“Lyrics get misunderstood”: the most autobiographical song Kate Bush ever wrote
Sometimes, a good cover song is enough to breathe new life into the original, reshaping or enhancing the themes and messages that made it great to begin with, and other times, it transforms it into something completely different.
As one of music’s greatest and most iconic legends, Kate Bush understands both types.
Most musicians who dislike people covering their own songs do so for good reason, because after all, if you’ve created a personal piece of art, it would feel strange to have someone take it and turn it into their own thing, and while many covers attempt to remain loyal and do justice to the original, others fall flat by abandoning everything that made it great in the first place.
Don Henley perhaps put it best once when he discussed how hard the Eagles work on their material, condemning covers like Okkervil River’s version of ‘The End of the Innocence’ for not only being poor, but for changing some of the original lyrics. The band weren’t “impressed” by the song and sought legal action to take it down, but Henley also shared his reasoning for why cover songs shouldn’t even be a thing in the first place.
“You don’t go into a museum and paint a moustache on somebody else’s painting,” he said, echoing another argument by another figure who famously despised anyone going near his material, Prince, who viewed cover songs as the ultimate offence to musical art. “There’s no other art form where you can do that,” he once said. “You can’t go and do your own version of Harry Potter. Do you want to hear somebody else sing ‘Kiss’?”
Funnily enough, some musicians see cover songs differently, embracing them as the ultimate tribute to their craft. They might not always think that they’re good, but that’s part and parcel of the entire game – once their art is out there, it no longer becomes theirs, available for anybody to analyse and reinterpret however they see fit.
Bush, for one, doesn’t seem all that bothered by people taking her music however they wish – in fact, she finds that to be one of the more magical aspects of sharing her art with the world. As she once told Interview Magazine, her lyrics get misunderstood “quite often”, but it doesn’t matter what she had “originally intended” so long as her material is “interesting to somebody else”.
She also said that she’s “happy” so long as people can “draw some feeling from it”, even if it means her songs become completely misconstrued. It doesn’t matter, because “all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to be thought-provoking.” This is interesting when you consider that most of Bush’s songs are autobiographical in some way, even those in which her real-life experiences are filtered through different narrative and storytelling techniques.
You could probably find at least one revelation about Bush’s character and mind in every single song she’s ever written, but one that she argued is her most biographical, that she discussed while sharing her views on other interpretations of her songs, was ‘Moments of Pleasure’. A song about grief, ‘Moments of Pleasure’ draws inspiration from all those Bush has lost, including her aunt, her guitarist, one of her dancers, a sound engineer from Abbey Road, a lighting engineer, and film director Michael Powell.
Lyrically, it’s also one of Bush’s simpler compositions, as the singer navigates the pain of losing people who were closest to her. There’s little room for interpretation, but perhaps that’s the beauty of it – it’s as close to hers as it will ever be. “Just let us try to give these moments back,” she sings. “To those we love, to those who will survive…”
