FEATURE:
Groovelines
Imogen Heap – Hide and Seek
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AS the magnificent…
IN THIS PHOTO: Imogen Heap photographed in 2019/PHOTO CREDIT: Alexandra Arnold
Imogen Heap has been back in the music limelight because her phenomenal album, Speak for Yourself, has been reissued twenty years after release, I wanted to focus on its standout track. On the album, there is a remastered version of Hide and Seek. It is Imogen Heap’s best-known song. One that has taken on a life of its own. Because of that, this Groovelines explores a true great. Even so, there may be people who have not heard the track of Heap. Released on 19th May, 2005, Hide and Seek was not a commercial hit in the U.K. Not a big success for the London-born Imogen Heap, this is a song that might have been a bit too unusual for the charts. However, the fact that Hide and Seek has appeared in multiple T.V. shows and is being talked about twenty years later proves how enduring and original it is. Hide and Seek was the first single from Heap’s second album, Speak for Yourself. Written and produced by Heap, the song is an acapella ballad that heavily uses the harmonizer. A track that describes painfully losing someone due to a breakup. Before coming to some reviews and features, I want to bring in some Wikipedia information. The collected some critical reaction for the incredible Hide and Seek. It still sounds like nothing else:
“Hide and Seek" received critical acclaim upon its release. Writing for The New York Times, Laura Sinagra wrote that "Hide and Seek" was "the ghostly pièce de résistance" of Speak for Yourself, adding that the song "suggest[s] a kind of lovesick cyborg alienation, an almost disembodied, distinctly modern malaise". Sophie Heawood of The Guardian referred to the song as "extraordinary", describing its use of vocal layering as "startling" albeit with a "Marmite-style love-or-hate effect on listeners". For Pitchfork, David Raposa identified "Hide and Seek" as the "black sheep" of Speak for Yourself, writing, "It's gorgeous, it's impressive, it's grandiose, and it's barely there at all — just Heap's voice darting and divebombing, making itself scarce, disappearing into itself." The Skinny's Dave Reid suggested that "Hide and Seek" "threatens to put the rest of the album in the shade". Jeff Vrabel of PopMatters wrote that the song was "uniformly gorgeous" with "no beat required", adding, "Its sonic trickery makes the song lap itself; there's so much synthetic beauty in there that it comes off sounding organic anyway”.
In 2020, fifteen years after Hide and Seek was released, Inside Hook explored its enduring popularity. A song that has been used in The O.C. and Normal People, it has translated through the years. Something about it that has affected audiences of different generations. One that appeals to an American and British audience. And it has gone beyond that! More than twenty years after its came out, Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek remains beautifully unsettling. Maybe not the right words. However, there is something both beautiful and unusual about the song:
“The first was the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the second was the one that felled the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the preface to WWI, and the third arrived in the Season Two finale of The O.C., when Marissa shot Ryan’s brother Trey to the tune of Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek.”
Since that night 15 years ago — the episode premiered on May 19, 2005 — Heap’s self-harmonized, vocoder-infused masterwork has been given the meme treatment by Saturday Night Live, the Billboard Hot 100 treatment by Jason Derulo and even the Broadway treatment in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. But it’s the song’s placement in Normal People, a new 12-part TV adaptation of the Sally Rooney novel, that has ripped open old wounds, sparked debates about musical baggage and posed the question: Can “Hide and Seek” escape its iconic origins to become something more?
To connect the dots across time, we got in touch with Maggie Phillips, music supervisor on Normal People, as well as Norman Buckley, who worked as a director and editor on The O.C., a job that included editing the Season Two finale, “The Dearly Beloved.”
“When I was editing The O.C., I was given Imogen Heap’s album Speak for Yourself by music supervisor Alex Patsavas at the beginning of Season Two — it may have even been before the album’s release,” Buckley told InsideHook via email. “I loved the entire album and thought her voice was unique. I suggested to The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz that he listen to the album, as I wanted to use a song called ‘Goodnight and Go’ in Episode Five of the second season (which we did). ‘Hide and Seek’ was on the same album.”
It’s the song’s association with the beloved teen soap that has ostensibly irked both fans of The O.C. and of Normal People’s source material. Less than a week after the latter show premiered, The Cut did what The Cut does, asking, “What Is *That* Song Doing in Normal People?” Another blog said “Hide and Seek” “belongs” to The O.C. As for Maggie Phillips, when asked if there were factions on the creative team fighting for or against the song’s use in the new Hulu and BBC series, she skips the pretense.
Of course, “Hide and Seek” does seem to have more than a bit of magic itself, which goes all the way back to the song’s composition, a musical origin story to rival other timeless classics like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” but one that seems to have gotten lost amid the memes.
“It was about three in the morning … I had an idea of this hide-and-seek thing, I liked the childhood reference and I wanted to write a song about that. So when I was kind of stream-of-consciousness singing along to myself playing the piano-keyboard-thing, this whole song, all four and a half minutes of it, just arrived from start to finish in that four and a half minutes. All the lyrics weren’t there because lyrics are like pulling teeth with me. And right at the end you can actually hear the local train going by the window, because my studio’s right next to a busy train line,” she told WXPN in 2006.
