Imogen Heap - Future Music

Full transcript: Imogen Heap on London Real

9:28 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Imogen Heap, who is a singer-songwriter, composer, performer, investor, and technologist. You write, produce, and mix your own albums and have seen chart success on both sides of the Atlantic, including two Grammy nominations and the win for Best Engineered Album. You have pioneered the use of futurist technologies in your recording and performance with the creation of MyMew, musical gloves, which enable the wearer to sculpt sound with hand gestures, and the development of Mycelia, your model for a fair trade music industry.

10:01 You’ve also recently become a mum. Welcome to London Real.

10:05 Imogen Heap: Thank you. It’s me, me. Me, me.

10:07 Brian Rose: I went through every video on YouTube and I couldn’t find you saying it anywhere.

10:12 Imogen Heap: I always forget to say it, but it’s like me and music. But it’s spelled M-I.

10:18 Brian Rose: Good. Let no one ever wonder again. Me, me.

10:21 I’m a bit jealous when I watch all of your content because I see you create and I see all this energy flow out of you and it seems like you feel life really in a big way. I grew up as the science guy and I grew up doing the science fair projects and studying computer science and doing the numbers. Then I went into finance and I was working the numbers and I was really good at that, but I never really felt like I was creative. Although, maybe some people call London Real creative.

10:50 But when I see you, it seems to flow effortlessly out of you. I was just wondering if that’s true or do you just make it look easy?

11:00 Imogen Heap: Well, it’s funny because the other day I had this email from my old manager, just recently we parted ways. He sent me this list of songs, of like 50 songs that never got released. I realized how productive and creative I was in my younger years compared to now.

11:21 So I was a lot more productive and creative when I was younger. My sister was asking me, why are you so much more prolific then? I was like, well, I just had less to do. That’s the great thing about where I am is that I can do lots of things. I can imagine an idea whether it’s making music with gloves or turning the music industry onto its feet.

11:45 But every time I do something like that and I have an idea, off it goes. So all the emails and all the talks and the conferences about that and all the demos and stuff. It takes away from that creative stuff. So actually when you see me on stage and I’m like, making music with gloves. I’m just oozing all that stuff that’s been waiting for such a long time to finally be able to be on stage and share the technology that we’ve been working on.

12:13 So it’s like a compacted condensed version of creativity because I don’t get to do it that often actually anymore.

12:20 Brian Rose: Because you’re sharing the technology and you’re sharing your performance as well, which you don’t get to do as often as you’d like.

12:28 Imogen Heap: Yeah, I mean at home I’m programming. I’m working away. I’m slowly, meticulously fine tuning music or some part of the software with the team on the gloves.

12:37 Or I’m trying to bring together the industry to see a new way, new architecture for the music industry that I think is a fairer and more sustainable future for music and art and creativity on all different levels. But yeah, what that does is it doesn’t help me get into the studio.

12:55 Brian Rose: Right. And in the studio you heard that excellence is on top of your list. I hear that you are a perfectionist when it comes to making a record.

13:04 You say that you kind of have one chance to make it and you want that one percent of people that might be listening to be like, oh yeah, she got that right.

13:13 Imogen Heap: Yeah, that’s very true. I feel like in this world, and I don’t think that’s what I do, but I do think it helps. That everybody listens to music constantly all the time. And like you just said, you have this set here, which just gives the viewer just a little extra minute watching it because they think, oh, okay, they care about what they do.

13:34 They’ve put attention to detail in the set in this room, whereas it could just be a blank wall and then people just might pass it by. So you’ve got those few extra seconds to grab people in this world of so much content. And every day, thousands of tracks being probably uploaded from all over the place. So yeah, I feel like I have these maybe 45 to 60 minutes of an album and I make an album roughly every four years. It’s not because I can’t create more music or I don’t want to create more music.

14:05 It’s because, yeah, there’s so many other things to do that I’m also created in. But yeah, I feel I’ve got to get those right. And I don’t want anything to tread over old ground, much to the annoyance sometimes of fans who like a particular song. I’m not going to do that again. I never reuse any samples or anything from previous works. It’s all completely from scratch, which again, maybe I don’t need to do.

14:30 Maybe I could be more prolific if I didn’t do that. But I just like this, that it’s a fresh new instance, a new idea. It’s a moment in time that it captures that memory of whatever it is or that moment that is right there and I’m living it. And then I want to capture that. But I do find that I could give up a bit more of what I do to an assistant.

14:54 I could give up the kind of editing or timing of things to somebody else or choosing of takes. But I also then the other side of me thinks, well, that is also really creative. And in doing all of those roles, people get the most me possible on an album. And that is my only chance of being the most me on an album. Because if you collaborate with someone, then you’re still you, but you’re with somebody else.

15:21 So for me, that’s what I do.

15:23 Brian Rose: Do you like collaborating or do you kind of like doing things on your own and going off your own ways?

15:28 Imogen Heap: I kind of get sick of one and then I’m dying to do some collaboration and then I get sick of, you know, oh, that’s not as good as if I could have done it myself. And then I go back to being myself again. So I have this constant pull and push from being one to the other.

15:43 But I always felt actually that, stupidly really, but there’s this understanding, especially I started up in the music industry, you know, initially when I was 17, I signed a record deal. And I was under the understanding that, you know, you had to be a bit traumatized and a bit depressed, you know, to be, you know, to be in the music industry, to write, you know, to write and record. You had to have these sad stories to tell. So then I almost inflicted sadness upon myself to have something to write about, which is really stupid.

16:18 Brian Rose: How did you do that?

16:19 Imogen Heap: Just by being alone, you know, just like, oh, you know, nobody understands me. I can’t have a boyfriend because they don’t understand me. And you just become what you think is necessary to do what you do. And it’s total rubbish.

16:32 Brian Rose: Because it’s a classic narrative that’s sent back to us over and over again, whether it’s Amy Winehouse or Gwen Stefani. All the great art comes from breakups and pain.

16:42 Imogen Heap: Well, I do think that that does help, you know, or friction in the world or, you know, when you’re when you’re like, that’s not right, you know, or that thing that was done to me is not right. I want to put it right in writing. I want to have that cathartic, you know, place and put something in writing.

16:59 And then I can feel like I can put it away. But also, it’s the process of which I was doing, which was very alone. And I kind of put myself into this very, yeah, what’s the word, basically cut off, I suppose. And then I to the point where I had the least kind of social calendar ever because I was just, oh, no, I can’t do that. I’ve got to be my music. I’ve got to be alone.

17:25 Brian Rose: And this is when you’re 17, 18?

17:27 Imogen Heap: Yeah, from 17 up until quite recently, like maybe five or six years ago. And then I realized, wait a minute, I’m kind of upset all the time and a bit feeling lonely because I’m alone. And all I have to do is just open up and invite friends around, you know, and go to things. And it’s not like I know I’m really lucky. I have some great, lovely people around me.

17:48 But I was always kind of shutting them out because I felt like that’s what I need to do. But actually, the more you open up, the more collaborative I become, the more creative I become and the more and the happier I get.

18:00 Brian Rose: And the music has changed.

18:02 Imogen Heap: And the music’s changed. The music’s massively changed. Well, it hasn’t had much chance to materialize itself because I’ve only, in the last two years, I’ve only written two songs.

18:12 And one of them I didn’t even really write. That was Taylor Swift collaboration that I did like two, two Februarys ago. And the last one was about my little daughter, Scout, called Tiny Human. We’re written as a commission for Sennheiser, but really it was about my little girl Scout. So that’s about as productive of us as I’ve been in the music department. But I’ve been really productive in thinking of an idea for the industry, in the time where I maybe could have been in the studio.

18:47 Or I’ve been developing this concept for a cultural space in the village where I live to try to kick start a bit of culture in the other places which was a bit barren of culture. Being so close to London but kind of also losing out in that department because people just go to London. So, a little bit of that.

19:08 Brian Rose: Good. I want to talk about each one of those pieces. And before we jump in, I just want to talk about London. So many British artists, they make it and they end up in LA.

19:19 Or they go to New York City because like, I don’t know, America’s the holy grail of, I don’t know, entertainment. But you’re here and you’re living in the house you grew up in. And why? Why London for you?

19:31 Imogen Heap: I love London. I really love it with a passion. I lived here, I got a record there when I was 17 so I lived in between West London and then South London and then Central London and Waterloo.

