I Bet You Didn't Know that Imogen Heap is My Mother ❤️

And Regina Spektor is my aunt. I call her Aunt Gina.

I have been awake for five hours today in total and I have spent three of them watching various recordings of live performances by Imogen Heap. Watching her work causes such terrible emotion in me that I cannot control myself. Today I sobbed while listening to Headlock. I wonder what Imogen would say. I learned that her friends call her “Immi.” I could name my daughter after her.

Heap’s sound is often described as ethereal because that is the best word for it. Her dedication to fluency, skill, and improvisation come together to create what literally feels like magic to me. It is all built so intentionally, so painstakingly, and somehow still so expressively. Watching Heap perform live is tense. Her set-up is precarious, to say the least, and she keeps you on the edge of your seat, forcing you to wonder how she’ll balance it all. She is running between instruments and then back to her computer and then she is at the front of the stage with a string of bells and you realize she has been singing all the while. Construction is important to her. And performance. The act of creation, not just the product. I view her work as a dichotomy between magic and knowing. The magic part— the feeling, the expression, the improvisation, and the trust that is so necessary to her sound. The knowing part— her skill, her commitment to craft, and her attention to detail.

In her performances, she always begins by exposing her production methods to the audience so that they are thoroughly impressed before she even begins to perform. This also speaks to her generosity. It would be so easy for her not to explain herself, to keep it sacred and mysterious. It would further develop the magic of her work if nobody knew how she did it. But she wants us to know. She loves this and she wants to share it because she is excited about it. Instead of cultivating the mysterious magic part of it, she is cultivating the knowing part. And yet is doesn’t diminish the magic at all. If anything, it strengthens her aura as an artist.

I listened to Imogen Heap’s Speak for Yourself album constantly as a kid. It was at the top of the small rotation of CDs I cycled through on our living-room stereo. (Others include The Lumineers’s self-titled album, The Farewell Drifters’s Yellow Tag Mondays, Mumford and Sons’s Sigh No More, They Might Be Giants’s No!, and, naturally, Space Ghost’s Musical Bar-b-Que. Just for context.) My initial introduction to Heap was through my dad, as she has always been one of his favorites, and I was soon fascinated with her myself. Her music came to define my childhood and my taste. I admit that I abandoned her discography for a few years during my adolescence, but even upon rediscovery, I found I still knew every single track by heart. Safe to say Heap made her mark on me early. Whether my immense emotion toward her now is based on the illusion of depth manufactured by nostalgia or a true recognition of her value as an artist, I do not know.

Thinking about skill makes me antsy. There’s some inherent suggestion there of inadequacy. Skill is commodity. Skill is character. Skill is livelihood. And I fear I am lacking in all. Maybe deeper than the fear, though, is the want. I want to know things so badly that it’s painful. I want to be skilled. I want to feel at home in the world. I want to build my own corner. I want to know how to do it all. Imogen Heap’s music, for me, embodies the magic of knowing. Her music is not just the sum of its parts— it has aura. Its own being. Perhaps even its own soul. To give a body of work that life takes passion, connection, and knowing. I want to make work that is more than the sum of its parts. I want to make work that feels like magic. I want to make work that quells the fear in me that I may not ever know or feel enough. And that type of work, as proved by Heap, requires both deeply intuitive play and carefully designed structure.

Regina Spektor is another childhood favorite of mine. Nostalgic, tender, expressive, and incredibly, unbelievably talented. She and Heap inhabited the same space in my mind as a child, likely because they stunned and confused me in the same ways. Their skill and craftsmanship were dumbfounding to me. Their fearlessly emotional and tender performances spoke to a sensitivity I related to and hated in myself. Consuming their work made me wonder whether my emotional capacity might actually be an asset that would lead me to create something beautiful instead of a weakness of my character.

Under the comments of her NPR Tiny Desk Concert, someone notes the way Spektor’s voice has not changed in twenty years. She has always made work that was both unbearably sincere and sweetly humorous. She uses her voice and her language as a means to experiment. She is adept at exaggeration and expression. As a kid, I recognized Spektor’s expressive power as both wonderful and disturbing. Granted, I have always had a thing about vulnerability and sincerity, but I think it’s fair to say that artists like Spektor might largely be brushed off as kitschy and hipster because they commit so much of themselves to their self-expression. It is dangerous to express yourself! (Obvious.) I have always felt the weight of that danger heavy on my chest. I often feel that I have so much to give, but fall against so many obstacles to my honesty. Embarrassment is perhaps the most dreaded of emotions for me. Still, I am trying to unlearn this aversion now. And coming across Regina Spektor’s devotion to feeling once again recommitted me to my cause. She is a study of authenticity, tenderness, and dedication.

These encounters with such deep passion are rare for me. I have spent a lot of time avoiding things that excite me too much. Mostly because the general consensus is that my emotional capacity is perhaps too great, and I do not like crying in public. My attitude toward music is the greatest example of this avoidant tendency. I have learned to steer clear of concerts, karaoke, orchestras, buskers, etc. I am not a person with a deep reserve of energy, and emotion is exhausting. I can’t afford to love things very much— but I do love music.

Days like this, spent consuming something truly meaningful to me, are an investment. They take a lot out of me and I worry I am not doing enough. I am still trying to decide how to address this. In committing myself to making art I have also committed myself to feeling. In turn, I may have doomed myself to eternal exhaustion. I must decide whether to: one, desensitize myself to the things that make me feel the most deeply so that I can engage with them in a more controlled manner; two, throw myself entirely into feeling, thus sacrificing my barely-functional body to the ever-consuming beast of my heart (the dramatics are necessary here); three, not feel at all, keep the deepest emotions in the womb, unreachable until I decide to engage with them on my own terms?

I think that drama might be the first step in feeling things more fully, which is something I worry about a lot. This brings me back to Spektor, who seems not to have this issue. She is unbearably dramatic in her writing, her voice, and her composition. The word ‘unbearable’ here is a compliment, I swear. It takes a lot to make me uncomfortable. My unease is a testament to her power. And she does have power. I have been talking a lot about magic and I’m not sure if it’s obvious yet but I operate under the belief that feeling is magic. That is reductive, but essentially my view. Everything truly good or interesting is made possible only through deep engagement with emotion. I think that maybe my aim is to make feeling more accessible to me. I know that when I cannot feel it is because something is off-kilter in my being. My goal, in the end, is to be safe to feel everything.

Imogen Heap provides a half-representation of the artist I want to be: exploratory, technically skilled, and dedicated. Regina Spektor represents another facet of that aspiration: of gentleness, sincerity, passion, and a capacity for expression to the point of discomfort. Maybe together they embody a dichotomy between knowing and feeling, but together they also represent the act of creation as magic. (Alchemy!)

These artists have, since childhood, provided a subject through which I can observe my own tendencies and insecurities. My immense desire to be skilled or my avoidant fear of sincerity, for example. Heap and Spektor also serve as a thread I can follow back to my childhood consciousness. They embody not only nostalgia, but the magic of Not Knowing. When you’re a kid, there is a lot you cannot know. It is safe for you not to know. It’s part of why the world feels so vast and fantastical. Now, I realize, I am trying to refashion the physical world I know back into one I do not yet. One which resembles the curious and expansive realm I imagined in my youth. Not only a place I do not know, but also a place I am safe not to know. Today, watching Immi, I felt I caught a glimpse.

Imogen Heap Tiny Desk Concert:

Imogen Heap Live at Royal Albert Hall:

Regina Spektor Tiny Desk Concert: