric, it is in the heat of the moment, and something has just happened."