What's Going On With Imogen Heap
on Heap's latest EP "I Am ___" and her use of AI to create it.
Honestly, Imogen Heap is probably why I love music as much as I do. When I was 10 or 11 and I heard Frou Frou’s Let Go used in a trailer for Garden State and was stopped dead in my tracks. It was such a sweeping, transportive melody and there was such a tension and rush to the song. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before, and it felt like it was music just for me.
I’ve always bragged that the first album I bought “with my own money and for my own Gods” was Frou Frou’s Details, after selecting it at a Barnes and Noble with my allowance. And I played the hell out of that album! I loved it, I remember responding to how beautiful Heap’s vocals were, they were powerful and feminine at the same time, and the songs were so emotive and unique. Lyrically, Details introduced me to emotions I would not be able to truly relate to for years to come and gave me a lot of imagery to daydream to. Instrumentally it was lush, exciting and cinematic.
Hide & Seek, released a few years later, would end up being a bit of a global music sensation that would withstand decades of interpolations and remixes and endless parodies that utilized its stark earnestness. It also sparked the ears of our generation’s most successful and talented pop stars. Namely, Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson and Ariana Grande- all of whom have covered or worked with Heap and publicly sung their adoration of her. This trio is particularly impressive to me: Swift is undeniably on track to becoming the most successful musician of all time because of her prowess as a pop songwriter and businesswoman. She has faced a lot of misogynistic accusations of having ghost-writers or buying credits so it’s unsurprising she would find inspiration with Heap, who was always done things so self-sufficiently. And Kelly Clarkson and Ariana Grande are both some of the greatest vocal talents in all of pop history on par with Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Adele in their own rights. Clarkson has helped make Just For Now an indie Millennial Christmas essential. And Grande is a deft producer and credits some of that inspiration to learn more about that side of music from Imogen Heap.
For women, and pop music-makers and those who practice the art of music while being a woman, it’s always been a majorly uphill battle. Heap has been through the industry’s wringer but managed her own path when she wrote, produced, engineered, mixed and art directed her 2005 album Speak For Yourself. And she really proved herself with this this album- it stands as a legendary pop bible featuring Hide & Seek, as well as my favorite track Headlock, which recently blew up on TikTok this last year or so.1 I would follow her career closely after this point when she started blogging the process of making an album on her YouTube channel. This was 2009’s Ellipse.
It’s funny to look back and realize that I was idolizing one of the most pioneering women in music at the time without thinking of it that way at all. I also got the impression that she didn’t think of herself that way either. I’m not saying Heap wasn’t aware of her own context, just that conversations like that weren’t as on the tongue at the time. But the truth was, Heap was incredibly powerful and singular in the industry. She was constantly one-upping herself and trying to grow and create something entirely new.
For her next album, Sparks, she wanted each song to be more than just a song: it had to be an entire project or tie-in. There are a million stories and excursions she’s gotten herself into over the years and as a fan of hers I’m going to have to limit how many to include, but some of my favorites: when she had fans send in scans of their feet to make a radial print of them for the Sparks album cover2. Or when she restored a local community garden to tie in with her song Neglected Space. Perhaps most relevantly could be when she invented a new piece of technology called the Mi.Mu gloves, which are effectively a wearable musical instrument. But the Mi.Mu gloves have received global attention and response- with many tech and media companies investing and presenting her invention. Even Ariana Grande wore them~
And it’s really not that surprising notable “feminist” author of the time and fellow Brit J.K. Rowling3, might have been a fan of Heap too- as she was tapped to create the soundtrack for Scowling’s stage adaptation for some Harry Potter garbage. This was decidedly before Scowling went full off-the-deep-end publicly TERF, and I even remember being happy for Heap at the announcement, thinking: I’m not gonna see that, but I bet she’ll make lots of money off it! Good for her!
Of course, in today’s climate it’s impossible to feel similarly. Recently it’s seeming like every other day another supposedly woke celebrity is revealing how decidedly bigoted they actually are, and Heap hasn’t really directly addressed it or denounced Pay Day Scowling in any tangible way. She probably knows Scowling is incredibly rich, defensive and retaliatory if she disagreed. And if she did agree, then it’s not like she’s unaware of the public’s reaction to her transphobia either. The music is probably all under deep contract which is making Heap decent money and is easier for her to just not talk about much. But unfortunately, Heap also found herself with accusations of “bad likes” on Twitter, and her response was pretty defensive, if ultimately a refusal of the original tweet. Since then, she has publicly made pro-trans statements, worked with trans musicians, is a fan of SOPHIE and came out as pansexual. It’s a conflicting bag of information, unfortunately.
Heap’s recent sexual awakening is what her latest EP I Am ___ is about in some ways. But what’s been at the center of the conversation with this EP is her use of an ‘AI Twin’ called ai.mogen. Many people online are calling her out for her participation with the technology. Heap argues AI is inevitable, that it’s already happening and that it’s just a matter of time before the general public becomes accustomed to it. She worked with a company she claims has ethically sourced its AI model, and ‘ai.mogen’ is specifically the program that was trained on Heap’s own body of work. From what she’s said, it seems like she’s mainly using AI’s capabilities to fill in the gaps of her music making process and to speed things up a bit.