19:43 And I lived there for, yeah, since I was 17. And so I really, really love the city. It’s just amazing food, diversity of culture and a real melting pot, amazing places. And just loads of free stuff, galleries, which, you know, when you’re a musician, it’s all so good to get lots of free stuff. And just, and more and more over the years, people just collaborating on all levels.

20:11 Whereas I felt like, it’s not just London, just in general, you know, 10 years ago, people were a lot more closed about their ideas, they’re a lot more secretive and kind of, I want to make money out of that. I’ve got to keep it, got to keep it close. But then actually now it feels like everybody shares everything because they want to get stuff going quickly. And projects are kind of like quickly, quickly happening more than ever before because of this real kind of sense of togetherness and let’s just get something out there like with Kickstarter or, you know, Indiegogo, people can just throw something together and let’s try it out and see if we can raise money for it. So it’s, that which I find in London is really amazing.

20:47 Brian Rose: More so than any other city?

20:49 Imogen Heap: I haven’t experienced that kind of energy in any other city. I don’t know New York well enough. But in LA, for me, I find it a bit too spread out for that to happen. There’s this kind of energy where you kind of move from one bar to the next or you go from, you know, one conference to another and you bump into somebody on the street. You don’t really bump into anyone on the street in LA. You might bump into a car, it’s not obviously recommended.

21:13 Brian Rose: Yeah, you need critical mass for ideas. You need like a physical critical mass. And with tech people forget that sometimes, but you actually need people in the space spending time together bouncing ideas off each other. You know, you mentioned that collaborative scene. I find that technology in London has that same energy of let’s we’re all going to make it together. Let’s help each other out as much as possible. I think it helps that there’s not a real tiered group of the made it’s and they haven’t made it’s yet. So there’s not billionaires walking around yet. And everyone’s just like, how can we help? How can we put London on the map? How can my idea help your idea?

21:43 Imogen Heap: It feels great. Actually, I was actually talking about technology then I’m just going to show you where my headspace is in because I’m just not in music anymore. My head feels like, you know, developing technology and just really excited about the potentials of how it can help music flourish in the future. So it’s still music related, but it’s coming from a tech undergrowth. So yeah, I feel nowhere else on the planet really. So for me, I could do that.

22:13 London’s a place.

22:14 Brian Rose: Good. Let’s talk about technology. I was watching some of your videos a couple nights ago and my 11 year old daughter came up and she saw me watching your tiny, tiny human video, which says she was watching that in the waters coming down and she’s like, who’s that? And I was like, well, it’s imaging just gonna be on my show. And she’s like, don’t have that lady on your show. And I was like, okay, well, I don’t know if you’re right there, Gabby.

22:37 And so she went and walked away, obviously didn’t take her advice and she came back and I was watching your wired video 2012 presenting, you know, the gloves, Mimi and she wouldn’t stop watching it. And she’s like, you have to have her on the show. And I was like, it’s the same person. And she just wouldn’t stop watching. And this speaks volumes, right? And I was trying to figure out why. And when you’re out there performing with your gloves on, it’s more than just the gloves because I’ve watched some of your performances where you’re playing, you know, keep your head in the air.

23:07 And I’m like, I’m not gonna be bored here or playing on a piano. And it’s almost like I’m watching you, but you’re paying attention to the instrument. And so then I have to kind of feel the instrument. But when you’re on the stage with those gloves, it feels like I’m like connecting into your heart.

23:23 Imogen Heap: Yes, that’s good. Yeah, that is one of the core reasons why I wanted to develop them in the future. I mean, in the past for the future was because I felt that on stage, you know, I, I do kind of flip between various different workstations.

23:36 Workstations on the stage, I have like sample area over here with a key tar and then I’ve got my beer and then over here I’ve got the perspex piano and different computer and stuff. And then over there, there’s the drums and cushion area. And then sometimes I have musicians on stage with me. And I’m I’ve got little microphones on my wrists and I was trying to capture this and sample it and in the most fluid way possible, but with the off the shelf gear that there was. So it was actually very rigid.

24:02 I had to kind of be in one place to do something and to be in another place to do another thing. And if I wanted to interact with my computer, then I would either have to use a keyboard or mouse or some other external controller device, which usually sits on the table and it’s flat. So you can’t kind of nobody can see what you’re doing. Yeah. And if you want to like just do something like pull up a volume or press record or bring in the loop or play an instrument that isn’t a piano on a keyboard or keyboard sound.

24:35 Then you’re really limiting yourself. Your whole body is kind of confined to dealing with this very simple task. You know, you have to go there. It turns on and it stops the whole flow of the performance. So for live it kills that connection with the audience. Yeah.

24:51 Brian Rose: And also you can’t go where you want to go because a fader is a one dimensional object.

24:56 Imogen Heap: Yeah, exactly. And so even though the crowd they say, Oh, I love it. I love it when you do some racing around like that and you’re kind of doing all these millions of things. And it is fun to watch, but what’s more fun to watch and what’s more fun for me to do is to actually be really in the moment. And it takes a lot of time to kind of program the gloves to get to the point of this feeling of very natural second skin, you know, physical, emotional connection.

25:22 But when it’s there, it’s amazing. You know, it’s just you don’t think about it. You’re kind of effortlessly connecting the machine with the human and humanizing the tech that you work with, drawing the sounds and out for the software and the computer without having to look at it. And literally feels like you’re shaping sound, you’re catching sound, you’re moving over there, you’re spreading it across the room, you’re kind of playing through some stars, you’re playing the baseline like a basketball.

25:50 It’s like it’s really different. And when people see it for the first time, it’s kind of both amazing and also kind of not underwhelming, but people assume, well, of course, that’s what you would do. Of course, that would raise the volume. And of course, that would send the panning over there and over there. But it’s like, you know, when you’re in a dream and you’re flying and it’s like, Oh, I know how this feels, you know, you can’t actually do it in the real world.

26:17 But if you could, it would be like, Oh, but yeah, of course, I can just fly. And it’s that when you see it on stage, it’s this, of course, that’s how it should be. Right. But it wasn’t. It took years and years to figure out those pieces

26:29 Brian Rose: for people that don’t know what the gloves are, that might be listening and still don’t know what we’re talking about.

26:35 How would you describe them physically to someone if they saw them in their own hands or on you?

26:41 Imogen Heap: So they look like some high tech pair of gloves. They’re self-contained. So they have, they’re black mainly, and they have a little mesh layer here. So you can see the tech underneath, which are eight bend sensors, one on each finger and then two on the long fingers.

26:56 And then you’ve got a button for sometimes you just need a button. And then you’ve got LEDs here for light feedback to give you information about what stage you might be in.

27:07 Brian Rose: And then the feedback’s important on these, right? Vibration and light feedback for you.

27:13 Imogen Heap: We need more feedback in time as the fabrics and sensors evolve more with soft tech.

27:18 And then on here we have the board, which it tells you, like in your phone, you’ve got an accelerometer, gyroscope magnetometer to tell you where you are, position up or down, or upside down, or left, right, a compass type thing. So you could say to your computer, my hand is over here in relation to here. And I have this posture, and maybe this posture would say, record now.

27:54 Brian Rose: And it knows your fingers are together and it’s near your mouth and it records.

27:58 Imogen Heap: Yeah, it doesn’t know near my mouth, but it could say that. It doesn’t actually have depth. That’s one thing it doesn’t have. It has left and right and up and down, but it doesn’t have depth yet.

28:07 But again, that’s a kind of design choice at the moment because we like to have everything

28:12 Brian Rose: you can’t have too many variables either, right?

28:14 Imogen Heap: No, I mean, I think that would be really nice. It could be something that we’d add as an accessory or someone could easily hack because you can open up the glove. You’ve got extra inputs if people wanted to do that to hack and do what they want with them. And then they have buzzers for hat-tick feedback. So it’s basically you as the user. You define your postures.

28:33 So I’ve got eight or nine. So I’ve got fist, open hand, puppet hand, one finger point, two finger point, articulate, secret finger, what else? T finger, rock sign, and pinch.

28:45 Brian Rose: Okay. You thought all those out and then pre-programmed those in to meet specific things.

