Last Saturday night, a night in which there were shows in every which direction, I decided on going to see Imogen Heap thanks to being the lucky recipient of a few tickets. After much fretting over a partner in crime, Shaunna decided to make the drive from Ann Arbor to join me. We got there just as the first opening act Geese was finishing up, so I’m not really sure what they sounded like, but I do know there were violins and drums, so that’s a great start. As soon as they left the stage, Imogen came out to introduce the second opener Ben Christophers who, along with Geese, would end up making up the majority of Heap’s supporting band for her set.

The stage looked a lot like how I remembered it from her Coachella set. Piano and instruments to the left, large tree in the center of the stage. Only this time there were more instruments on the right. A few notable songs were played during the setbreak, namely Fever Ray’s “When I Grow Up” (which brought back fond memories, since just about a month earlier, Heap performed just before Fever Ray to close out my first day of Coachella ever) and Apparat’s “Over and Over Again” (the song that I knew that I knew, but I couldn’t identify until hours later. Isn’t it so satisfying when that happens and you actually later figure out what the song is?

Now let’s talk about her performance. A lot of times you will go to a show and the band will play through all their songs, maybe say something like, “We’re so happy to be here in [insert city name here]” and that’s about it. Well, Imogen Heap is not one of those acts. She lets you know everything that’s going on and everything she’s about to do, and she makes sure the audience is an active participant in the show. First off, she held a poll prior to the tour, and 12 of the songs she plays each night are those that the fans voted on. As she put it, that night’s set list was crafted especially for Detroit by Detroit. During “Just For Now”, she divided the audience into thirds and used us as her backup singers rather than using a voice repeater as she says she did in the past. She told stories, like when she had a male friend over for a lunch date, a man who didn’t eat any meat or dairy products, but ended up eating a biscuit anyway. When she asked why he ate the biscuit, which definitely had butter in it, he said, “It’s just a biscuit” to which she replied, “Then why didn’t you just eat the fucking meat!?” And perhaps most surprisingly, we learned about halfway through the show that she was going to improvise a song every night completely at the whim of the audience. We picked the tempo (I think it was 123 BPM), the time signature (3/4. She apologized that we wanted 6/8 but she didn’t have a 6/8 beat preloaded. The exact honesty and humor that makes her such a presence) and the key (G# minor. She started in G# major and about 30 seconds in realized her mistake, swore and started again, to the amusement of the crowd). And then she announced that the improvised songs would be available to download and all proceeds would go to charity, in our case Urban Farming, a great local cause that I think has been picking up lots of steam lately.

But what’s more than her charisma on stage is her impressive performance, often playing piano, keytar, drums and programming beats and loops all within one song. The last time I saw her she was solo, but even with a full band, her multi-tasking skills did not change. And with her headset microphone, she often stands singing front and center, hands free and nothing getting in the way. The set was pretty stellar too, as you will see in some of the pictures below, with the large illuminated tree as the centerpiece and an impressive floor to ceiling backdrop that was constantly changing. Perhaps my favorite part of her performance was the final song, in which she announced that she doesn’t do encores and just includes them as part of her show. Why don’t more artists do that? It sort of defeats the purpose of an encore if it happens every single night, doesn’t it?

Anyway, I sort of knew what to expect after Coachella, but I was very pleased with her performance, not to mention her ability to multi-task with the best of them. Special thanks to Nick Zalewski for letting us use his pictures (I clearly need a more powerful point and shoot for situations such as this). You can check out his Flickr page here.

Imogen Heap – Hide and Seek (Mt Eden Dubstep Remix)

Imogen Heap – The Song That Never Was (The Zodiac Social Version)