Switched on Pop - Playing "Hide and Seek" with Imogen Heap

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

It may be hard to believe it in this technology-driven day and age, but one of the most pervasive sounds in popular music came about when a computer STOPPED working. In 2005, artist and innovator Imogen Heap released "Hide and Seek," a mysterious and emotional song featuring just her voice and a digital harmonizer. In this episode, Nate and Reanna dissect a song that launched a thousand memes and gave the world one of the defining sonic textures of our time. Songs Discussed Imogen Heap - Headlock Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek Electric Light Orchestra - Mr. Blue Sky Phil Collins - In The Air Tonight  Daft Punk - Around the World Imogen Heap - Getting Scared Frou Frou - Let Go Jason Derulo - Whatcha Say Bon Iver - Woods Coldplay - Hurts Like Heaven Kacey Musgraves gracias a la vida Frank Ocean - Close To You  Zedd, Maren Morris, Grey - The Middle Caroline Polachek - So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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on records. Welcome to Switch on Pop I'm musicologist Nate Sloone

and I'm producer Rianna Cruz Rianna I want to tell you about one

of the most memorable live music experiences I've had. It's 2009. We're at Webster Hall in New York City, and the singer, composer, keyboardist, technologist, multi-hyphenate artist, Imogen Heep is performing. And she is doing a solo set, including some of her most familiar songs, but because it's the magic of live performance, she's not doing it in the same way that you hear on the recordings. It's familiar, it's different. It's live. It's unfolding in front of you. And she's not just, you know, up there with a piano singing. She is wearing this pair of digital gloves called Mumu gloves that she invented.

She's like doing this interpretive dance on the stage. Wow. Every movement corresponds to a musical effect, a reverberation, an echo, a sustained note. It's like extraordinary. And now you weren't there with me, Rihanna. But we do have a a tiny desk concert that gives us, I think, a little bit of the feeling that I'm trying to convey to you. Wow, that is a song that I have heard maybe a thousand times, and yet that version was so beautiful and different. And let's put a link to this in the show notes, because I do want people to see this. It's just imaging heap at that familiar tiny desk setting with these gloves and every little motion triggers another effect. And it's like you said, Rian, it's like this, the song that we all know

so well, but done in this completely new way, thanks to the spontaneity and the unpredictability of live performances. I feel like this is all a testament to this artist, Imogen Heap. I mean, she is such a interesting presence in poppy music as part of our special limited series, modern classics where we explore hits from the early 2000s, the turn of the millennium, and hear how they continue to shape the sound of our modern musical soundtrack. I feel like it's time to turn our lens on hide and seek. If we listen to the studio version of the song, it's probably pretty familiar. Here first.

What to say? That you only meant way. When, cause you did, what you say. That it's all for, because it is what you say. When did that song come out, Nate? 2005. So we are 20 years out from hide and seek, and I to this day have not heard anything remotely similar to that song, which is nuts because we have a lot of descendants of that type of sound.

You know, we have FCA Twigs. Okay, Lou just put out an album that is very stylistically similar. But I think hide and seek is a singular song. I totally agree. It still sounds as fresh as it did back in 2005 today. Even with all the technological advancements that have occurred in those intervening two decades, this just pops out of the speakers and you're like, whoa, everything stops. You have to give your full attention to this.

That's got to be like a 300-track session. We will plumb the layered depths of this track in detail, Rihanna. But I just want to step back and think about the fact that on one hand, here's this iconic song. And on the other, like Imaging Heap, not necessarily a household name. And I think that's exactly how she wants it. Because Imogen Heap, she's not just a singer. She's not just a performer. She's someone who is actually innovating the very way that we make music on a fundamental level.

the tools, the approaches, the sounds. And I think what's so remarkable about hide and seek is it's not only this iconic, familiar song. It also maybe changed the way that people would make music forever after. Wow. Admittedly, I know very little about Image and Heap. I know sort of her musical background. I'm curious, Nate. Tell me more about this song.

I want to know all about Hide and Seek. Rihanna, like most great tracks, this one starts in the middle of the night. No one ever wrote a hit song at Nine in the One. morning. Of course not. Nobody wrote a hit song doing their artist way pages. It always happens. Inspiration strikes at the wee hours. I mean, even back in 1916, Irving Berlin was saying you got to work out your ideas between two and five in the morning. That's when all the good shit happens, Rihanna. Shout out circular sleeping or whatever they call it. All right. So it's sometime in the vampire hours and Imogene Heap is doing a late night studio session.

