FEATURE:
Why We Should Love You
The Independent Nature of Kate Bush’s Music
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THERE may be a slight…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Makowitz
disclaimer or exception to start off this feature. The Georgian traditional choral in Hello Earth (from 1985’s Hounds of Love) was not written by Kate Bush, though the rest of the song was. During In Seach of Peter Pan, Bush which appears on Lionheart, Bush sings an excerpt of When You Wish Upon a Star, written by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington. I know too that some string arrangements were written by other people. Maybe band members having a big say in that their part sounded like. However, when you look at Bush’s ten studio albums – even though Wikipedia says Director’s Cut is a remix album, it is not, as it was recorded in a studio and the songs are not ‘remixes’ -, she is the sole credited writer. If I throw in the fact that Night of the Swallow had strings arranged by Bill Whelan, and strings arrangements on Houdini are by Dave Lawson and Andrew Powell, then everything else was written by Kate Bush. She was the first female artist in Pop history to have a million-selling debut album with 1978’s The Kick Inside. An album where she was the sole writer. I look at all her albums and marvel at the sheer variety you get in terms of the sounds. This is not an artist who repeats things and has albums that sound alike. All ten of her albums are very different. One might say it is no big deal that she wrote all of her songs. Consider the fact that she solo-produced seven of her albums, co-produced another and assisted with production on another. Only one album that does not have Bush in the mix as a producer.
The production on her albums is one of the most notable standouts. I think about the modern scene and solo artists who are majorly successful today. When you look through their albums, there are co-writes. Think about modern Pop queens and whether they have the same independence and music autonomy as Kate Bush. From Sabrina Carpenter to Taylor Swift to Beyoncé through to Charli XCX, they have other writers and producers in the mix. You can look at other genres and areas of music and see artists who have released a lot of album where all the songs were written by them. Even one of our very best singer-songwriter, Laura Marling, has co-writing credits on some of her songs. Kate Bush heroes like Elton John, David Bowie, The Beatles and Steely Dan have not strictly written all of their songs (Steely Dan has to give a co-writing credit to Keith Jarrett for Gaucho’s title track; The Fez (from The Royal Scam) had another writer beside Donald Fagen and Walter Becker). Whether you consider Kate Bush’s songwriting record to be purely individual or largely so, one cannot get around the fact that she was very much the heart of her songs. Her words and music. It seems quite rare in today’s music scene where you will have a band or artist where one person writes everything. That there is no outside help as it were. In terms of production too. Not many artists producing most of their studio albums. Even so, there is no doubt that so many modern Pop artist take inspiration from Kate Bush. She definitely opened doors in terms of musicians, especially women, being able to write their own songs and direct their career.
I have written about this in some capacity before. I will approach it from a new angle today. It is not only impressive that Kate Bush has written all of her tracks. Consider how unconventional they are. If she had written ten commercial Pop albums and penned all the songs herself – again, not something many artists alive can claim – then that would be impressive enough. She has written a body of work not only uniquely brilliant and eclectic. It is one that has inspired a whole range of artists across multiple genres and time periods. I want to take from this New Yorker feature from 2018:
“Female pop geniuses who exercise their gifts in rampant, restless fashion over decades, writing, performing, and producing their own work, are as rare as black opals. Shape-shifting brilliance and an airy indifference to what’s expected of you are not the music industry’s favorite assets in any performer, but they are probably easier to accept in a man than in a woman. And such a musician, even today, is subject to the same pressures that have always hindered women’s artistic expression. Like the thwarted writers whom Virginia Woolf described in “A Room of One’s Own,” the female pop original is “strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that”—by the refusal to please and accommodate that only a deep belief in one’s own gift can counteract. “What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society,” Woolf writes, “to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.”
One secret of Bush’s artistry is that she has never feared the ludicrous—she tries things that other musicians would be too careful or cool to go near. That was apparent from the very first lines of “Wuthering Heights”—“Out on the wiley, windy moors / we’d roll and fall in green / You had a temper like my jealousy / too hot, too greedy.” When she wrote that song, she hadn’t yet read the Emily Brontë novel; she’d only caught the end of a TV adaptation. But of course she got the essence of the book, sucked it in, and transmogrified it in her teen-aged soul, and she knew how to keen those lyrics like a ghost ceaselessly yearning.
