The 1993 album Kate Bush needed to correct: “My better songs got lost”
There are very few discographies that can be any more perfect than what Kate Bush has done.
She might not have had the greatest presence on the charts every single time she made a new record, but even if she wasn’t touring the world like every other 1980s star, her records felt like miniature journeys whenever you put on the first track. She was looking to make music that was much more far-reaching than anything else, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t some bumps in the road that needed to be fixed now and again.
First of all, it wasn’t like Bush was going to have the best handle on how to be a rock and roll star in the beginning. There are plenty of artists who have tried their hand at making brilliant music right out of the gate, but despite ‘Wuthering Heights’ still being one of the finest songs that she ever wrote, being placed directly into the hit-making machine wasn’t the right way for her to be introduced to the world, and Lionheart is probably the clearest example of that.
That doesn’t mean that the record is bad by any means. It’s pretty damn good, but since most of the tunes were made up of outtakes that she had from her first record, it wasn’t like she was trying to break any new ground. She needed to find her footing a bit more, and as soon as she hit The Dreaming, her entire run throughout the rest of the decade is still one of the most insane streaks that any pop star has ever done.
Hounds of Love is probably the closest that she came to true perfection, but there were just as many detours that gave us a fair share of surprises. The Sensual World is a lot more muted in certain areas than what she had previously done, but when it comes to baroque pop, there are hardly any tunes that compare to The Red Shoes. The entire album felt like a litany of everything that pop music had been building towards, so why the hell did Bush want to wash her hands of the record?
Anyone who puts a song like ‘Rubberband Girl’ doesn’t really need to make anything else ever again, but the main problem Bush had was that the record was far overstuffed with material, saying, “In hindsight, I think my last record was too long. Some of my better songs were on it, but they got lost. I was trying to give people as much for their money as I could. But people have very short attention spans now. It seems everything is just a moment away from the fast-forward button.”
But that can be chalked up to the fact that the music industry was just starting to adapt to the CD era of music as well. There are probably countless artists who would have been glad to have the freedom to not cut anything for vinyl restraints, but when you start putting too much material on a record, there tend to be a few songs that aren’t really necessary to tell the story of what someone like Bush wants to say.
Still, new Kate Bush songs are rarely a bad thing, and even when she was making more experimental tunes, it’s hard to think of which songs to cut from The Red Shoes. Her vocal performances are pitch-perfect half the time, Michael Kamen’s orchestrations are absolutely beautiful on every song, and even if it could afford to be trimmed a bit, no one with a straight face would have wanted to cut a collaboration with Bush and Prince.
It’s ultimately up to the artist at the end of the day for what ends up on a record, but arguing over cutting songs on an album like this is really splitting hairs half the time. And since Bush has gone on multiple sabbaticals whenever she released new music, most of us fans are happy enough that she made as many songs as she did when she was still actively working on her classics.