28:51 Imogen Heap: Yeah, and it’s very easy to program. You just go like that, capture. The neural network goes, okay, this is in this position or the bend sensors are at this state. And then you might train it like once or twice and then it’s done. And then combining your posture state with your movement, so up, down, left, right, or in zones, or when an accelerometer peaks at this point, the drum hits when I’m in this posture.

29:19 So it’s really, once you get your head around it, you kind of think, oh, I could do so many things. Just with those simple combinations, we haven’t got to the point of time-based gesture recognition. So, you know, this does something, which is what we’re now working on.

29:36 Brian Rose: Okay. I can imagine it must be like a mad scientist works because the software component alone, let alone the hardware, sounds like a team of 20.

29:45 Imogen Heap: Yeah, well, there’s a team of eight and there’s only really two people working on the software two, three days a week. So it’s amazing what we’ve done just in the little small team that we are. And it’s like, you know, no one of us could make the gloves and do a performance. You know, we really need each other. We’re all very much part of the system, the cog of the glove making machine.

30:13 And that’s what makes the team so great, is that we really need each other and we really like each other.

30:20 Brian Rose: And what’s been the response of the gloves? I saw a short video and now it makes sense to me. You sent a pair to Ariana Grande and she’s like, puppet hand. I saw it and I was like, what’s she talking about?

30:33 Now I know what she’s talking about. So you sent her a pair of those. She looks like she’s having a ball playing with them. What’s it been like to see other musicians play with them? She performs with them.

30:43 Do some get it? Do some not get it? How do you find it?

30:46 Imogen Heap: I think, well, first of all, there aren’t that many people in the world who have them. They’re quite expensive at the moment because we’re a small team and, you know, we’ve got some people that every week we need to pay.

31:00 So the gloves are expensive.

31:02 Brian Rose: How much?

31:02 Imogen Heap: They’re five grand.

31:03 Brian Rose: Five grand. OK.

31:04 Imogen Heap: But we want to create two pairs. So you’ve got the performance pair at this kind of the rate that it is at the moment, which we hope to integrate and just make totally bulletproof for, you know, stage performance, which at the moment we use Wi-Fi, but anyone will know is use Wi-Fi. It’s not totally bulletproof when it comes to stadium shows like Ariana Grande. So she, along with our team, has developed and a guy called Ben Bloomberg developed a kind of radio, you know, like this kind of radio to send over the signal that receives back in on Wi-Fi.

31:38 And that’s totally bulletproof. So we want to create that for the performance version and then we want to create a much cheaper, more affordable glove for those people who aren’t going to be doing stadium shows, but still want to be creating stuff and doing small gigs to make them much more affordable. But we’re just, you know, we haven’t got any external investment. It’s just initially it was just my funding for about five years. And then now through the sales of the five grand gloves and through a few grants, we can sustain ourselves.

32:11 But we really need to figure out this manufacturing thing.

32:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, I was about to say, what’s it like being in the technology business? You know, we have our other technology show and out of 85 founders, I think only five have been in the hardware business. Like I said, Kano, Blaze and those people, everyone else has like a serious amount of respect for because everyone else is building ideas in the cloud. They scale massively. I’m not saying it’s simple to build an Uber, but when you talk to Emily Brooke from Blaze and she’s like, I spent New Year’s Eve in China and my supplier.

32:39 And if you get one thing wrong in the hardware, then you can’t fix it for nine months. You can’t just upload a new version. It’s hard work.

32:47 Imogen Heap: Yeah. Actually, that’s one thing that we really want to try to achieve is to have all of the manufacturing done in the UK.

32:54 Not to go to China, but actually to keep it within the UK or as close by as we can. So to do things so that we know that, you know, how exactly how people are working and make it nice and fair and everybody knows the story. So and to keep it close so we don’t have to wait nine months for something to be changed. And it’s, you know, it’s come at no surprise. But at the time, you know, when 3D printing and, you know, maker spaces and hack labs are all kind of, you know, popping up all over the place.

33:30 So it means that, you know, Hannah in using in Berlin, you know, she can pop down to the local makerspace and quickly, you know, build a little thing to house something into the gloves or say you can have some print up some circuit boards, you know, have those done pretty quickly. It’s an amazing time combined with open source movement of, you know, all of our all of our software and most of our hardware is open source. And we’ve been if you want to, you can go on there and make your own pair of gloves. And we tell you how to do it.

34:03 Brian Rose: That’s very cool.

34:04 Very cool. What’s the best and worst part about being in the glove business? What have you learned? You’ve been doing this for five years, five years, six years.

34:13 Imogen Heap: Well, it’s not really a business. Right. Okay. It’s very much kind of, you know, hand to mouth.

34:19 And we we hope to make that not the case in any years time. But for me, it’s just I just feel so lucky to be able to have had a dream and and now have a really amazing team all together working on it and other people in the world using them and how in turn they very quickly inspire me to either have jealousy like, oh, they’ve done that before. Or they’ve I wanted to do that. I must get onto it, you know, or out of all or mostly out of all just inspired by how other people use them because no two people use them the same.

34:56 You know, there’s no you don’t have to use my justice. You can use any justice you like any postures you like. And it’s really about the creativity of how you map those sounds, how the idea is then manifested through using the gloves because the gloves don’t do anything on their own. You know, you have to do the creativity and what you want the gloves to do. And it’s really funny how very different people that just if you gave them a sound, how much just their personality immediately becomes apparent.

35:29 So I had this friend called Tom. He was a surfer and he put on the gloves like in the early days and he’s very chilled, very, very chilled. And he put on the gloves and he just was kind of going, hmm, hmm, hmm. And he was doing that for half an hour and he was just so happy. And that was him very chilled and really like, you know, enjoying the experience. And then the opposite end of the scale is my dear friend Tim exile, who’s this totally amazing kind of genius musician and makes software.

35:58 And he’s hilarious and he took the gloves and the first thing he did was like just kind of made a fist and then took a sound, you know, made it quiet, hide under something, you know, as if it was like muffled and then go, you know. And it’s just it really takes on the personality of the person using them. Because normally I’d have to learn how to play a guitar, learn how to play a piano or something which usually cuts off probably the majority of people from expressing themselves through music.

36:30 You still have to, you don’t have to learn it technically in the same way. It’s more like you have to teach it how you have to teach it how you want it to be. So you’re actually the teacher rather than the student. You are discovering your world and what your movements are, how you want things to manifest, what kind of sounds relate to what kinds of postures to you in your world. And then out it comes. And there’s infinite possibilities.

37:02 Brian Rose: And what’s been the response? Obviously my 11 year old gave you the thumbs up. But when you’re out there on stage, does it feel anything like your previous performances?

37:11 Imogen Heap: So recently I think I did my most integrated glove performance with all the acoustic instruments because what your daughter and you saw was a song entirely written and performed with the gloves. And that was our first kind of major project as a gloves team was to try to enable me to do that, to write a song entirely on the gloves and perform it entirely on my own with the gloves.

37:32 Brian Rose: Again, you made it look easy, but like I was watching this and I was just thinking like years and months and months of coding and recoding and the feedback just to feel what that does.

37:42 Imogen Heap: Yeah, it took a long time. But there was a, it took a long time mainly because we’re all doing it in our spare time, which often isn’t very much. And then when I was doing that song, because I wanted to release that song with the gloves, that was part of the reason why I did my past album the way I did it, where it was all kind of project based so that I could spend time on the gloves.

38:04 And so for that we had an intense period of time, about three months where we really went for it and we got loads done and that took us to a jump. And now we have other jumps that we kind of look towards, whether it’s a conference or the collaborative gloves, which Ariana bought a pair of, and each time we make a little jump. So we need to keep giving ourselves those jumps because otherwise we don’t get lazy, but we focus like anyone.

38:30 Brian Rose: Yeah, we had a previous guest here, Vinay Gupta, who I know is also part of Ethereum, we’ll talk about my Celia very soon.

38:37 But I asked him about the gloves and he said, Brian, and he didn’t know I was going to quote him, but I’m going to do it anyways. And he said, the first thing to get your head around is how impossibly cool her gloves are. Like really, seriously, the most magical pieces of technology I’ve ever seen. He’s like left hand up, down controls flange, right left controls pan. She’s singing and dancing and her voice flows through a 4D space rather than a 2D space, completely fluidly integrated into the performance.

