Lessons from a Late Bloomer & Kate Bush Fan
Kate Bush Press Photo 1981
“I always saw you as a late bloomer,” my mother told me when I was 20.
I don’t think she meant it as a compliment.
She was sporty and popular in school. My father was literary and nerdy. I held aspects of both, but I leaned towards the literary side, never caring much for athletics. (As a freshman in college, I used to sneak off to the University of Georgia’s gothic cemetery for some quiet each game day.)
I’m also an Aquarius, so I took my mother’s criticism that hinted at my outlier status as a veiled compliment. We water bearers never see our weirdness as a detriment, no matter how negatively the other signs spin us oddballs.
No, I wasn’t going to get married and have babies in my twenties and go to work in some office job until I was 65. Call me a free spirit or downright rudderless. I didn’t care. Was the “house and kid” thing the goal, anyway?
It wasn’t the direction I had in mind.
I thought of my music heroines. Maybe Patti Smith had to spend some time in the Piss Factory to write her stories, but Kate Bush had other plans.
I love both artists immensely. But I’ve held a deep devotion to Kate Bush’s storytelling since I was 10 years old. And at 45, I can finally say I’m not alone.
I discovered her as I bet lots of other girls had in the late 80s watching the movie, She’s Having a Baby. Premiering on the heels of Footloose, She’s Having a Baby starred Kevin Bacon. Check. It focused on the girly theme of pregnancy. Check. And it included a New Wave soundtrack. Check.
What more could a 10-year-old girl in the 80s want?
“This Woman’s Work” was my introduction to Kate Bush. I just recently discovered that Bush recorded that song specifically for the movie and wrote it while watching that montage of Elizabeth McGovern’s character in labor. What woman of a certain age hasn’t thought of that scene while pregnant?
Like McGovern’s character, I even had a similar birth story. In the movie, the baby’s head gets caught and so did my child’s head. This situation required both the character in the movie and myself to land on the operating table for an emergency C-section. But unlike that main character, I didn’t get my musical montage.
If I were hedging my bets, I would guess most American women’s interest in Kate Bush stopped at this movie. “This Woman’s Work” was by far the most status quo kind of love song Bush has ever produced. But for me, the oddball, I was craving all the unbridled weirdness I could get my hands on as I explored even more of the British Bush’s musical catalog.
As 10 became 11, I discovered an oversized VHS clamshell case at our little mom-and-pop video store. This was Kate Bush Live at Hammersmith Oden. I eventually found the companion double CD of the concert at a local record store. We had no streaming back in those days, so this was a rare find in the Deep South.
Who knew The Hammersmith Oden concert was a gateway drug?
Soon I was buying every Kate Bush album I could get my hands on well into my teen years.
In the 8th grade, I moved to a new state and two girls in my homeroom gave out CD singles of top 40s songs to all our classmates as a Christmas gift.
“You like Mariah Carey, right?” they asked.
“Sure,” I said and accepted their gift, not really telling the truth. No one there had ever heard of Kate Bush. I was already the weird new kid, why make it worse?
I would listen to Kate in secret. I loved her for being everything Mariah Carey wasn’t. Mostly, I loved her risky writing. Her songs were the product of true storytelling. Not a bunch of typical love stuff with lyrics like “ooh, ooh, baby, baby.”
Not that love stuff can’t tell a good story, too.
But it’s how that story gets told that matters. And most love songs are snippets of feelings, not fully actualized narratives. You get the falling-in-love feels. Or the breakup blues. Or somebody’s done me wrong wreckage.
But Kate Bush…
“No, I’ll never give the hunt up and I won’t muck it up…
Somehow this was it I knew.
Well, maybe fate wants you dead too.”
Her love stuff was life or death.
Her song “The Wedding List” was inspired by a 1968 French film called The Bride Wore Black.
The movie follows a young woman who seems to be on a killing spree for no reason. She polishes off five men.
Later in the film, we’re given a glimpse of the five men in a bell tower playing cards across from a church. One of the men begins fooling around with a loaded gun. When he points the gun out the window, he haphazardly fires right at the moment a couple walks out of the church. The murderess and her childhood sweetheart emerge from the church as newlyweds. The groom is shot dead. This murder, of course, prompts the bride to spend the entirety of the film tracking down and picking off each man responsible for killing her new husband and all of her dreams.
And what’s with the last few lyrics of the song? You’ll have to listen to solve the mystery.
Kate Bush was everything Mariah Carey wasn’t. I’d never classify Kate as a diva. With every song, she presents a fully fleshed-out narrative and stands as an impressive storyteller. More like a prolific novelist than a songstress. Every record she’s produced could be considered a concept album. Remember those? Even Beyonce has created her version of a concept album. But Kate Bush has been doing it since the late 1970s and continues with it to the present.
I attended high school in the mid-90s. A lover of all kinds of music. By the time I was graduating, I had spun out to even more obscure kinds of bands and performers. First Peter Gabriel, then the X-Ray Specs, the Cocteau Twins, and Miranda Sex Garden. Musicians who wrote albums that left you wondering about the stories behind the songs.
