If you include her re-recording projects, Taylor Swift has released an incredible eight albums in the past five years. Not bad for someone who also spent much of that time breaking records on her mammoth Eras Tour.
It follows, then, that Swift’s creative process must be as rapid as her name suggests, and this has now been confirmed by Imogen Heap, who worked with the star on Clean, a song from her 1989 album (which, slightly confusingly, was released in 2014).
Discussing the experience with People, Heap says that her single session with Swift took place at her house, and has a ‘let’s see what happens’ kind of vibe.
“She turned up looking immaculate, and we didn't really know what we were going to do,” she begins. She had an idea on her phone, she played it to me, and I was like, ‘That's good. Should we go and record it?’”
It sounds as though Swift may have needed a little convincing, but quickly came on board. “She was like, ‘Well....’ I was like, ‘Yeah, down in the studio, let's just go there now,’" recalls Heap. “So we're like, ‘OK’. We went downstairs, we had our cup of tea by the fire, and she wrote the next verse. I started to make music around us. And then by the time she left, which was like just after dinner, we had managed to write the song, produce the song, record the song, chat, meet, have tea, sit by the fire, eat lunch, eat dinner, do an entire record all by ourselves.”
Heap goes on to say that, while there’s no magic ‘secret’ to Swift’s prolificacy, it helps that she knows what she wants to achieve.
“She is extremely efficient,” she confirms. “I've never done that from start to finish with anyone. And I felt very excited. I really appreciated her. There was one moment when I was trying out something a bit different for the middle section, and I was like, ‘What about these chords?’ Thinking that's just so different. And she was like, ‘You know what? I think we're going to lose them here, so let's just do this.’ I'm like, ‘OK, that's fine.’ What I learned, I suppose, [is] just she's very good in the studio, and she knows what works.”
Clean, of course, was one of the songs that was re-recorded for Taylor’s Version of the 1989 album, and Heap was previously confirmed that she was involved in that one, too. After sharing photos of her working on the new version in a 2023 Instagram post, Heap told fans: “Now you can have fun playing spot the difference.”
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