The Kate Bush album she called the “happiest” she’d ever been
Kate Bush is the sort of artist who often gets labelled as being a genius, and there’s plenty of good reason for this. Having written and recorded the entirety of her debut album, The Kick Inside, while she was still a teenager and miraculously going on to surpass this huge achievement on multiple occasions afterwards, there are plenty of good reasons to hail Bush as being one of the most naturally gifted songwriters that the UK has ever produced.
However, despite her prodigious talents, these accomplishments have never come without her putting in the hard graft, and it’s often been something of a painstaking process to put together some of her finest works. This is the case with many artists who are hailed as being masters of their craft from a young age, and while the triumphs might seem easy to come by, a certain amount of knuckling down must be done to get there.
If things aren’t going quite to plan, it’s very possible that the creative process can become quite a draining experience, especially if you’re exerting a lot of your energy meticulously piecing together your masterpieces. As flawless as the most intricate moments on Bush’s records might appear when listening to the finished product, it’s often the case that they’ve been through a painstaking amount of tweaking and altering just to get things looking and sounding absolutely pristine.
Bush’s fifth album, Hounds of Love, is often regarded as being her finest work, but the process of making the record took almost two years, from beginning with demos to having a fully fleshed-out record. The compositions are elaborate and complex, and the songwriter expands on her progressive pop style to incorporate more elements of new wave and electronic-inspired sounds. Hounds of Love is an ambitious work of art, and it deserves to have had this amount of effort put into it, but did that come at the cost of being the sort of record that leads to artistic burnout?
While some artists may have felt exhausted from the kinds of effort that Bush was putting into making this album, she felt like an artist with a renewed sense of satisfaction in the creative process, and proclaimed to Richard Skinner in 1992 that it was the happiest she’d ever been making an album. Whether this was a statement made in hindsight where she was able to reflect on the process having been a grand success for her or if she genuinely felt this way at the time in 1985 is another matter, but the sense of pride with which she talks about Hounds of Love suggests that she adores the record with all of her heart.
“I’ve never been so pleased to finish anything in my life,” Bush told Skinner. “There were times when I never thought it’d be finished. It was just such a lot of work, all of it was so much work, you know the lyrics, trying to piece the thing together, but I did love it, I did enjoy it and everyone that worked on the album was wonderful.” While a lot of this would suggest that a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the making of the album, she would go on to put the process into context compared to how she felt making her other records.
“It was really, in some ways, I think the happiest I’ve been,” she continued. “I know that there’s a big theory that goes around that you must suffer for your art […] and I don’t believe this. Because I think in some ways this is the most complete work that I’ve done, in some ways it is the best, and I was the happiest I’ve been compared to making other albums.”
Finishing something that feels like you’ve climbed a mountain to accomplish must be satisfying no matter the quality of the work, but when it happens to be as good as Hounds of Love, there’s no wonder she wants to shout from atop the peaks about how good the process was.
