please enjoy this selection of songs from my very favorite musical artist, miss Kate Bush. this is sort of adapted from an older mix made for people who had only heard “Wuthering Heights” and “Running Up That Hill” and nothing else.
there are a lot of singles in here, but hopefully enough deeper and obscure cuts to keep people interested. this tends towards the more melancholy longer songs which might fuck up the flow, but i wanted to err on the side of favorite songs. i also did include “Don’t Give Up” just because i thought it was worth it to include her most famous guest appearance in a song. some notable exclusions i had previously considered were Experiment IV (great video but song is meh) and Jig of Life (great song but Night of the Swallow is similar and i wanted to put the weirdest Hounds of Love track in there).
i also have a question here: do you all have any particular Kate Bush deep cut favorites? i have often said that my favorite song of hers is “The Fog” from The Sensual World - so that’s my usual answer. though “How To Be Invisible” from Aerial is another favorite a lot of people don’t know (that i chose to forego including in lieu of something slightly more upbeat from that album).
Leave It Open always reminded me of Ween for some reason - maybe just the effect on her voice. mainly i was trying reduce the picks from Hounds of Love and The Dreaming to two per album tho
I think I could almost produce a 20 Big Ones for her too, but I honestly haven’t explored her as much as I could have, so this will help a lot I bet. Glad to see you ended up making this! Get Out of My House is a really smart inclusion from the Dreaming, I think.
On my 20 Big Ones I’d have put Eat the Music on there.
Recently enough I was revisiting Never For Ever and realised that I must not have given that album a proper listen past like Babooshka and Army Dreamers. There’s a lot of great songs on there! All We Ever Look For stood out in particular:
but yeah i grew up with this character’s work. feel like there was a moment where it was right and proper to kind of dismiss her first 3 lps for her being the products of a Talent being Handled but fuck that i think
i read a biography of hers recently and it struck me how incredibly boring her life is! outside of maybe like 1977-1982ish anyway. my life is way more exciting overall tbh lol. but it’s also the clear case where having a family who were in a position to support her really benefited her tremendously because there’s no way a woman in that position would be allowed to have the career she did otherwise
i think some of her stuff is region blocked in the US or it has different US/elsewhere uploads. my aforementioned earlier mix of hers i made for someone off youtube a few years back was basically entirely wiped out when whoever runs her channel must have reuploaded everything
speaking of the UK, it is funny to have seen more recently her be basically elevated to this symbol of UK nationalism considering how much people slagged her off as an unserious theater kid teenager early in her career. but she was always mostly just an artist for artsy nerds over here in the US. i’m just glad she hasn’t been dumb enough to make any sort of public political statement after she said she thought Theresa May was doing a good job and then had to retract that.
the best songs on The Red Shoes are definitely better than The Sensual World (which IMO is an overall better album) for me - they just have more personality to them. i think it just gets into cheese territory a little too much, especially towards the end of the album. it’s kind of a shame - i want And So Is Love without the corny guitar solo, and especially different arrangements of those last few tracks.
