“Very difficult”: the song Kate Bush felt was too big for her
No artist can spend their lives trying to create the same schlock over and over again. Even AC/DC have found ways to switch things up now and again, and it takes a massive amount of bravery for someone to stray from their usual wheelhouse and make something that they aren’t sure will pan out right or not. However, since everything Kate Bush did was built on breaking down the barriers of rock and roll, she felt that only a few songs managed to loom larger than she initially expected.
When looking at Bush’s discography, though, going above and beyond was never out of the question. Ever since The Dreaming, she had begun working on songs that were much more adventurous than anything going on in pop, and despite never being a true progressive artist, she was always willing to go in a different direction than before, even if it meant losing fans that wanted to hear ‘Wuthering Heights’ all over again.
But since bands like Pink Floyd were writing multi-part suites in their tunes and crafting lavish concepts like The Wall, it was only natural for Bush to start thinking in those terms. Songs no longer needed to be restricted to what the radio format said it was supposed to be, and looking at what she did on the back half of Hounds of Love, it was clear that she had the chops to pull off something like The Ninth Wave.
Since her magnum opus is technically two albums packaged in one, The Ninth Wave is a multi-part journey as this woman finds herself stranded at sea with nowhere to go. And while there are a handful of moments where the piece can sound genuinely terrifying, ‘Hello Earth’ is the moment where the true climax of the piece begins before everything calms down for ‘The Morning Fog’.
But the structure of the song was never exactly conventional for what Bush was known for. She had a few songs that had continued to build over the course of their runtime, but as soon as she started working on the tune, hearing the whole thing come to an abrupt halt in the choruses was the one moment where she started to question whether or not to leave the entire operation behind.
Despite her grand ideas for the record, Bush admitted that she may have been a bit too overambitious when working on this tune, saying, “‘Hello Earth’ was a very difficult track to write. In some ways, it was too big for me. We had the whole song, but [with] these huge holes in the choruses. I knew I wanted to put something in there, and I’d had this idea to put a vocal piece in there, this traditional tune I’d heard used in the film Nosferatu. We re-recorded the piece, and I made up words that sounded like what I could hear was happening on the original. And suddenly there was these beautiful voices in the chorus that had just been like two black holes.”
When hearing the track in context, you would never guess that Bush had trouble putting things together. There had been some moments where it felt like the tune got lost, but by hearing those ethereal voices in the chorus, it puts the listener in the character’s position, as if she’s going in and out of consciousness and is hearing voices from the great beyond coming to her rescue.
But that kind of craftsmanship is all part of what being a musician is all about. There are many moments where things can sound difficult to pull off, but the true professionals know to take something that might seem impossible and make it look like the most natural progression in the world.