38:59 He’s like, I think she should totally team up with Johnny Ive and do this at Apple level types of investment. It’s genuinely world changing.

39:06 Imogen Heap: That’s a big statement. Wow.

39:08 Brian Rose: Was that since the last show that he saw?

39:10 Imogen Heap: Yeah, well, there was today. Oh, thanks, Vinay. Yeah, well, he went to that show. And for me, that was a real, you know, a marker because it wasn’t full of problems in lots of new technology and also, you know, hardware software. Also, not just the gloves, but it’s like how it integrates with all the other software, which isn’t used to dealing with gestural interfacing.

39:35 So we were kind of having to jump through all kinds of hoops to make things work, to hack things together. And so that’s been the problem in the past. But this time, you know, I learned from my mistakes. I learned trying to be too complicated and trying to do too much and actually simplified things. And it was a lot more effective and things flowed a lot easier. And the glove software has come on so much since doing all of those mistakes.

39:57 Not mistakes, but, you know, you just because you’re not doing it all the time, you do like a conference every three months or something or a gig every three months. And each time things fall down. If you were doing a tour for a whole year, you would do all of that in the first week. But it’s like every time, oh, no, nothing happened. We’ve got to figure out. We’ve got to do that.

40:20 And so this was the first time when nothing major, major went wrong and I was able to actually give a performance and really enjoy it. Whereas the media machine performances, I’ve always been like, right, OK, what am I doing now? I may have looked like I was kind of calm and everything, but in my head I was like, what am I doing? I’ve got to try and remember this. But now it’s much more becomes a language like I know that is reverb. This is catching my voice. I’m always panning left and right.

40:44 I always approach the bass lines with my left hand. I always have I’ve created a little language for myself and it’s much easier now because I’m having to remember so much. It’s just become second nature. And that’s what happened at this gig was it became second nature. And that’s what Vinay saw was this fully integrated kind of flowing thing, which was, you know, it was like movement performance art with songs.

41:10 And it wasn’t like abstract, weird sounds. You see a lot of that. It really made sense. But you couldn’t define it or really know exactly what it was I was doing, but it just made sense. And so that’s what it’s about. It’s this extra layer of connectivity or nature to the audience.

41:31 This kind of unsaid relationship that you have now, because they kind of get that rather than you’ve been over here in your little world. And I’m there all the time present. And it just changes massively. It enables me to be much freer, much more relaxed and and and actually just enjoy singing a lot more because I can do all those nice fun effects. And I don’t have to do all the trickery over here. I can just really and it has really changed the way I perform.

42:07 Brian Rose: Is this the future? I mean, in 50 years from now, when we go down to Camden, we see 90 percent of people like this and these old antiquated, you know, hollow barrels that we played with string instruments. Will those be gone?

42:18 Imogen Heap: No, no, I think they’re really exciting. You know, when when the two collide and you get those acoustic old favorites, the piano, I love playing the gloves with the piano.

42:27 You can kind of augment the piano and, you know, stretch out a string or tune stuff down and opt to make the piano. Imagine it like physically twice the size or distorted or you can do that all bend into the into the get into the notes and pluck the notes and sample those and create little clouds and then carry on playing the piano. And, you know, these kinds of movements, what you do playing piano, you know, these actually mean something now because they’re changing parameters as you kind of, you know, your wrists are doing this and you’re making something louder or softer or sampling something while you’re playing.

43:01 And it’s very seamless and it’s wonderful.

43:03 Brian Rose: Endless possibilities with tracking the human movement. Yeah. And putting sound to it.

43:08 Imogen Heap: Yeah. I mean, there are obviously loads of other things which are using gestural interfacing as the core like you’ve got the connects, you’ve got the myo, which kind of tracks your muscles.

43:19 Brian Rose: OK. Did you have a connect behind you for that wired performance?

43:25 Imogen Heap: Yeah. So for me, I think the gloves do the kind of finer detailed work. But when it comes to the macro, I found moving my using the proximity to the audience as a kind of creative axes.

43:42 So I could as I get closer to the audience on that song, part of the concept of the song was when I get close to the audience, it becomes much more intimate and kind of close in. And when I go further back, then all the delays come in, loads of extra drums. You know, the river becomes absolutely massive when I’m over here and it maybe messes up with the drum programming. So it kind of gets all jittery. And then when I get closer again, so this move getting further and closer is also a kind of creative tool.

44:16 So I use the connectors, kind of extending the playground to the stage and then the gloves as the literally shaping the sound in my hands, the music in my hands.

44:27 Brian Rose: So I saw a TED talk online, too. There’s a woman using your gloves, the TED talk. I didn’t even go in to watch it.

44:34 Imogen Heap: Oh, is it Shigar? I don’t know. Blonde hair.

44:37 Brian Rose: Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. And I was like, I’ll watch that once I’m done preparing.

44:42 Imogen Heap: Yeah, she’s on the team. So she actually came from an artist background, saw me using the gloves and came to this work, our first kind of London open workshop where people come and try out the gloves and said, I want to work with you guys. I love this idea. I want to help. I want to get involved. So she’s now one of our two team members who actually get paid in the week.

45:11 And she is using them in her songs. So she’s kind of coming from the artist angle and also their day to day kind of dealing with all the grants applications and all that stuff. And so, yeah, so she’s out there using them now. And we’ve got one of my favorite users of collaborators, as we call them, is this guy, Chris Halpin. And he has had cerebral palsy and through Drake Music, who are a foundation who work with music and disability musicians with disabilities, empowering them to be hyper-created, even if they haven’t got the, you know, the bits that we have to interact with the computer.

45:50 You know, maybe they haven’t got the digits or whatever. The gloves kind of for him are enabling him to instead of being boxed in and feeling like he can’t use the software, the hardware that we’re all kind of meant to use and being boxed in by that and being less and less able to use that. The gloves are kind of, they’re malleable, so they work with you, they grow with you, they change with you. If one day your movement isn’t so good, then you can train the gloves upon your movement of that day or how you’re reaching a certain posture.

46:34 So he’s finding it really liberating because he’s able to, he’s actually playing the guitar, he’s done this great little, kind of a, what do we call it, kind of a, part of the little worm, a little worm, anyway. Not like an air guitar, but with his hand. Yeah, so he’s plucking the strings as he’s kind of going up and down. And it’s really lovely, it really feels like he’s kind of plucking the strings and, you know, creating different chords with this hand.

47:03 So it’s amazing.

47:04 Brian Rose: That’s exciting. And yeah, like you said, someone who, like, I can’t play the guitar, but someone who might not even be able to teach themselves how to play guitar because they might have a function of a finger can now create music.

47:16 Imogen Heap: Yeah. Again, it’s, you would never play it like a guitar, because you would probably do it with a guitar, but you get this whole other, all different types of possibilities.

47:25 It’s like a hyper-real guitar, which is the shape of you, however you want to play it, you know. And so in many ways it’s more than a guitar, but it will never replace a guitar because a guitar has this physical body and it’s rigid in that way. Okay. And that’s good too. Yeah, understood.

47:47 Brian Rose: So you did Tiny Human, released recently, two parts of it. You released it with Sennheiser, but you also released it with a really exciting project, idea, revolutionary concept, which is Mycelia, which is kind of tapping in from what I understand. I want to hear more about parts of what Bitcoin uses in the blockchain to kind of have this entire network of information around a piece of art and how we can track it over time and compensate people for it.

48:12 And I knew Vinay was there, and Jamie Bartlett, and all sorts of exciting people, and I want to talk about that. But I also want to find out your relationship with corporates and labels, because I know you released that with Sennheiser. You were signed when you were 17. You self-published your own album in 2005 before anyone was really doing that. And you’re not shy with corporate sponsors, and I know sometimes you said that you feel like it’s kind of going back to the ancient times where, say, a king would sponsor Mozart, as opposed to it having to be part of a business organization. You’ve seen both sides. How do you feel about labels, corporate sponsors?

48:47 Imogen Heap: Yeah. Well, we’re in a transitional phase where, you know, the industry, as we knew it with CDs, it was kind of, you know, it was manageable. It was kind of understandable. Things were bought in a place, and then you knew who was buying them, and then you could go to that place in the world and tour that place because you knew roughly how many sales of a CD you’d buy. And, you know, buying all that. But now, it’s like data, music everywhere. We don’t know really who’s listening to it all the time or not.