and she's using the vocoder setting on her Digitech vocalist workstation harmonizer for a very pedestrian reason, which is that her computer lost power. Wow, so this is a physical piece of hardware we're talking about. I just did a quick Google. It's this tiny little thing. Yeah, it's a metal box with a bunch of knobs and lights. And it's very unassuming. Imaging the heap is like, okay, my computer is busted,

but I don't want to leave here without having created something. thing. This little digit tech vocalist workstation box has been sitting on her shelf. She's like, maybe I'll bring that down. Plug it into my four-track mini-disc. Wow, that takes me back. Plug in my mic and my keyboard and press record. And she sings the first thing that pops into her head. You know, I feel her. When I wake up at two in the morning, don't know what's going on. These are the questions that I am asking myself, where are we? What the hell is going on? I feel her on a spiritual front. Highly relatable. Also relatable, the fact that this wasn't like a plan. She wasn't saying, okay, I'm going to make this song. It's going to be about this. It's going to express this thing

I'm thinking about. It was just like spontaneous, improvisatory. It sounds like that. The way that she's singing these notes, like where is very elongated. Like she's playing with her voice actively as if she's tweaking the settings on this physical piece of machinery. That's pretty cool. And that piece of machinery has its own kind of randomness at work as well. Because this digitetic box is taking her voice, processing it through the keyboard that she's playing, and splitting up her voice into all these multiple melodies. Wow.

But here's the thing. Imaging Heap doesn't know which notes the Digitech box is going to pick. So if she plays a chord with 10 notes, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, the box is only going to select four of them. One, three, four, seven. And then that becomes the chord. So there's this other level of randomness. She presses down 10 notes.

It picks four. She's improvising these words on the fly. it's all kind of emerging out of the air in front of her. It's also a strong leap of faith for a song that has no instrumental. Oil in mucks appear on walls where pleasure moments hung before the take over the sweet. It is stunningly stark. I totally agree, Rana. It's like it's acapella.

It's just her voice out there in the great ether, surrounded by this anodonic chamber of nothingness. It is wild to encounter a pop song like this out there. It's a very cold song that lends itself well to the electronic things that she's doing on the track. I've always been in awe of hide and seek. Speaking to the magazine, electronic musician a year after the song came out, Imogen Heap said, I recorded it in like four and a half minutes and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out

of me then. Wow. I love it because it doesn't feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere and I'm not questioning that one at all. One take wonder. Love it. That makes it sound pretty easy, right? But don't be fooled.

There was a lot of groundwork that Heep had to lay in order to get to the, point where she could just unravel this masterpiece in the wee hours of a studio session in 2005. Her debut album came out in 1998. It was called I Megaphone and one of the songs, the lead single, Getting Scared, did help her gain some fame because it landed on the soundtrack of the film, I Know What You Did Last Summer. That is nuts, Nate. That sounds like garbage, the band. It sounds like nine inch nails. That's wild.

Very different sound than the gossamer austerity of hide and seek that we were listening to seven years later. Very, I know what you did last summer, though. Fast forward a few years. Heap works with producer, songwriter Guy Sigsworth in a duo called FruFruFru, from 2002 to 2003. and their song Let Go finds itself on an even bigger soundtrack, the Garden State soundtrack in 2004. Stone Cold Classic. I see the scene in my brain. It's the airport meet cute at the end of the movie. Natalie Portman, Zach Braff, a classic. And another very different sound from this artist. There's so much going on here. There's kind of a UK trip-hot backbeat. There are these orchestral swing touches. They're

these melodies that never quite go where you expect them to and like kind of always keep you on your toes. A very lelting vocal that I feel like is one of Imogen Heap's trademarks as well. This duo Froufru, they're very successful, but Imogen Heep decides it's time to go back to her roots as a solo artist. And that brings us to speak for yourself, the album which gives us hide and seek. She records it over the course of 2004 and she finances it herself. She releases it independently. Wow. She mortgages her flat to fund the production of this record.

She had a placement on the Garden State soundtrack. I feel like she shouldn't have to do that. You got to chalk it up to a shady music business. But also, I suspect she wanted to retain a level of artistic control here. Because there's some daring sounds on this album. That's Just for Now, which follows these similar themes of layered, vocals, these ethereal textures, and really kind of avoiding a typical verse, chorus, structure. The interesting thing about these songs, which I'm sure that we'll get into, is that they have legs.

Like recently, that track has been really big on my Instagram Reels page. Rihanna, it is wild how many of these songs have had a second life on social media in 2025. Take another track from Speak for Yourself. Headlock. This is actually the opening track of the album, and at the time of this recording, it's been used in nearly 140,000 videos, soundtracking clips from the award-winning 2024 psychological horror, sci-fi adventure game mouthwashing. Stop. Are you kidding me? A sentence I never thought I would say, but this is a game whose plot concerns a crashed spacecraft in the fates of its five-stranded crew members.