It was no surprise to me when I landed in the burlesque community in my early 30s that many of the performers were Kate Bush fans, too. These were people who adored her strange style and her weird-ass interpretive dance moves from videos like “Wuthering Heights,” her captivating song about that classic gothic love affair. These burlesque performers would put together whole shows dedicated to Kate’s quirkiness.
Kate Bush finally getting her US #1 hit in 2022 due to the Stranger Things success isn’t all that astonishing.
It tells us that she was always ahead of her time. And that good storytelling retains its timeless power.
If you’re a writer and fan of Stranger Things and you like Max’s theme song Running of that Hill, I suggest you branch out a bit and get lost in some of Kate Bush’s other songs for writing inspiration. Same as I did at 10, 11, 12… well every year until now.
Here are a few of Kate Bush’s not-so-simple stories in song:
“Coffee Homeground” from Lionheart, 1978
A lovely little number about a lonely person who likes to poison houseguests. This song reminds me of the movie Arsenic and Old Lace, but Bush claims it was inspired by a cab driver who thought he was being poisoned by someone he knew.
“Babooshka” from Never for Ever, 1980
This song stars a wife wanting to test her husband by pretending she’s someone younger. Her husband is, of course, smitten by the younger woman. And the opportunity for these two to reconcile gets ruined on every level. What more could you want from a Kate Bush love song?
“Night of the Swallow” from The Dreaming, 1982
This song switches from the point-of-view of a smuggler navigating a clandestine flight to his lover’s POV who argues he shouldn’t be taking the flight. She protests and promises to get the law involved. The Australian actor Guy Pearce shares a personal connection to this song in the interview show Take 5. It’s worth the listen.
“Houdini” from The Dreaming, 1982
Of course, this one is about the famous escape artist Houdini. But this song is more than just the escapologist’s time on stage. This song explores Houdini’s life and death. The song shares a secret phrase the magician shared with his wife in case his spirit was able to return from the grave. In life, Houdini exposed charlatans of séances, and the utterance of the secret phrase by a medium was eventually proven to be a hoax.
“Cloudbusting” from Hounds of Love, 1985
What would you do if your father had a machine that could change the weather? Well, you’d want to keep him protected from the government, that’s what. And Kate Bush does just that as she portrays the son of the famous psychologist and philosopher William Reich before and after his arrest. Inspired by Peter Reich’s memoir A Book of Dreams, this song and the subsequent video with actor Donald Sutherland are both interesting interpretations of the memoir.
“Mother Stands for Comfort” from Hounds of Love, 1985
This one’s about the great love a mother has for her son. And most mothers can attest to this feeling, but in true Kate Bush fashion, she takes it up a notch. Here, the son is a murderer, and the mother is sworn to protect her child at all costs, no matter the consequences.
“Wild Man” from 50 Words for Snow, 2011
An empathic view of the mythic Yeti monster. The main character in this song falls for him and wants to help him escape the clutches of those who would capture and cage him. This entire album takes us through the snowscape of a winter dream, so why not make the love interest be the Abominable Snowman, right?
These seven songs are just a taste of the kinds of storytelling you’ll find in Kate Bush’s repertoire. If you start listening to her and get hooked, you can check out the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for more lyrics and additional information on each of the narratives she writes and sings about.
Or you could try your hand at an alternative writing workshop.
I’ve begun using this introduction to writing with my 5-year-old. She can’t write many words yet, but she can tell stories through pictures. So, each day after her phonics lesson, I put on some instrumental music—jazz, classical, meditative—and I leave the room so she can spend uninterrupted time developing her stories.
My child is the opposite of how I was at her age. She’s a kinesthetic learner—possibly the child my mother had envisioned instead of me—and settling her down long enough for some self-reflection isn’t the easiest thing to do. But she’s so taken with the music that these writing workshops have become a big hit. She’s also discovered Kate Bush so we may have to explore some storytelling songs in picture drawings, too.
But even if you’re a prolific writer, you can recreate this type of non-word writing workshop to tap into the more visual side of storytelling.
If you’re feeling stuck or looking to challenge your regular writing practice, try it. Attempt to free yourself from forming stories with words and see where your imagination takes you with visual art.
Put on some lyric-less music (I love movie scores like The Governess by Edward Shearmur and Fur by Carter Burwell). And use simple figures to draw out any story that comes to mind. You might be surprised to find that removing your dependence on words helps you create stories in ways you haven’t yet explored.
What music inspires your storytelling?
If you find that you’re writing stories that aren’t getting much attention yet or you haven’t found a publisher, maybe you’re just like Kate Bush. Your stories might be ahead of their time. Or maybe your audience hasn’t even been born yet.
Don’t get discouraged. Your day will come if you keep writing.
Photo Attribution:
"Dickens Fair: Kate Bush" by PhotoshopScaresMe.com is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
*Yes, I’m aware that’s probably not Kate Bush. The photographer was as well. But the likeness is quite good.
