The singer Kate Bush said had “the most beautiful” voice
Any other vocalist would have killed to have the kind of vocal range that Kate Bush seemed to have so effortlessly.
It’s hard enough for anyone to get their first tunes off the ground when they start in the industry, but hearing Bush storm out of the gate with ‘Wuthering Heights’ when she wasn’t even out of her teens is the kind of talent that’s almost too much for one person to possess. But all that musical intuition came from Bush practising her craft and learning from the best in the business.
After all, it’s hard not to talk about the beginning of Bush’s career without discussing David Gilmour’s involvement. There’s no way that any of her songs were going to fit onto a Pink Floyd record or anything, but when listening to how her career shaped up, she seemed to have the same adventurous approach to music as Floyd did most of the time. Nothing ordinary was enough to satisfy her, so why not try working with every single genre she could think of?
It was bound to be a rough ride for casual pop fans, but once you tune in to the music on a record like The Dreaming, it was like Bush was turning into a mad scientist in the studio the same way that The Beatles were. She was carving out her own lane as a songcrafter at that point, but she also knew that if a tune didn’t work if it was only played on piano, there was no use in continuing.
Every artist from that time still abided by the rules that every singer-songwriter did, and while Bush added a lot to ‘Cloudbusting’ and the entire back half of Hounds of Love, it always held together as some of the most beautifully forward-looking music that the charts had ever seen. And given what the charts had gone through in the 1960s, it wasn’t like they weren’t ready for a few thrills as well.
The Beatles had opened doors that most people thought would never be opened on the pop charts, but Bush was also firmly attuned to what Donovan was doing around the same time. There’s probably no song of hers that sounds anywhere close to tracks like ‘Mellow Yellow’ or anything, but if you remove all of the strange fingerpicking in his tunes, nothing hit her harder than the sound of his voice.
Compared to every singer-songwriter, Bush had never heard a voice quite like Donovan’s out in the wild, saying, “Donovan has got the most beautiful voice – that very slow vibrato that people like Cliff Richard can put on, but [Donovan] has it very naturally. I mean, he sings like this all the time. And again, he’s an incredible songwriter, lyric writer. And it seems that he’s just been forgotten; he’s gone under. It’s ridiculous. I can’t stand to see that happen to people, especially someone like him.”
And compared to all the greatest names in 1960s rock, Donovan doesn’t deserve to be ignored nearly as much as he was back in the day. It wasn’t the most “dangerous” music to appear on the pop charts by any means, but any artist that could write tunes that strong and actually bring together half of Led Zeppelin for the song ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ deserves at least more props than being a footnote in 1960s culture.
No, he wasn’t going to ascend to the levels of Bob Dylan by any stretch, but he had carved himself out a place where he could ride along right beside the folk legend. Dylan was more concerned with making music that reflected his own heart, but Donovan was ready to challenge people’s perceptions of what a great song could sound like outside of a couple chords and a nice melody.
