walking upstream…
Imogen Heap
photo: duk3l1xon · cc by-sa 4.0 ↗Imogen Heap
sourcesLondonist — Interview · LiveJournal/ohnotheydidnt — Imogen Heap covers Michael Jackson's Thriller for BBC Radio 2 (dates the Thriller cover) · MTV News — Imogen Heap Gets Personal On Debut LP (backs her denial of the Kate Bush/Tori Amos/Alanis Morissette comparisons, 1998) · Consequence — Interview · Aurgasm — Aurgasm Interview · Wikipedia — Guy Sigsworth (backs his co-writing/instrumental credit on Björk's "Unravel")
In Essex, before she was a teenager, Imogen Heap was already the household's designated composer, learning clarinet, cello and piano and discovering — as she told Consequence in 2010 — that classical counterpoint and orchestration "did seep into the way that I make 'Pop' music." She signed to Almo Sounds and released her debut, I Megaphone, at 20, then spent the early 2000s as one half of Frou Frou, singing and writing alongside producer Guy Sigsworth, before going fully solo and self-produced on 2005's Speak for Yourself, an album she wrote, engineered and mixed alone. Critics kept reaching for Kate Bush comparisons; Heap has denied them twice, on the record, seven years apart. The debts she actually claims run stranger: a Michael Jackson-obsessed childhood, and the man she sang beside in Frou Frou.
the sound in question
2005
Hide and SeekImogen Heap
walk the tributaries ↓
Michael Jackson1980s · Pop / R&B / Funk
Twice, four years apart and unprompted, Heap named the same artist when asked what shaped her — not Kate Bush, the critics' reflex comparison, but Michael Jackson. "Michael Jackson records probably had the most influence on me from a pop world," she told antiMusic in 2005. "When I was 12 he was non-stop on my tape player... it's the production. So complex yet makes you want to dance around the garden." When Jackson died in 2009, she didn't leave it at nostalgia — she went into a BBC Radio 2 session and recorded her own take on "Thriller."
listen: upstream & heresource: antiMusic — MorleyView ↗
1982
ThrillerMichael Jackson
2009
ThrillerImogen Heap
listen forJackson's original is dense with studio craft: Quincy Jones layering strings, chants and a horror-movie voiceover into one continuous groove. Heap's session cover strips that away and rebuilds the song from a single source — her own voice, tracked and stacked through a harmonizer until it does the work of a full band. It's the same appetite for complex, engineered sound she named as the pull of the original, just built from breath instead of a studio's arsenal.
Guy Sigsworth1990s–2000s · Electronic / Art pop
Sigsworth was already a name Heap knew before they were bandmates — a fan of his group Acacia as a teenager, then his collaborator from age seventeen, years before Frou Frou existed as anything but a side project. The influence she credits him with isn't sonic; it's disciplinary. "Perhaps the biggest influence on my lyrics was working with Guy Sigsworth when I was in the duo Frou Frou," she said in 2018. "Here I learned not just what it's like to sing my lyrics, but actually more importantly what it's like to listen to them."
listen: upstream & heresource: The Cross-Eyed Pianist — Meet the Artist ↗
1997
UnravelGuy Sigsworth
2005
Hide and SeekImogen Heap
listen forThree years before Frou Frou, Sigsworth co-wrote and played clavichord on Björk's "Unravel" — a song stripped down to little more than a held vocal line and one skeletal keyboard figure, most of the arrangement just space around the voice. "Hide and Seek" asks the same question of Heap's own catalog: how much a record can do with almost nothing in it, a harmonized voice standing in for a whole band. It's the architecture Sigsworth brought to their partnership, before he ever policed one of her lyrics.