49:23 We don’t know who’s sharing it. We don’t know how old they are. Well, maybe we do. But the problem with the record industry is it’s like existed from a paper kind of statement radio many, many years ago, 100 years ago, began from the kind of publishing angle of sheet music. And it’s been built upon as technology has kind of come into the fore and shaped the music industry again, then it would go off with a different tangent.

49:51 So, you know, you had vinyl and then you had cassette and then you had CD and blah, blah, blah. And then you had MP3, which changed everything, which is very exciting. And all the labels got terrified because they suddenly didn’t have control.

50:04 Brian Rose: Were you terrified?

50:05 Imogen Heap: I wasn’t terrified. I was. This is brilliant. You know, all of a sudden my music can be everywhere, you know, and I don’t have to.

50:12 I don’t have. Well, the record industry, you know, panics because they’re like, we don’t have control. People are, you know, getting our money. We’re basically taking money that we could be having elsewhere. But actually, I don’t think that I always felt like the record companies were always doing us over as the artists.

50:32 And I’d prefer that fans got hold of the music and shared it because of the love of music rather than be vilified or, you know, criminalized for doing that. And it’s just the thing about Napster was that it was really easy. It was really easy to get hold of music. And so people did it. And now, you know, Spotify and iTunes, it’s really easy to get music like that. So you do see much less piracy.

50:56 And really, what we need to create is something which is so flowing and easy to use and fun and has so much interesting data and people are cross-referencing all kinds of amazing stuff. So that we’re not limited to this really rubbish experience of music at the moment, which is a crappy, you know, small version of your, you know, nice mix in your studio, which, you know, vinyl got close to. You’re left with this really little bitty version of your music, which doesn’t have the bass end and can’t really get a sense of the music.

51:31 And we listen to it on really rubbishy little speakers on our phones. And we give it maybe five seconds of our time. If it doesn’t sound as loud as the last thing, then we kind of move on to the next thing. Or we’re watching it with videos that maybe aren’t relative or related from a kind of musicians point of view, artistic point of view. And then we’re also not knowing anything. If we’re lucky, we may know the cover art or maybe the video.

51:59 But more often than not, we don’t know who the musicians are. We don’t know who the composer is. We don’t know who the artist is, because sometimes they want a completely different name to kind of people don’t know that you’re sharing that particular song. So the connection between the artist and the fan is so far away now, because often they don’t make that connection to even a person anymore, because it’s just this piece of audio that kind of goes into a playlist and so much music and I’ve got time to find out about that person.

52:26 So all of this nice information gets lost.

52:28 Brian Rose: Do the streaming services turn music more anonymous in a weird way? Because you go to Spotify and music comes out as opposed to where you used to have to at least go find the artist and buy the song.

52:39 Imogen Heap: Like I said, I think it’s a transitional phase. And we’re at this place where music is everywhere. It’s a golden age in the sense that we can listen to anything from anywhere at touch of a button on our mobile devices for free.

52:52 But the downside of that is the experience of music is very kind of, it’s not an emotional experience, it’s kind of washed over us a bit, for taking for granted maybe. And I feel like it’s not the fault of the listener, it’s the fault of the industry at the moment, this is where we are technologically. But now we have this chance with new technologies to really go so much deeper and to give the services, the data that they need to make Spotify a place where you might be able to walk through the songs that a certain musical instrument might have been on.

53:40 Not even just a musician, like a guitarist, but actually the guitar itself. You could follow the life of the guitar through different songs over the years. Or you could follow the life of a song, all of its different incarnations, all of its different covers. And then you could follow all of its remixes or the deliberative versions of that song if you wanted. But at the moment there’s no way to really search through that information, because all of the licensing and copyright information of musicians, they’re not on a database, one database anywhere.

54:10 And if they are on a database they’re closed, because the company who owns that feels that as something that they can make money out of.

54:17 Brian Rose: But that’s your publishing idea?

54:18 Imogen Heap: Yeah. So we’re just getting to a point where I think people realise that the more open they are with the data, the more money they can actually earn. Because people are going to find out about that music, they’re going to find out about the musicians, they’re going to find out about the producers, the whole industry can breathe.

54:35 At the moment we’re all kind of, you know, they’ve got it down to such a little tiny paranoid point of the mp3 and no data attached to it, so that the artist actually doesn’t really know where that music’s got to. So if I, for instance, wanted to see, well I know for instance there’s some DJ in Poland, I think he’s in Krakow, I’ve heard, oh this DJ’s played your music again this week, and I’m like, I mustn’t remember to find out who that is. But then how do you find out, I mean it’s played you could ask them and they could try and find out from the radio, blah blah blah.

55:09 And ultimately, wouldn’t it be great if that piece of music was being streamed directly from my personal music collection of me as the artist uploading this music to one point of contact for the whole of the world. So the whole of the world knows that when they want to look at a tiny human by Imogen Heap, they know where to go. This is one place which I upload to, it’s verified by me, all the data, all the copyright licensing information, the splits, all the people involved, the musicians, the lyrics, the video, who made the video, the clothes that I wore, the brands that I used to make that piece of music.

55:47 If everybody could have that data and have that source, then so many things could happen, so many different exciting ways to travel through that music, I could then discover, oh I can see that because of it there would be a dashboard, because you’d be able to get all the information back, because that would be part of the deal. Anyone using that information has to give back the information that they receive from their users. So if somebody in Krakow has played Tiny Human, I would be able to see who that was, because I would just be able to see.

56:19 Because I’d be able to see in my dashboard that music has been played by this person in Krakow, and I could tweet him, I could say thank you, thank you for playing my music, next time you want an interview, just call me up. I can actually make those relationships, build them. That for me is like the key thing which is majorly missing in the industry is this ability to be able to thank people actually, to make those contacts and to grow your network.

56:45 So this is about almost making music a richer media experience, like you want to be able to get more information, find out more about the music, but also chart who’s using it, and then ultimately get people to be paid properly for it, and to see all that in kind of a Bitcoin blockchain piece where it’s all public ledger, and yet through miners or I think librarians is what they’re being called, it all gets done in a way that’s not subjective, that a label can’t come in and say we’re going to take that piece and not tell you about it. Am I describing that?

57:20 Brian Rose: Yes, and the miners, they could be your fans, so maybe there’s a model that’s not the kind of blockchain mining way that we do it now, where a lot of people think it’s unsustainable because there’s these massive warehouses churning through algorithms to try to solve that block, and it’s just, they’re using so much energy to do that, and is that really sustainable?

57:42 Imogen Heap: So people like Vinay have kind of ideas about alternatives to that, and maybe with Mycelia there might be a way that perhaps the miners could be doing that somehow as fans on a network, and then I could thank them in giving them concert tickets.

58:00 Brian Rose: Right, pass value in another way.

58:02 Imogen Heap: And so then you can really connect up those people who are helping you, fans sharing your music, hosting your music, they could even, if anyone could potentially have access to all these amazing tools that would pop out onto the Mycelia network through mushrooms as I call them, so these are the services.

58:24 Somebody may build a service for me to be able to see all this information curated in a really interesting way, so maybe a service is a dashboard, you know, how does it curate all of that information that’s out there in a useful, meaningful way for me to be able to do my business, to be the entrepreneur, the musician that I am, and that I may pay them for that service. So the Mycelia level itself would be free for the artist, it needs to be free, that side of it, and perhaps people may find a way to do that without paying for it, but the whole point of the system is that if it’s just so much easier and more fun and cheaper, because you’re not paying the middlemen, you’re not paying people to write out statements of kind of odd numbers and digits for you to kind of try to have no idea really where this might be, and that’s where money comes from around the world over the years, you know, your money coming in, but you’d have actual sensible data that you’d be able to do something with, that you’d be able to, you may even be able to mortgage your house, you know, on it if it was all integrated and it was all in your digital wallet.

59:30 Again, you know, if the banks to do that, you could kind of do that on the blockchain, have these relationships, these contracts individually with people that would be embedded.

59:39 Brian Rose: And you said you came up with this idea because you were sick and tired of complaining about the music industry, and that something kind of needed an idea to be put out there.

59:49 Imogen Heap: Yeah, so I have this new song called Tiny Human, and currently I’m not by choice, I’m not in a publishing deal, I’m not in a record deal, I don’t have a manager, so I’m actually in the position of a new artist.