Perhaps she figures she’s already done the work of production; her synths are signatured- why take weeks of tinkering when she could just regurgitate what she’s already created? I honestly remember Heap complaining about how long it takes to engineer everything yourself in those blogs, though I won’t take the time to dig through the old videos. And it’s not as though we expect folk musicians to re-invent their instrumental palette with every new album. Heap also used the AI to help with her vocals, which I actually think makes plenty of sense. As artists get older, they might not physically be able to sing the way they used to, despite being expected to perform songs they wrote with younger vocal cords. And it’s not like people are always kind or forgiving to musicians who can’t hit the notes the way they used to.
But even if I can find arguments to defend the choice, I am mostly left with the impression that Heap is already trying to think and act like the big AI tech companies that are coming for art. It seems making music is not something she wants to dwell on as much4. Sparks was released in 2014 and save for a few random one-off singles (most of which had major cultural tie-ins like The Happy Song) she hasn’t written many songs in a traditional sense. Reading her Medium article, Heap clearly has good intentions with all of this, but there’s also a layer of frustration I can sense. She highlights 2 playlists- one of ai generated Headlock remixes and one of unlicensed songs made by humans sampling the song. She also shares many examples of her attempts to get ahead of this sort of thing happening to her music to no avail; real Heaple5 will recall the number of emails we’ve received from her over the years about some new altruistic music sharing platform inspired by mycelium that she’s been trying to create (and I guess has finally manifested as Auracles). I’m left wondering if Heap sees little difference in how an AI machine has regurgitated her work and how disrespectfully some humans have interacted with it. Of course, Heap is well aware that it was remixes and interpolations that brought her more mainstream success than her music would have achieved on its own.
I see someone who is earnestly trying to find a solution to something she sees as inevitable. Unfortunately, a lot of her arguments mirror those of highfalutin cohorts like Grimes, who has had an ai.twitter bot running amok on her tech billionaire exes’ website for years now. Heap’s arguments on AI are nuanced, so I’m not going to pretend they’re not, and I’m not an expert on AI at all. But she has little to say addressing the environmental impact beyond acknowledging it exists and that it’s a problem.
It’s also been bad for Heaps discography. The main track and centerpiece of her latest EP was released November 2024, called: What Have You Done To Me? This track is an amorphous electronic experience. It’s dynamic, bombastic, lush, strange and beautiful. It may not be everyone’s taste but it’s a fun listen I’ve returned to throughout the year. It doesn’t give any credit to ai.mogen and might be the last Imogen Heap song to do so. She hasn’t released a solo single since 2020’s Last Night Of An Empire, a track which seems to be about the anxieties of a quickly changing world. While it has a chorus, structurally it’s a lot more free-wheeling than most of the work she’s famous for. What Have You Done To Me? seems to build on that, with no refrain or direct repetition of melodies or lyrics.
But the songs released with her ai-thing since then? Like, Aftercare or murmur, for example, well- they’re not terrible or unlistenable. At times they feel a little novel honestly. They don’t have easily discernible structures but in a way that feels beyond understanding rather than a purposeful artistic writing tool to be analyzed. Sonically ai.mogen comes off like digital wallpaper, and somewhat akin to the noises our phones make, in my opinion. At best, these songs feel like they’re trying to answer some kind of impossible premise: to create music unlike anyone’s ever heard before.
She’s actually sort of attempted this concept before: one of my favorite fandom anecdotes is when she created a special electronic egg-shaped chair that people could sit in and talk to. She asked fans to go tell ‘The Listening Chair’ about a song they needed, or a song they had never heard before and the chair recorded their answers. She was attempting to fill a collective gap of musical need. Humorously she came to the conclusion that there was no one specific thematic ‘song’ humanity was truly ‘missing’. So instead created an acapella autobiography, where every minute of the song told the story of seven years of her life. I think this story is quite charming, and that it speaks to Heap’s ethos as a musician. She’s always trying to grow and do more as an artist but I’m not sure when her solution stopped being to just write a song about it. It’s something she’s always been so exemplary at, too.
It’s interesting too because her specific musical inclinations are clearly coming back into vogue with the resurgence of Headlock, and many of Heap’s daughters gaining popularity off of her influential sound. But Heap is interacting with AI a lot differently than these artists and I worry she will struggle to connect with the dissonance before too long. Maybe some of these younger artists are just burying their heads in the sand like Heap seems to think, but it honestly feels more like they’re too busy just making their art.
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It’s not an artist’s job to figure out the future of AI. And it didn’t ever need to be an artist’s job to do the entirety of their album by themself either- even if Imogen Heap had to in order to have any real autonomy as a woman in the industry. Perhaps in a few years I will look back on this position and see how correct Heap was about most of this, but in the meantime, I’m not going to be terribly hype for any new ai.mogen releases that come down the pipe.
7th grade me is hugely vindicated by this: one time I had a technology teacher tell me the song was weird when I tried to use it as my background for a power point presentation I was supposed to give.
lol ew
(who will now only be referred to as: Pay Day Scowling)
I swear to god I saw an interview or something with her super recently where she literally says somethings like ‘i don’t want to spend more than a day or 2 on making music anymore’ but I can’t actually find it.
An attempted pet-name for Imogen Heap fans akin to ‘little monsters’, ‘Swifties’ etc.