Oooh, what are your favourite tracks from that? Never for Ever is at the moment the one album of hers that I actually own. It's been in my stuff for ages and up until about a week ago I hadn't listened to it since early 2010. I've been writing a sort of social fairy tale (a genre descriptor I invented for the vaguely heightened sense of reality in an LGBT manga called Aoi Hana) about the countryside in upper New England where I grew up and one night I was awake at three o' clock in the morning so I went through a whole box of CDs, found it, and ended up writing four or five thousand words while listening to it on loop. My favourite track from it is definitely 'Breathing', for what I'm given to understand are the usual sorts of reasons. Then I went online and discovered The Dreaming and Hounds of Love...
She seems to be about as interested in nuclear war as Kajiura Yuki is in apocalytpic Buddhism, or at least she was in the Never for Ever/The Dreaming period.
"Breathing" is definitely my favorite too--also for the usual reasons--my others are "All We Ever Look For," "Violin" and "Night Scented Stock." "Suspended in Gaffa," "Sat in My Lap" and "Night of the Swallow" are my favorites from The Dreaming.
I love 'Violin'. That and 'Breathing' plus 'Suspended in Gaffa' are the three songs that stand out to me the most in what I've listened to from her so far (I know it sounds incredibly sappy but 'Suspended in Gaffa' genuinely does make me feel that Bush or the music itself or both is understanding something very important about me). I'm still trying to puzzle out what I think of 'The Dreaming' itself (which is itself a compliment in some ways; parts of what the song does strike me as potentially problematic both aesthetically and politically and other parts of what the song does completely blow me away), and I do really like a lot of the really big powerful tracks from Hounds of Love that found some measure of mainstream popularity. Also 'Delius' and 'All We Ever Look For' for reasons that I can't fully articulate.
"(I know it sounds incredibly sappy but 'Suspended in Gaffa' genuinely does make me feel that Bush or the music itself or both is understanding something very important about me)."
The line "I won't open boxes that I am told not to" was really important to me back in my late teens, when I first heard it. Also, in my head there's this big connection between her music and Angela Carter's books, if only because I was reading those for the first time at the same time I was first listening to Kate Bush.
I'm drawing the same kind of connexion between her music and Kajiura Yuki's music, and her music and Walter M. Miller's writing, for, again, reasons I can't fully articulate (although the nuclear war has a lot to do with the latter). I feel like I'm building this edifice in my head of real or perceived interrelations between a lot of the narratives and bits of art that are really important to me, or rather that's my natural way of integrating art and literature into my experience anyway and Kate Bush is forming a new and unusually powerful node in that web of bridges, if that makes any sense.
"I feel like I'm building this edifice in my head of real or perceived interrelations between a lot of the narratives and bits of art that are really important to me... and Kate Bush is forming a new and unusually powerful node in that web of bridges, if that makes any sense."
It makes perfect sense. That's what it's all about, IMO. :-)
Definitely. I've been doing it ever since I can remember. The first few nodes were Beatrix Potter, which I connected to my actual experience since I grew up in a very rural area, and Tolkien, which I've connected to a ton of subsequent stuff. Musically the first that really grabbed me was Beethoven, then Verdi (I didn't listen to much modern music when I was small).
melengro
Comments
She seems to be about as interested in nuclear war as Kajiura Yuki is in apocalytpic Buddhism, or at least she was in the Never for Ever/The Dreaming period.
Edited at 2012-05-28 05:11 am (UTC)
Edited at 2012-05-28 05:13 am (UTC)
Edited at 2012-05-28 05:20 am (UTC)
The line "I won't open boxes that I am told not to" was really important to me back in my late teens, when I first heard it. Also, in my head there's this big connection between her music and Angela Carter's books, if only because I was reading those for the first time at the same time I was first listening to Kate Bush.
Edited at 2012-05-28 05:32 am (UTC)
It makes perfect sense. That's what it's all about, IMO. :-)
Edited at 2012-05-28 05:39 am (UTC)