Earth

Album: Ellipse (2009)
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Songfacts®:

  • The song features nothing but Heap's voice in the fore and backgrounds. She explained why to Electronic Musician: "I could have gone the route of really processing the vocals to make them not sound like vocals, but I just thought that defeats the object. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the best sound out of my voice. And I spent ages editing them together. There's over 100 tracks of vocals on it, and it was absolutely completely doing my head in, just hearing the sound of my own voice for, like, three weeks nonstop. But I really had this vision, what I wanted it to be. It was really good fun to write that one.

    I wrote the song called 'Aha!' and I needed something to go after it because I felt like, in the running order of the album, it wasn't really working. So, I thought, I'm going to listen to 'Aha!' and then I'm going to the first instrument that feels like it wants to be on the record. I went straight to the mbira and I played a chord. It started off being something completely different, but I knew I always wanted it to be vocals because I needed an a cappella [track] on the record. So the vocals were written really, really quickly, and I went back and kind of perfected the sound of them."
  • Not all of this song was written in the studio. Heap told Electronic Musician that the "Da-da, da-da-dah" part came to her when she was showering. She added: "And then I was going, 'Da-da, da-da-dah' as I was getting dressed and running down to the studio. A lot of really good ideas happen in the shower. I think it's the only time where, because you can't be in your studio, you're not distracted by all the other millions of things you have to do. Long showers - not very good for the environment, but good for creativity."

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