1:00:00 I’m totally free, or I’m totally independent, a lot of people thought I was independent, because I did things my own way, but actually I have licensed to major labels and I’ve been connected, but now for the first time ever, I’m totally independent.

1:00:14 Brian Rose: Okay, so perfect timing for this.

1:00:15 Imogen Heap: Yeah, so I can really just do what the hell I like. And so put it up there for free, for people to use in their new systems and software they’re developing to just see how their models might work.

1:00:26 But really what I’m trying to do is there are loads of different programs and softwares that are coming up, platforms for musicians like there’s something called OCL that’s working on stuff, there’s Ujo, there’s Aurovine, there’s Alexandria, there’s Superpass, there’s iTunes, there’s Spotify, there’s all these millions of different places that we individually have to upload music biographies data to, or a distributor would do that for you, you have to pay them a percentage to do that. This way, your music would go up, it would act like a beacon and it would go up, I’m here, I’m here, one place, and that’s all I have to do. And then the automated contracts sort out the rest of it, they’re already speaking to Spotify and Ujo and all these people and they’re sending that music to them, however they give that to the public, however they want to present that to the public.

1:01:22 So then it depends on how good and exciting and fun and fair your system is, is how well it’s going to work in this network because it’s like an ecosystem and anything in nature if it’s taxing, if it’s too taxing on the system it dies because it pushes it out like in a pack of ions. I call that frictions and technology, people just don’t do those things. So the idea really, it came from the industry at the moment, it feels top suit early, it always has done, the artists, the musicians, the people that really need the money now always get it right at the end of the food chain, right at the end, after all the companies that have it ahead of us and then get lots and lots of the pie.

1:02:05 And then we get left with these tiny little things and we don’t even know really if that’s what we should be over or whether it should be more or probably usually more. So it’s about just getting rid of all that and just direct, when you listen to a piece of music on Spotify or iTunes in the future, hopefully, you would know that that play would be going directly to the artist. Right, and the consumers would kind of see that as kind of this fair trade for music and they would gravitate to those sites.

1:02:31 And they’re like, are you using mycelia? Oh, okay, then we can talk. They might gravitate or they might not, but I think I would hope that through public pressure, like anything else, that everything is going this way, you know, knowing about the author, the creator, wanting to get closer to that relationship. We’re close in the sense that, you know, I’m on Twitter and you can tweet something to me and if I catch your tweet, you know, I will write something back if I can.

1:03:01 But that connection to my music, like that physical connection, that money connection is so far removed. And it’s just about the artist having the power, being empowered to decide how they want their music to be shared because at the moment I don’t really have a say. If I put something up, it’s there and I can’t take it, I could take it down, but it’s probably more effort than it’s worth. So for instance, I wanted to, on my birthday, put all of my music for free. So any system out there that was using my music would have to, on that day, it would be free.

1:03:33 No users would use it. It would be like 0.003p less on their subscription or whatever, however the model would work. Or they would just get it for free. On another time, or generally, I would like all my music to be free for under 16s. I would like them to be free for over 60s because they worked hard enough.

1:03:53 Or I might like to divert all of my payments into my digital wallet on that one day or that week to, you know, a disaster relief fund. But at the moment, I kind of can do a charity concert or something, but it’s just, it’s not. It should be more connected in this day and age. We know where everything’s going.

1:04:10 Brian Rose: You know, when I hear this discussion, I think of, there’s a great documentary. It came out recently with the Eagles and it talks about their whole piece.

1:04:19 And David Geffen comes on and you can see they’re going back and forth. And David Geffen’s like, I’m the label. I protected them from all this. And the Eagles are like, they took all of our money. And then there’s a great movie called Artifact that Jared Leto made about his band, 30 Seconds from Mars.

1:04:32 And it’s about their whole struggle with, I think it’s Sony, I don’t know. And in the end, they actually stay with them because they distribute their music, but they make no money from the music. They make a loss every year. I think they even had something in their claws, like you were talking earlier, where there’s like a damaged goods. They pay a percentage for that in a digital world.

1:04:50 And yet they continue with that label and then they tour and take those monies. It’s just always strange from the outside to see these really torn relationships, you know, between musicians and people who distribute your music.

1:05:03 Imogen Heap: It’s lots of old models on top of new models on top of old models and all this weird stuff like packaging deductions, like, you know, it’s a similar thing where you have digital. You have digital now. You don’t have physical packaging, but still like only up until maybe a few years ago, or maybe they still are in record deals now, they still demand to have this packaging deduction.

1:05:25 But there’s no packaging, you know, how can you take that from me? But it’s just, you just win slow. It’s a very slow thing. I have a friend of mine called Rupert Hine, and his second deal was a real success because he managed to get a whole percent, one percent of all the earnings. One, one percent.

1:05:43 Before that, it was 0.7%.

1:05:44 Brian Rose: That’s insane.

1:05:45 Imogen Heap: And I think my best deal, I got 17% of my money. You know, you do get in advance, but it doesn’t really add up.

1:05:51 Brian Rose: Right. And this is the age old story you hear about musicians and business people. What’s next step for people with mycelia? If they want to know more about it, if they want to put their music out in a similar way, what can they do?

1:06:04 Imogen Heap: So at the moment, it’s a concept. What I’m trying to do is put the concept out there so people are developing tools just to think in terms of this architecture. The bass level and then the mushrooms on top, blah, blah, blah. So what I’m trying to do is, I’m getting so many emails, so many conferences to talk about this, so many people are interested in it. I’m getting completely inundated, to be honest.

1:06:30 Brian Rose: Another project for Imogen.

1:06:32 Imogen Heap: But I don’t want to take it on myself. It’s not a project I’m going to earn money off, it’s a foundation that needs to happen, basically, for mycelia, so that we can have investments, but it kind of remains a bit removed. But it funds the protection of artists rights and the flexibility of the system, the protocol, the language, and how the systems are going to interact. That’s what the foundation needs to be. So there’s, first of all, creating a website for mycelia, just so people know where to go, because they’re coming at the moment, coming through info at Imogenheap.com, which you can, if you like.

1:07:14 But then I’m just basically got this massive email list that I’m just going to, when we have an event, which is going to happen in London sometime at the end of January, a long weekend, panels, discussions, talks, and a hack, a long hack weekend. So just with big names that we know of, and smaller, upcoming platform developers, all get together with artists, with labels, with distribution companies, with everyone, manufacturing devices.

1:07:46 Brian Rose: How does mycelia look from the user end of your device? What will a little light come up and go with AirDread Music?

1:07:55 Imogen Heap: So it’s a massive thing, but it’s just about building in now the wish and the hope for something which is sustainable, flexible, resilient for the future of music. Because at the moment, it’s not. It’s very, very difficult if you’re an upcoming musician, even if you’re not, even if you’re a middle-class musician, a Zoe Keating coined this phrase. You’re not the top 1%, you’re not a starting musician, you’re in the middle there. It’s just still very hard to make a living.

1:08:33 And I’m lucky because I’m diversified. And I do deals with Sennheiser, and I write them a song. And every year, something random comes up that pays the bills, or the 1% does sample a bit of your song, like Jason Derulo, and makes another song out of it. And then that pays my mortgage off for a bit. But these little things happen every year. And then the next one is for me is Harry Potter, making music for Harry Potter Theatre production next year.

1:09:00 But I kind of have to rely upon the unexpected. But it should be that I should be able to rely upon the music that I make, bringing that money in, because I’m lucky that I can have those options. But 99.9% of musicians want to make music, and that’s how they should get their money back. And it’s about time we figured this out. And it’s not that complicated, right?

1:09:23 It’s not that complicated. It just needs to be fair. And I think when people realise that actually the fair, good place for the future of music is the most money. That is where people are going to make the money. Because if everybody is integrated into the system, then the payments from the user end can be tiny. Tiny, tiny, tiny. Not worth, you know, pirating. Just tiny.

1:09:50 In the same way that we pay for our electricity bill or phone bill. Or, really not phone bill. But water bill. We use it and we don’t even think about it. That’s actually not also a good thing, because we do have problems on the planet as a result of that, maybe. But that’s not, again, that’s not for us to figure out.

