The 1979 melody Kate Bush said she could never top: “Like two black holes”
The approach to art varies depending on who you’re talking about. For instance, Graham Nash has always tried to write from a place of personal perspective.
In an interview with Far Out, Nash spoke about how his music always needs to be representative of the period of time in which it’s written. This means that regardless of whether you want to talk about politics, current emotions, or anything else which is happening in life, your music should be a reflection of the moment you put pick to string, pen to paper, or stick to drum.
“I really still think every day about a quote by Nina Simone,” recalled Nash, “Who said ‘Every artist, whether you’re a songwriter or a piano player or a sculptor or a painter, you have to reflect the times in which we live’.”
Of course, not everyone agrees with the musician on this. There are a lot of artists who prefer to write from a place of fiction, as they draw from real emotions, sure, but they end up creating something which doesn’t pertain to their life and instead is like they’re trying to write a new novel. These aren’t reflections of the moment the piece of music was written; instead, they’re a fun piece of music designed to entertain.
Concept albums are the perfect representation of this. The Who made some great ones, and modern artists are constantly putting works of fiction into what they write as well. Take a group like Clipping, for instance, a rap trio who drew from the franchise of horror and managed to release an album that was borderline terrifying as a result.
Then, you have some artists who do both of these things. Their music is a reflection of the time that they live in, but they also take influence from a range of different forms of pop culture, be it films, art, TV or literature. One of the best artists when it comes to this kind of writing is Kate Bush, who always seems to be able to straddle the line between fact and fiction wonderfully.
One of the most famous examples of this is ‘Wuthering Heights’, as Bush knew the story but had never read it. So, she combined the brief narrative of the book with her own experience and ended up making what is now an incredibly famous song. “The name Cathy helped, and made it easier to project my own feelings of want for someone so much that you hate them,” she said. “I could understand how Cathy felt.”
While this might be one of her most famous songs, she also took from a work of fiction when writing ‘Hello Earth’. The track was coming together, but Bush was stuck looking for a melody. She wanted one similar to what she had heard in the film Nosferatu, but no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t top it. After drawing a complete blank, she decided instead to just use that original melody.
“We had the whole song, it was all there, but these huge, great holes in the choruses. And I knew I wanted to put something in there, and I’d had this idea to put a vocal piece in there, that was like this traditional tune I’d heard used in the film Nosferatu,” she explained.
Adding, “And really everything I came up with, it with was rubbish really compared to what this piece was saying. So we did some research to find out if it was possible to use it. And it was, so that’s what we did, we re-recorded the piece and I kind of made up words that sounded like what I could hear was happening on the original. And suddenly there was these beautiful voices in these chorus that had just been like two black holes.”
