I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK–KATE BUSH-The Kick Inside (1978).

For the longest time, Kate Bush was my soundtrack for reading.  There was something about her voice and her musical style that I felt was conducive to reading (must be the Wuthering Heights connection).

This, her first record, was recorded when Kate was 19, and now that I’m older (and have heard her later discs) I can really hear how young she sounds.  And with that youth comes a certain degree of naivete.  If you bring any amount of cynicism to this disc, it completely crumbles.  I mean she’s a teenager in the late 70s, so there’s an awful lot of earnestness here.  There’s Buddhist chants, there’s a lot of well written feminist thought, there’s an interpretation of Wuthering Heights.  There’s even whale songs in between tracks!

But there’s also a lot of songs about lost love.  And the thing that is so strange about that is, if I understand her biography correctly, she was not terribly worldly.   So the songs about lost men or Berlin pubs or even pregnancy are unusual to say the least.  And they show a furtive imagination.

So, you get songs of love and longing.  Songs about “Strange Phenomena.”  But you also get some wonderfully weird lyrics, like my favorite couplet: “Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o / My feet are heavy and I’m rooted in my wellios”

And I just love the audacity of her writing a song about Wuthering Heights (and, yup, it got me to read the book).  Not to mention the audacity of the notes she hits in the song.

Because clearly the thing most notable on the disc is her voice.  She wails and screeches and hits notes that were previously unheard in popular music.  The chorus of “Over the Moon” is striking in its ambition.  And let’s not forget the outrageous opening notes of “Wuthering Heights” (she’s so out there that she had to re-recorded it for the greatest hits record to try to get more airplay).  But no matter how otherworldly and at times bizarre her singing is, there is no doubt that her voice is a phenomenon unto itself.  Just listen to the gorgeous control she uses on “The Man with the Child in His Eyes”).

As she got older, she reined in some of the excesses of her voice (while unleashing excesses in other areas!).  She would begin multitracking her voice for awesome effect, as well as using some surprisingly deep gutteral vocals on other songs.

Kate would go on to write a few brilliant records in to 80s.  And this is certainly a fun starting point.

Of course, I’m disappointed that the US cover is the one featured above, which is clearly dumbed downed for US audiences who didn’t get (or like) her.  Because check out the cool original cover.  I mean, I’m not even sure what it’s all about, but it’s certainly more interesting!

[READ: November 6, 2009] “The Godchildren”

I loved the premise of this story from the get go.  And I thought it was a genius way to bring together three strangers who know each other.  The three characters: Amanda, Susan & Chris are the godchildren of Vivien.  Vivien was a friend of each of their parents, but she herself never had any children.  So, it was agreed early on that the three kids would occasionally spend a day with Vivien.  But the parents soon lost interest in talking to Vivien and the kids’ visits became something of a substitution for the parents actually talking to her.

And so, for most of the kids’ young lives they would hang out together at Viviens’s house, but they would never see each other anywhere else.  I loved the idea that these three young people had a secret life together that they would never admit anywhere else.  In fact, when they were teenagers, the three of them were afraid they might run into each other out at the pub.

The story proper is set many years later, when the three children are grown and with children (but no longer spouses) of their own.  Vivien has just died, and they are called to her house to see if they want anything as mementos.  And so these three people who haven’t seen each other (or Vivien for that matter) in some twenty years are now thrust back together in a musty old house that is smaller than they remember and full of memories.

It was interesting to watch these adults regress into familiar personalities that they had when they were younger, while trying to retain their adult attitudes.  And it was even more fascinating to see what secrets were revealed as the story ends.  All of this emotional backstory and intrigue in a mere 6 pages.  It was a really compelling story, and quite frankly I would loved it to have been a lot longer.

It’s available here.