1:10:12 That’s for the systems to figure out. The users shouldn’t have to worry about that. We, as an industry, need to make it easy for the users to enjoy, flow through music. But through micro payments, everything integrated. Just super simple to be able to navigate through the glorious world of music.

1:10:32 Brian Rose: Love this idea. Really glad you’re putting it out there. And you’ve got people like Vinay and all sorts of other people working on it too. Super exciting. What’s it been like as a mother changing your music? Obviously your daughter, Scout, inspired this track, Tiny Human.

1:10:47 How did you think it would change you? I think I saw a vlog of yours where you were a couple months out and you’re like, this is about to happen. How has it changed you musically?

1:10:59 Imogen Heap: What it’s doing, I see things, I’m more interested in the news now than I’ve never been before. Because before I lived in my own little bubble.

1:11:09 But now I’m really, I want to know what this world is going to look like for Scout. I’ve always been a bit oblivious to it, in my own little bubble. And I think about things around my world, like the music glove making, or the senior building, or whatever. But when it comes to the bigger picture, I did a bit with my last record, Sparks. I went out and actively collaborated on various different projects, but they were very music related.

1:11:35 But now I’m just, I just want to know what I can do to just help massage good relations. Because I feel like that, whether it’s on or offline, the way that we’re all going to get along is if we just talk, understand, learn from each other. And I feel like I want to do that a bit more. So I think that is a result of having a child, because you start to see the future a lot closer. And yeah, so I don’t think that’s going to change.

1:12:12 Tiny Human was very much about actually my reaction to what it’s like to be a mum in those first three months of intense crying, because she had severe colic, it was absolutely hell on earth. It wasn’t this kind of gorgeous picture of, oh, it’s actually wonderful, look at my quiet, peaceful baby. I’m getting so very sleepy. She was a nightmare, you know, she’s absolutely gorgeous now. It wasn’t her fault, she was going through a grain of paint.

1:12:36 But it was pretty horrendous. So yeah, the next songs, I think, looking out, but also looking deeply in and how we all connect. So bigger picture, but also really like fine in there. How does it connect to family and connections or back actions? It always is how to get closer to things.

1:12:57 Brian Rose: When you’re creating that song, do you ever wonder what it’ll be like when she’s 18 and she decides, I’m going to pull that YouTube video up and see mom sing this song about me. In the shower.

1:13:09 Imogen Heap: I hope that, I don’t know what she’ll think of it. Part of me, like my mum doesn’t really like it because she’s like, oh, but you didn’t think of it.

1:13:19 That was my daughter’s reaction to it. That’s really what it was like. And I played it the other day at Scout’s birthday because I ended up being this massive birthday party because it turns out all my friends with babies have no social life either because we all have kids now. And so they all came. So it was massive. 130 people party with 40 kids. And I played this video and a load of my friends just was like, that is just thank you. That is exactly what it was like.

1:13:43 Some people do have this gorgeous picture of peace and tranquility and so it was this gorgeous thing that’s in our lives, bringing all our family closer together. But for me and my partner, it pulled us apart so much with these other folks all the time and just made me so tense all the time because she just wouldn’t stop crying. So that’s what it was like.

1:14:05 Brian Rose: So your daughter, yeah, probably, probably understandably doesn’t understand that. I just kept thinking, how long was the image in the shower on that shoot?

1:14:14 Imogen Heap: Not very long. I only did four takes because I had to get back to Scout. I was like, man, is this ours?

1:14:20 Brian Rose: But she’s such a pro. It doesn’t even seem to be, you know, noticing the water.

1:14:24 Imogen Heap: No, well, actually it was warm. We built it in my barn.

1:14:28 Brian Rose: Oh, okay. All right. I saw the Amy Winehouse documentary recently and I know she went to the same school you went to.

1:14:35 And I saw this woman that got a record label, like when, you know, in the same kind of age you did when she was 16 or 17. And then I watched, she had her second album and then this great kind of tragedy and this kind of spiral. And I just felt like in a weird way we all were kind of responsible for that in some reason. And yet a lot of the same things happened to you and yet you’re out here and you’re surviving and you’re talking about other, you know, great things.

1:15:01 Brian Rose: And I was wondering, do we have a collective responsibility to young musicians to, I don’t know, take care of them better or keep them from having tragedies or am I just looking at this the wrong way?

1:15:14 Imogen Heap: Well, obviously I was really sad when Amy died because you feel, what could have I done? I don’t think I could have done anything. I didn’t know her. But I just felt like I wish I could just call her up and say it’s going to be all right. But I wasn’t in her head. Nobody really, I don’t know the kind of details. I haven’t watched the film.

1:15:37 But I certainly felt really sad and what a horrible industry, you know, that this kind of super creative woman, amazing woman, this happens. But I don’t think it was, you know, it’s not all, I don’t know. I don’t really know how to comment because I don’t know if she wasn’t in the music industry. How else would her character evolve? But certainly the music industry doesn’t help you if your mental state is going down a certain direction.

1:16:16 They do tend to feed off that, you know, like, oh, poor Amy, you know, oh, let’s grab her while she’s looking really awful coming out of a friend’s party or something and make the worst thing that we can out of it because that makes good news. I mean, that’s that is not necessarily just a problem that’s indicative of the music industry. That’s just the British press. And that happened to lots and lots of famous people. So I feel like, I don’t know, it’s this maybe a combination of that. I certainly was fed that a little bit when I when I began in the industry that you should be, you know, it’s okay to be depressed.

1:16:58 It’s okay to be down because when you get your real good music stuff. And I did believe that. And I kind of, like I said, inflicted that upon myself. And then I realized, wait a minute, I don’t need to do that. I just, it’s okay to be happy. It’s okay to take help and be open and not worry. And you won’t get, you know, pounded for it.

1:17:21 I don’t know. I’ve never I’ve never been in there. I’ve never been in the public eye. I’ve always shied away from it. If there was any point in my career where I could have taken a, you know, a remix or I could have done a song with a some big rapper or something. I just didn’t do it.

1:17:38 So I was like, unless it’s creatively right for me to do it, I don’t do it. So I’ve never I’ve never written a song for the sake of wanting to, you know, sell X amount of records and be on top of the pop saw whenever I can’t do that now. But I’ve never done that. But what I’ve managed to, I feel I’m really lucky in that I have the flexibility to do whatever I want. And, you know, gone through some kicks and punches to do that.

1:18:08 But out of it, I feel on my own women. I can I can be what I like and talk what I like. I can say what I like. I can make stuff that I want to make. I feel I feel the freedom to and the encouragement to make gloves or to talk about my senior even when I don’t know really, I don’t know that much about the blockchain.

1:18:31 I could just know that there’s something in it, which is going to really massively help this this idea, which kind of almost happened before, you know, the blockchain. But then when I realized the blockchain was there, that is it. Then now it can all come together. This is the time. And that’s kind of what happened with the gloves as well.

1:18:50 Brian Rose: So it seems like music exists for Imogen and Imogen doesn’t exist for the music, you know, and that’s it seems like, you know, music is there for you to go to when you want to be creative and you want to do explore and probably technology too. And yet you’re not a slave to the music or technology.

1:19:08 Imogen Heap: Yeah, I want to write more music. And then I do try to have Fridays where at least I like music. But actually what I end up doing is just developing the technology more. But I do I do need to give myself time to make music because that is ultimately what makes me really satisfied is when I’ve made a piece of music, got something that’s out there in the world. And, you know, I love time. I love it. You didn’t love it. She likes she likes seeing the gloves, but that’s okay.

1:19:37 And that’s what’s great is I get to do all these different things and and I get to people in in different ways. And maybe they’re not a fan of this, but they’re a fan of that. And it just it just it just leaves to such an exciting life for me. And I can’t wait to do the next bits of music. And I’ve got so many ideas. But I think now between now and Harry Potter, which I kind of start writing more stuff for that in February.

1:20:04 That’s what I want to do. Make some music. I’ve got no I’ve just released a record last year. So I’ve actually got no real reason to make to make music for the first time ever. I’ve got no particular reason. And that’s how it should be.

1:20:18 Brian Rose: Right. Right. You mentioned that when you were younger, you were more prolific. And I wonder as a musician, do you people a lot of people will watch this and they’ll be like, you know, how can I be this or how can I have success like this? Is it about a numbers game to certain extent is about creating so many different things and some will be noticed by these people and some by those people. And, you know, great musicians have a few hits you heard of and then they have another 90 some percent of their music that is was either a work in progress or wasn’t that good. Is that important for a new musician to focus on that volume of creation?

