“Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” by KATE BUSH

Stranger Things put a 37 year-old song on the pop charts, which is fitting: Kate Bush's music always did seem out of time.

If I Only Could

Kate Bush was 25 years old and already there were mutters that she was past it, a has-been. Her fourth album, The Dreaming, was the first where she had the full artistic control she had fought for since first signing her record deal at 18. The 1982 album was a commercial disappointment. As she later put it, it was her “she’s gone mad” record, a dense soundscape that was less accessible than those that had made her one of the biggest young stars in the U.K. Bush herself was also less accessible. She had already stopped touring after 1979’s Tour of Life dates. Exhausted after months in the studio, she stepped off the popstar treadmill altogether, and according to the music press, disappeared. Tabloids ran paparazzi photos captioned with rumors that she was yet another rock star on drugs (wrong but believable considering the cocaine-dusted ‘80s) or, presented with equal horror, that she had gained weight. 

Bush didn’t disappear. She went home. She bought a 17th century farmhouse in Kent, not far from her family home, another old farmhouse, in East Wickham. Instead of paying £100 an hour for a cave-like London studio, she built a 48-track studio in the barn behind her family’s stone house. It was the same creaky barn, which she described as “a mouse’s nest,” where she banged away on a wheezing pump organ as a girl. Her instrument now was a Fairlight CMI¹, a synthesizer and digital audio workstation with an embedded sampler. For an artist who considered herself a writer more than a musician, it was a machine of infinite possibilities. 

“Running Up That Hill” was the first song done for The Hounds of Love, released in 1985 when Bush was 27. Bush wrote the song in a single evening on the Fairlight, and she cut a demo on an 8-track with her partner Del Palmer, who had been her bassist since their days as the KT Bush Band. It turned out to be more than a demo: The galloping electronic drumbeat programmed by Palmer and the hook — the Fairlight honking like a goose on psychedelics — are what you hear on the song now. And once Bush took it to the studio in the old barn, she was free to spend hours and days and weeks chasing textures and sounds, laboriously crafting the atmosphere the song demanded of her. 

In this seeming contradiction between how quickly she writes the song and the time it takes to draw out its sound gives a sense of Bush the artist:  Music, the whole of it, is pure expression. The sound of the song is an equal part in telling its story. Bush certainly wasn’t alone in this. Pink Floyd² had used the studio as an instrument to great artistic and commercial effect for Dark Side of the Moon, for just one example. What the new technology of The Fairlight did was put endlessly mutable sounds literally at her fingertips. She was pioneering a cut-and-paste aesthetic that pretty much defines modern culture in a centuries-old barn — past, present, and future all at once.

The atmospheric, often ethereal, quality of Bush’s songs gives them a sense of magic realism. Which is to say, the fantastical ideas and sounds in her songs aren’t creating an imagined world, but rather tap into our imaginations to express emotions experienced in this one. The fact that the sound of “Running Up That Hill” is like nothing else makes it easier to absorb the lyrics’ fantasy of switching places with your partner to understand things as they do — you’re already in a place where anything could happen. That electronic drumbeat also gives the song a bounding quality, so yes, it feels like an uphill run, which draws you in to its dizzying excitement. At the end, her voice is pitched down, as if Bush has indeed made her deal with God and become her man to fully feel his joys and pain. 

You don't wanna hurt me 

But see how deep the bullet lies 

Unaware, I'm tearing you asunder 

Oh, there is thunder in our hearts 

Is there so much hate for the ones we love? 

Oh, tell me, we both matter, don't we?

Bush also has the ability to seem as if she’s singing directly to you. While some singers sing the song — the notes, the melody — she’s singing what she intimately knows that the songs mean. This is especially true on “Running Up That Hill”; each “c’mon darling” is invested with so much emotion that the line strikes directly at your heart, even if you rationally know that the darling in question is Del from Kent. 

That’s the other fantasy element to Bush’s music — Kate Bush herself. A petite beauty with a four-octave range, she hardly seems real. Producer Daniel Lanois³ said, “She’s very down to earth, apart from the fact that every man in the room falls in love with her.” But that’s the thing — there should be no dichotomy here. Who Kate Bush is as an artist has nothing to do with what men or fans want from her. One of the triumphs of her idiosyncratic career, with all its adventurousness and 4 to 12 year gaps between records, is just how much she’s made that clear.

As she sings on “The Big Sky,” the third track on Hounds of Love, “You never understood me. You never really tried.”

15 Song Playlist

An all-too-cursory mix of songs spanning her career, with a certain emphasis on Hounds of Love. I kind of like how it flows, tho.

Well This Is Wonderful

And then do it to raise money for Women’s Aid. Donate here.

SHANE REACTION @imshanereaction

If you ever need cheering up just remember that every July thousands of Kate Bush fans gather around the world to perform Wuthering Heights dressed head to toe like Kate Bush herself

A Good Book Is Hard to Find

Graeme Thomson’s Under The Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush is remarkably well done. I’m not the biggest fan of music books, actually, but this one, along with being essential to this week’s edition of the newsletter, is a really good read. It appears to be out of print, with only used copies online. But it is available on the subscription service Scribd, which has a Free 30-Day Trial.

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Thank You

Thanks for reading an email sent at the beginning of a long holiday weekend. I hope it’s some relief that this one isn’t thematically American or something else related to Independence Day.

Narratives are powerful things, especially our own internal ones. Often, I’m sitting down in front of a laptop trying to sort out why a song makes me feel a certain way and see what other connections can be formed. But for some songs, it’s an exercise in listening anew. In this case, I had to listen past any narratives in part informed by all the Kate Bush posters hung on dorm room walls in the ‘80s. That Stranger Things gave this song a run on the pop charts made me to do that, and I’ve grown because of it. So thanks, Winona Ryder, who went so far as to wear Kate Bush t-shirts on set, for hounding the Duffer Brothers to include Bush’s music in the series.

And thanks to my friend Cliff, to whom I owe much, for saying this is his favorite of these pieces, confirming that good things happen when we push narratives and grow.

1. Short for Computer Musical Instrument. Bush discovered it through Peter Gabriel when she went to his home studio to record backing vocals for “Don’t Give Up.” Gabriel was so impressed by the Fairlight that he formed a company, Syco Systems, to distribute the Australian-built instruments in the U.K.

2. David Gilmour helped produce the demo tape that got Bush signed. He didn’t take any financial interest in her career; he was swimming in Dark Side of the Moon cash and thought it only right to help some other artists along. In his studio, she was fascinated by his Mellotron, and it’s an easy line to draw from that keyboard to the Fairlight.

3. Lanois produced Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Willie Nelson, and U2, for starters, and has three Album of the Year Grammys on his mantel.