Not long ago, I was reading another Virginia Woolf essay, about the Brontës, when I came across some lines about Emily that made me think of Bush. It wasn’t only because Bush summoned Emily’s shade in “Wuthering Heights” or, this year, wrote a short poem for her that will be inscribed in stone at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, on the Yorkshire moors. It was because Bush’s identification with Emily Brontë seemed like a key to her own music. Emily, as Bush once described her, was “this young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff.” Bush, like Emily Brontë, rendered femininity as passionate and heavy but also incandescent, allied to the natural world, an irresistible force. “Hers then is the rarest of all powers,” Woolf wrote. “She could free life from its dependence on facts, with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar”.
Not only is Kate Bush an artist who has written all of her songs. She is someone who has done so at times when the industry was hugely male-dominated and sexist. From the start of her career, she was determined that what she was singing came from her mind. Sure, there have been string arrangements where she got assistance. Some odd bits here and there. However, as a composer, Bush’s albums have been composed by her. Consider the sheer scope and diversity of her compositions, that is another hugely impressive layer. Once more, I look around music today and wonder how many artists can rival. It is clear that Kate Bush’s music has influenced various artists in different wats. In 2022, The Guardian ran a feature where a range of artists wrote what Kate Bush means to them:
“Brian Molko, Placebo
Kate created her own emotional universe. I’m nostalgic for that period in music because I think we’re given too much information today, so there’s less capacity for us to create those personal universes through somebody else’s work. There needs to be enough ambiguity there for it to become very personal to each listener. Kate’s music meant I could leave the drudgery of my everyday life and my family situation and escape into my imagination – that’s still what I look for today in music.
Rae Morris
Her music is all about combining small details with spiritual, otherworldly, wider cinemascape stuff: a really grand, imaginative to-the-moon-and-back scale, but also the sound of the blood running through your veins. As a teenager I felt like her voice was my inner voice.
Jenny Hval
Working so intensely with her music made me gain enormous respect for her work. I feel as if she is completely unique in her ability to research other people’s stories and retell them. So many of her songs are directly about a book, a film, or an image. And instead of the familiar “if I could turn back time” nostalgic pop music storyteller, the emotional density of those stories is always completely intact, through her voice, production twists and magnificent melodic themes. It’s as if she is a reporter, reporting from the war zone of human experience”.
I am going to wrap up in a minute. Before I do, I want to drop in part of a feature from The Independent that was published in 2014. To coincide with her return to the stage for Before the Dawn, they asked whether Bush was a “Musical pioneer? Reclusive genius? 21st-century witch?”. I think the first is more appropriate as Bush has never been a recluse, and it seems insulting to label her as a witch:
“Without really meaning to, Kate Bush has stood for many things. She has stood for English pop as a discrete idiom, sheared free of its American roots. She has stood firmly for artistic independence in the face of corporate will, by standing up to record-company bosses and by forming her own management and publishing companies at an age most of us are prepared to swallow whatever trickles down. She has stood for privacy in the face of presumption by the media. She has stood, fiercely, against the sexual objectification of women as an industrial norm. She has maintained the conviction that one's first duty is to one's own artistic muse, and she has done it as if it were all in a day's work and not a continuation of her work by other, self-dramatising, means”.
It makes it all the more impressive that Bush wrote all of her songs considering the depth and originality! Some might argue that other solo artists have a longer run of albums where they have written all of the songs, though it is a rarity. Kate Bush is that rare thing: an artist who had a degree of independence right from the start. Writing every song on her debut album was a major reason it was so popular. Never wanting to cover songs or collaborate with writers. This has continued throughout her career. None of her studio albums feature cover versions. She has always wanted to keep things original. That is to be applauded. We look ahead to the next phase of Kate Bush’s career. If she does grace us with another album, you can be sure it will sound like nothing else. The media often labels Bush with these unkind and inaccurate tags. However, I think we can all agree that the one tag that cannot be argue is the fact Kate Bush is…
A music pioneer.