Deep Album Cuts Vol. 232: Kate Bush
Kate Bush is one of the 2021 nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, Tina Turner, Devo, Carole King, Iron Maiden, Mary J. Blige, LL Cool J, Todd Rundgren, The Go-Go's, Rage Against The Machine, and New York Dolls, among others.
Kate Bush deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. James And The Cold Gun
2. The Saxophone Song
3. Kite
4. Full House
5. Coffee Homeground
6. Violin
7. Blow Away
8. Delius (Song Of Summer)
9. Get Out Of My House
10. Leave It Open
11. The Morning Fog
12. Jig Of Life
13. Mother Stands For Comfort
14. Reaching Out
15. Deeper Understanding
16. Never Be Mine
17. Why Should I Love You?
18. Lily
19. Mrs. Bartolozzi
20. Among Angels
Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from The Kick Inside (1978)
Tracks 3 and 5 from Lionheart (1978)
Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Never For Ever (1980)
Tracks 9 and 10 from The Dreaming (1982)
Tracks 11, 12 and 13 from Hounds Of Love (1985)
Tracks 14, 15 and 16 from The Sensual World (1989)
Tracks 17 and 18 from The Red Shoes (1993)
Track 19 from Aerial (2005)
Track 20 from 50 Words For Snow (2011)
Tracks 3 and 5 from Lionheart (1978)
Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Never For Ever (1980)
Tracks 9 and 10 from The Dreaming (1982)
Tracks 11, 12 and 13 from Hounds Of Love (1985)
Tracks 14, 15 and 16 from The Sensual World (1989)
Tracks 17 and 18 from The Red Shoes (1993)
Track 19 from Aerial (2005)
Track 20 from 50 Words For Snow (2011)
Kate Bush has been a massive star in the UK for her entire career, but she's ever quite been that big in America, so I really knew of her much when I was younger. I knew her work with Peter Gabriel and her biggest U.S. hit "Running Up That Hill," but even that wasn't quite at the inescapable level of '80s synth pop songs. But I also came of age at a time when two of the coolest and most popular female solo artists were Tori Amos and Bjork, both of whom were heavily influenced by Kate Bush, so I kind of grew up hearing echoes of her without realizing it until later -- to say nothing of how Big Boi from Outkast and a couple generations of indie artists worship Kate Bush. So it's been fun to delve into her catalog and see what all the fuss is about.
When Kate Bush was 16, demos of over 50 songs she'd written were shopped to record labels, but nobody was interested until a mutual friend passed her demos to Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. Gilmour produced some professional quality demos with famed Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick that helped her get a record deal with EMI, and a couple of them, including "The Saxophone Song," appeared on her first album.
Bush's debut single "Wuthering Heights" topped the UK charts and she was a big deal from there on out, which is kind of hard to imagine just based on how eccentric and proggy her first few records can be. I feel like the only kind of comparable thing that's happened in my country in my lifetime with a teenage girl becoming a chart-topping star with such an idiosyncratic, uncompromising sound is Billie Eilish, but even that's in a very different context. Bush didn't tour from 1979 to 2014, putting her in an elite club of major acts who didn't tour in support of some of their biggest albums (including The Beatles, Steely Dan, R.E.M., and Talking Heads).
The early stuff is growing on me but Hounds Of Love and The Sensual World are definitely more immediately palatable albums to me, bigger drums and and less ornately complex arrangements but still a lot more personality and originality than most synth pop records of that era. Hounds Of Love is a cool album because it's very cleanly divided into a side 1 of Bush's biggest and most accessible pop songs and a side 2 that's an epic mini-suite titled The Ninth Wave, 7 interconnected songs inspired by Tennyson's Arthurian poems. She sort of repeated the same format on Aerials, a double album where the 1st disc features distinct songs and the 2nd disc, subtitled A Sky Of Honey, is one long piece that's meant to represent the 24-hour cycle of a single day.
"Deeper Understanding" is a startlingly prescient song from 1989 about the nascent Internet ("As the people here grow colder, I turn to my computer/ And spend my evenings with it like a friend"). Appropriately, Bush chose this song as a single when she later released an album of re-recordings of old songs, 2011's Director's Cut. The original "Deeper Understanding" predates by quite a few yeras what I think of as the quaint early songs about the Internet like Britney Spears' 1999 track "E-Mail My Heart" or Prince's 1996 song "My Computer," which Kate Bush actually sang backing vocals on. Prince also played and sang backup on "Why Should I Love You?" from Bush's The Red Shoes and it's a great song, kind of an uncannily perfect melding of the sounds of two artists who always sort of lived in their own sonic worlds but admired each other's work.
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