1:20:52 What about what he says, what dead musician comes to mind when you’re like, they had it right? Is it like Mozart or is it like Elvis or is it not them or is it is it like someone else completely off the radar? We wouldn’t have heard of.

1:21:32 Imogen Heap: I don’t know. I mean, for me, I would say Brian Eno was like, you know, he’s somebody I really look up to and respect. He’s just a brilliant mind. He’s very active politically. But he also, you know, so creative and, you know, because he created a genre or lead the genre.

1:21:53 And just really lovely guy, great family, just super smart. And for him, you know, for me, he’s the kind of embodiment of success in music because he’s not either he can walk down the street. If you know who Brian Eno is, you’re like, oh, it’s Brian Eno. But if you don’t know who Brian Eno is by face, you know, you might know his work. He’s just not like, you know, I don’t know. I feel like he’s got it right. I’m sure lots of people do recognize Brian Eno on the street.

1:22:26 But he’s not to the point of you can’t walk out the door, you know, you can go on the tube, you can do what he likes. And for me, that’s success. Right. Being able to be free and not be pounded on by journalists or whoever, but still be able to be really creative and do what you want. So yeah, it’s really a fame for me.

1:22:47 I’ve never ever been a want to I see it as a terribly hindering thing in life. And I’ve always avoided any anything that led me there. And I kind of, you know, we see people on YouTube and they’re like, oh, if only imaging was more recognized or more, I wish it was more famous. And I don’t want to be more famous. But I do want my music to work for me. And I do want I do want to be able to keep creating. And I do want to do want my music to be shared and enjoyed by lots of people.

1:23:21 But whoever wants to enjoy it. What I what I find is just knowing that for me, I know there’s loads of amazing music out there that I don’t know about because nobody’s told me about it or there’s so much music out there. It doesn’t get to me. And that’s that’s frustrating to you. Yeah. Because I know there’s like these moments I’m going to just be like, oh, that’s so much.

1:23:44 I don’t know where they are in the world, because the curation of all that data and music out there is really bad. So I just want to find I want that to not happen. So that the people who do want to will love my music to make sure that they find it in their lifetime. That’s that’s all I want. But I don’t want the thing.

1:24:05 Brian Rose: What is your 2025 look like Scouts turn in 11. All these things have changed in your life. If it’s if it’s been a great 10 years for you. What what what what’s in the future? Is everyone wearing the gloves in the street or I just want to like what is what is a great 10 years for you?

1:24:21 What’s your 10 years for you look like what things have happened for you or for the music industry? What does that look like?

1:24:29 Imogen Heap: I want to find a way to create better flow in my life. So where things intersect, you know, the gloves, my Celia, my music, my home, my family, my barn at the bottom of the garden, which I want to turn into a cultural center. I just want to I want to help the flow of creativity. And I think having a space in the world physically also bringing goodness back to the place where I live physically, not just digital, not just out there and music or music getting out there, but actually bringing the goodness back home.

1:25:03 I think if we could do that also a bit more in generally in life, bring what we the goodness that we get put it back into the physical world around us and could help solve a lot of things too. If we put the goodness back into our direct kind of communities. So I’d like to see I would like to see that happen in my life. I’d like to see Scout happy at school and for me to be able to be a good mum and see in her what she what my mum and dad saw in me, which is a passion and to help nurture that and.

1:25:42 And yeah, just be able to have friends and still go around the world being able to dream up crazy ideas and meet people who also think that’s quite a cool, crazy idea or jump on other people’s crazy ideas. Just more of the same, really. Just want to be doing the same.

1:25:58 Brian Rose: I think you will be doing that. I always ask everyone one question at the end. I want to ask you if you can make a phone call to the 20 year old image and and give that young woman a bit of advice knowing everything you know now.

1:26:11 What would you tell her?

1:26:13 Imogen Heap: I can’t tell you. I won’t tell her. I can’t tell you what I tell her because it’s secret.

1:26:20 Brian Rose: Have you thought about this before?

1:26:23 Imogen Heap: Well, yeah, just lots of things, not really regrets, but yeah, I’ve let things fester too long, really. Some things in my life and I didn’t look at them soon enough. And so I suppose if I was to look back, I would just give myself the advice. Just deal with it now. Whatever’s upsetting you right now, just deal with it.

1:26:49 That’s what I’d give advice to myself.

1:26:52 Brian Rose: That’s good advice. Best advice you’ve ever received in your life could be music or business or personal.

1:26:58 Imogen Heap: Actually, my dad gave me some really good advice, which was just always keep your promises. And that has held me through many different projects and relationships and hold on to your promises.

1:27:11 Obviously, if you say I love you forever, you can’t always stick to that one. Because you’re not going to change emotionally. But as much as I can see, I wouldn’t say that. But as far as, you know, I’m talking about like short term business things. If you say I’m going to do this song for you, and then you decide, oh, I can’t be bothered to do this. This is a nightmare. I’m just going to not do it. Don’t do that. Just always do it.

1:27:35 You never know how things will come around. I mean, actually, a good example of that is Harry Potter. I did something back then. Actually, it was a joy to work on, but it was a very small thing and it took up a bit of time. And maybe my manager at the time, people were kind of going, maybe you should be doing this and not that.

1:27:54 But I promised this person I was going to do it and I really wanted to do it. So I did it. And what it was, it was the music for this production called Pool No Water. And it was, you know, it was on for about a month and then it kind of disappeared. But it was really great. And I loved the guy working on it, Stephen Hoggart.

1:28:09 So it turns out he’s the movement director for Harry Potter. And that’s how I managed to get the gig. Or one of the reasons. So, yeah, I think always stick to your promises and, you know, make sure that you follow through with what you said you were going to do.

1:28:24 Brian Rose: And you do that a lot. I get the feeling. All right. So you’re known for your integrity.

1:28:29 And in the music business, I’m guessing it’s a small world. And over 10 years, 15 years, people find out who’s there. 20 years. And you’re excited about Harry Potter. Let me talk about Harry Potter.

1:28:43 Imogen Heap: Yeah, me too.

1:28:44 Brian Rose: Thank you so much for being here. Priceless ideas and advice for young musicians, you know, as far as, you know, in this day and age, there’s this concept of you’re 1,000 true fans. I don’t know if you ever read that article, but it’s, you know, just this idea that if you can really go and touch and grab all these people and just have a thousand people, we try to believe it here and find those thousand people that will drive to see your concert and buy your CD and talk about you with their friends.

1:29:08 Then you own your own business and then you can go from there and you can get by it on $70,000 a year and then see what else is there. But at least then you’re being your person and you’re exploring your art. And, you know, so many people live their lives and never get to do what they want to do. So, you know, it’s good to hear you talk about that stuff. And when I hear an idea like Mycelia and when I hear you talking about it, I just feel like it carries weight.

1:29:33 And so I can see these people kind of jumping on board and it seems like this idea is going to be taken very seriously because you’re taking music seriously. And you’ve always like done things like five, ten years before everyone else, whether it’s blogging or self-publishing or some of these things you’ve done in real time with videos and things like that. So it’s really been nice talking to you. I know we’ve been you’ve been on our radar for like 18 months and we’ve always been like people like you really have to talk to Imogen because you seem to have a real spirit for what we do here.

1:29:59 Thanks so much. All the best. If people want to get a pair of those gloves or find out more about the Mycelia project, what’s the best way for them to get touchable?

1:30:09 Imogen Heap: Yeah, meemugloves.org. That is our website.

1:30:11 And yeah, you will find that you can go into the main list and find out what we’re doing. But we really, really hope to have a man-factual pair of gloves that are a bit more affordable. Probably shouldn’t say this, but by the end of next year, you know, latest. Because it’s time. It’s time, it’s time, it’s time. But it is also time and money for the last one.

1:30:35 Imogen Heap: Yeah. But we’ll get there.

1:30:36 Brian Rose: But it’s fascinating when you look at technology when that price gets to a certain point, sometimes it can spread just rapidly and be adopted and be used. So, yeah, I hope that comes very soon. Awesome. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well. Come see us again sometime. Thank you.

1:30:53 Imogen Heap: Thank you.