“I went home and I played it to my boyfriend — he’s kind of tattoos and bleach blond hair and six-foot-four — and he started crying when he heard it. So I was like, hm, there may be something in this song.”
It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Schwartz, Derulo, Hoggett or Abrahamson also shed tears when they first heard the song. But as Heap notes, the memorable lyrics — from the opening “Where are we?” to “crop circles in the carpet” to the gunshot-triggering chorus — weren’t all there when she made her boyfriend weep. So the power, the timelessness of the song, then, lies beyond the “mmm whatcha say.” It lies in the music.
When asked how the process of choosing songs for Normal People differed from other projects, Phillips said, “In this instance, I spent most of my time trying to remember what my first love and first heartbreak felt like. The feelings are so strong, nothing is diluted from experience or time. I didn’t want the music to feel detached. I wanted the songs to feel imitate and sincere … as real and as intense as the emotions they were experiencing”.
I am going to wrap up in a second. Before that, this feature from earlier in the year marks twenty years of Hide and Seek. I surprised that more has not been written about it. However, this is a song that will continue to be talked about for many years. If it perhaps no longer resonates with the same demographic it did ten or fifteen years ago, there is no denying how influential and important Hide and Seek is. Beyond the media and its screen appearances:
“It’s been two decades since Imogen Heap gifted the world “Hide and Seek,” a song that beautifully defied musical norms and etched itself permanently into pop culture. Released in 2005, this unique acapella track broke barriers, selling over half a million copies, and resonating deeply within mainstream media, from topping charts to becoming a memorable soundtrack moment on the beloved TV show, The OC. Our lecturer, Alex Wood, breaks down her vocal production, noting how Heap’s voice serves as both melody and instrumentation, with layered harmonies creating the song’s entire sonic landscape.
The creation story behind “Hide and Seek” is as intriguing as the song itself. When Heap’s studio computer unexpectedly “blew up,” she didn’t despair. Instead, she turned to a Digitech Vocalist Workstation EX, hardware typically used for pitch correction and real-time harmonisation, and began experimenting. Using this technology alongside a MIDI keyboard and recording onto a Minidisk 4-track recorder, Heap crafted her groundbreaking masterpiece. What made “Hide and Seek” stand apart was Heap’s innovative use of the device’s vocoder setting. Unlike traditional vocoders that blend vocals with synth signals, the Digitech altered Heap’s harmonics in real-time, creating an ethereal and synthesised vocal quality. With the device limited to four-part harmonies, Heap creatively played additional notes, allowing the harmoniser to randomly select pitches. This resulted in beautifully unpredictable harmonies, surprising inversions, and the hauntingly high notes of the second chorus.
Though Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” pioneered acapella synth-vocals back in 1982, “Hide and Seek” uniquely captured the internet generation’s imagination. It has notably lived on through countless “hmmm, whatcha say?” memes, demonstrating the song’s persistent influence and its remarkable ability to transcend generations.
In 2018, Heap further highlighted the song’s incredible journey with her Mycelia project, “Life of a Song,” visually tracing the $1 million in royalties “Hide and Seek” has generated. This innovative transparency illuminated the complex financial dynamics of the music industry, underscoring Heap’s ongoing commitment to artist empowerment”.
Beyond its appearances in the media, there have been covers, remixes and samples of Hide and Seek. I want to return briefly to Wikipedia, as this information about those who have tackled Hide and Seek and used the track is really interesting. I hope that this the features and words I have collated goes deeper into Hide and Seek. Gives you more of an impression about why it is so special:
“On the fifth season of Australian reality competition series Australian Idol, finalist Ben McKenzie performed the song on the season's fourth episode. British alternative rock band Fightstar covered the song as a B-side to their single, "The English Way", in 2008. American metal band And Then There Were None covered the song in 2009. In 2010, Canadian guitarist Antoine Dufour recorded a solo guitar version of the song. British a cappella ensemble The King's Singers included a cover of the song on their 2010 album Swimming Over London. In 2010 and 2011, respectively, Dutch DJ Afrojack and Swedish DJ Otto Knows released remixes of the song. In 2012, British pop rock band The Dunwells released a cover of the song on their EP Leaving the Rose. In 2017, English musician Jacob Collier recorded his solo harmonizer rendition of the song. A trance remix of the song by Dutch DJ Ferry Corsten was released in 2013. American DJ Slushii released a future bass remix of the song in 2018”.
Because Speak for Yourself recently turned twenty and there has been a reissue, a lot of people have been talking about Hide and Seek. It was ubiquitous at a certain point and received a lot of attention. Whether it was T.V. or film exposure or cover versions, maybe the focus has died a little. However, there has been new spotlight on this classic recently. This is a fantastic and hugely impactful track that we are going to be dissecting and discussing…
TWO decades from now.