And apparently hundreds of thousands of people. are just dying to make videos of this video game soundtrack to Imogen Heap's headlock from 2005. This is wild. So this is incredibly esoteric music being used to score remarkably esoteric cultural ephemera. I think that's such a cool and exciting legacy for this work. It is. And it is so unexpected. I think that's what I really love about revisiting this album and revisiting hide and seek. Because Heap herself said in 2019, when she made hide and seek, I remember making the song in the studio and thinking, God, this is so self-indulgent. No one is ever going to like this song, but I really loved it. And not only was the song successful, despite its strange

acapella approach, it had the biggest afterlife of any song we've discussed so far. Because as big as, you know, a placement on the Garden State soundtrack is, what's even bigger? being featured in the season two finale of the O.C. I mean, can we do spoilers for a show that came out 20 years ago? I think we've passed the time barrier. I remember watching the first two seasons of the O.C. And a DVD collection that my person living across the hall for me in college had given me, and I was like sick with the flu.

And I just binge watching was not a term yet. But man, I inhaled those episodes. And when this happened, I was like, oh, my God, I was frozen. I was, I still get chills just thinking about it. Misha Barton shoots Logan Marshall Green. And then you get this music cue out of nowhere. It was like, I mean, we don't have cultural moment. In this post-monoculture age, we don't have moments like that anymore.

Like hearing hide and seek in the OC for the first time. You had to be there. You make a great point. I wasn't there. But I have cousins who are millennials. So I have heard much about the OC. And a quick shout out to the OC's music supervision because not only was Image and Heap featured on the show multiple times, we had basically a who's who's of indie music of the 2000s. You know, there was Death Cap for QD, LCD sound system, modest mouse, Sufion Stevens, radio head. Like these all-timer artists getting attention, getting promo, from the OC. Theme song by Phantom Planet. I mean, yeah, straight bangers. Now, that probably would have been enough to take the song to another level,

but then it gets satirized by S&L and the Lonely Island in a digital short called The Shooting. Dear sister, by the time you read this... What you say. Oh, that's your only meant. What you say? Oh, what you say.

The listeners couldn't see that, but Nate was bold over laughing. Okay, so at this point the song has permeated deep into the crust of popular culture. Which does the song, I think, a disservice because I hear that, I start laughing at that music cue, when really it's the climax of this beautifully intimate song. It's like cultural revisionism for image and heap. It's turning something so not funny into something. hilarious by association. And then there's the Jason Derulo of it all.

Of course. He covers the song in 2009. One of the best samples of all time. Let's wake that to you up. I mean, that's a visionary interpolation right there. Straight up. Now, after all these uses, I totally hear what you're saying, Rihanna. Does the song retain its initial ability to arrest us?

I have to say it does. When I watch that tiny desk performance that we played at the very beginning of this conversation, I get those same chills that I did when I heard the song for the first time. And part of this might have to do with something that Heap herself identified about the song. She said, I think the reason that it has reach is because there is so much room for interpretation. It doesn't connect to a genre. It's completely open. It's full of color, but it's colorless.

It's full of meaning, but it has no meaning. It has so much for you as the listener to identify with it and fill in the gaps. It's so refreshing to hear an artist with that ethos, especially 20 years out in 2025. We just did an episode talking about Spotify. And there was a lot of focus on the lean back listener and algorithmic music being put out to satiate listeners' need for background music in their day-to-day lives. What I like about Image and Heap, and specifically this answer, is that it promotes lean-in, listening. It's listen to this and gain something from it. The song has such a manifold legacy, but there's one other part of the story of this song that we haven't gotten to, and it's

the technology itself. It's this digit tech workstation. I want to talk about where it came from and what happens to it after Hide and Seek after the break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready?

Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No. No. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays

on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions. and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE.

When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want order at the border. don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. When we hear this kind of sound in hide and seek, we are essentially listening to the sound of a vocoder. This term is a portmanteau of the words voice and encoder. because it was originally invented as kind of a form of spycraft. Wow.

Homer Dudley at Bell Labs from 1928 to 1938 led a team that developed this voice masking technology. So you could have a phone call without being eavesdropped on. You use this vocoder to encode your voice and then someone at the other end decodes it and listens to what you're saying. This is like for spies and industry secrets. You know, it's not until decades later that musicians start to think, maybe we could use this espionage technology for artistic purposes. And it's a duo that we've talked about on the show before, Robert Mogue and Wendy Carlos. The classics.

Yep, there they are again. The namesake of our show switched on Bach. They're always around. This duo is probably the first to recognize the musical potential of this technology. Wendy Carlos uses the vocoder on her version of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the 1972 Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. Its first appearance in pop music is probably in the 1970s Prague rock classic Mr. Blue Sky by the Electric Light Orchestra.

Wow. From there, this vocoder technology takes off. We hear it on Phil Collins' 1981 hit in the air time. This is a classics only episode, Nate. Banger after banger after banger. And the group that makes the vocoder a central core part of their sound is French dance, duo, legends, daff punk. Now we've just heard like a bunch of different styles of music, a bunch of different eras. But I feel like they all have something kind of in common with their use of the vocoder. It's often used to be something whimsical, maybe something a little menacing. Maybe something that's kind of a novelty.

When Imogen Heap comes along and takes this technology in the form of that digit tech voice workstation box, she flips the script on how we think of the vocoder. No longer is it this novelty, whimsy, scary sound. Now it's something that takes your self-expression and deepens it. Wow. There's a depth and a sensitivity and a delicacy to the sound of the vocoder. And so to me, hide and seek, Imogen Heap, it's less about the technology itself than the way she uses it that opens this new door for artists who follow in her footsteps. The first artist that comes to mind as part of this legacy is Boni Vair.

Absolutely. Let's listen to Woods from his Blood Bank EP. So we hear the new. sensitive side of the vocoder in a number of tracks over the course of the 2010s. Cold plays hurts like heaven. Frank Ocean, close to you from Blonde. Zed, Marin Morris, and Gray, the middle from 2018. Carolyn Polichick's so hot you're hurting my feelings from 2019.

This is cool because I feel like the vocoder now in popular music is so ubiquitous that it's hard to point out unless you're actively looking for it. Like in that Caroline Polichick song, I've listened to that song dozens of times and not once did I listen and pull out the vocoder until this moment. You know, same with the Frank Ocean song. It's a technology that is so intrinsic. to 2010's pop music, that it almost feels like a non-event. You know, it's like, oh, this song has vocoder, okay. And let me say for the record that there's lots of different technologies in all these examples.

Maybe one is a harmonizer. Maybe one is a prismizer. Maybe one is, you know, a factory setting on a digital audio workstation. But I'm going to lump all of these under the general category of vocoder, this technology that manipulates the voice and spreads it out into. these multiple melodies. And I totally hear what you're saying, Rianna, it's like, you almost don't notice it sometimes. It's now so easily available. It's something that just sits in the studio and you can just suddenly transform a voice at the touch of a button and give it a little extra kind of

juge in the background of a bridge or something. But that reality we live in is all thanks to image and heat. Without hide and seek, I don't think we would think of this technology in the same way. She opened it up as a tool for emotional introspection, one that has been constantly in the popular music vernacular ever since. And I feel like one testament to the lasting legacy of this song is a cover by Jacob Collier, someone who also merges technology and musicianship and turns different instruments into choirs. Okay, Jacob Collier, not my bag, not my cup of tea. But something that is my cup of tea is a song that I got really into last year that also samples hide-and-seek. And that's the song What You Say by Young Marco. My God.

Injected into my veins, Rihanna. That is so good. I heard that song. Low-key changed my life. I'm so glad because I did not have that in my research talk. And that is just mind-blowing. And what a perfect ending to this conversation because I love all the unexpected directions

this song has taken us in. And how hard to predict that was from this initial recording session, late at night in a UK recording studio, when your computer dies, and you turn to this mysterious vocoder box and play the first thing that pops into your head. Yeah.

And 20 years later, here we're, we are with our techno remix, our OC soundtrack, our S&L parody, our Jason DeRullo cover, our transformation of the sound of this technology throughout the landscape of popular music. I mean, it doesn't get better than that, y'all. Legendary stuff. This episode was produced by Jake Casman. Switch on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz. It's engineered by Brandon McFarland.

Edited by Art Chung illustrations are by Iris Gottlieb. Our theme music is by Zach Tenorio and Jossi Adams of Arc Iris. We're a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of New York Magazine. You can subscribe to New York Magazine by going to nymag.com slash pod. You can find us on social media at Switched on Pop wherever you get your postings. Tell us what your favorite use of vocoder is. I would love to know. I love the vocoder.

One of my favorite sounds in pop music. Go to our website, Switchedonpop.com. Sign up for a newsletter. Don't forget, we're playing pop music bingo all through 2025, okay? We're going to check in every time a square gets marked off. So far, Drake has not gone country, and we haven't had any songs mentioning brain rot. Yeah. But the year is long.

There's a brewing rap beef between Travis Barker's daughter, Alabama, and Daniel Brigoli, aka Cash Me Outside, Bad Baby. So perhaps that'll spawn a Billboard hitter too. The music's been pretty good so far. I'm not going to lie. So I've been kind of invested in that. We'll have to keep tabs on that. That's encouraging. Yeah, yeah. Don't cross it off yet, but perhaps in the future.

Bad Bunny did not go to number one, so we can't cross off our Spanish language number one yet. But I'm sure that's going to happen. It's going to come. It's going to come. Kazoo, I'm not so certain. Kazoo, jury's still out on Kazoo. Yeah, yeah. All right, Rihanna, we've got to sign off to everyone out there. All that remains for us is to say thanks for listening.