Day 393: Kate Bush – The Sensual World
I was scrolling through a list of best albums of all time today thinking that I’d like to listen to a woman with good vibes, and very few people fit that bill as well as Kate Bush. She’s the patron saint of strange ladies, and as a part-time strange lady I do listen to her a little bit, but nowhere near enough, so I thought I could go for an album of hers that I’ve never heard before: The Sensual World.
Album cover courtesy of EMI
Kate Bush was born in Bexleyheath, Kent to a doctor father and a nurse mother. They had an artistic family, her mother had a background in Irish dance and her father was an amateur pianist. She started writing her own songs at only 11 years old and played piano, violin and the organ. When she was 15, her parents put her in touch with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, who helped her record a demo and get signed. By 19, she had her first huge international hit with "Wuthering Heights".
The Sensual World was released in 1989 as her sixth studio album after she’d released the massive hit album Hounds of Love. Unlike her previous few albums, it wasn’t an album built around one overarching concept, but instead it’s ten short stories. It was written, produced and composed by Kate Bush in her home studio, and it became a critical and commercial success, reaching number 2 on the UK Albums Chart and earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Performance (vocal or instrumental).
As much as I enjoy the occasional Kate Bush, I tend to stick to listening to her big one, Hounds of Love, and I’ve definitely not listened to her other albums enough. The Sensual World is a reminder to me that I should probably just go on ahead and listen to every single thing she’s ever made. There’s absolutely no one like her, she’s so unique and true to herself as an artist. The album is cerebral and poetic and one of those where you could spend a good amount of time thinking about what she meant by what she said or what it means to you.
Lyrically, truly no one is doing it like her – the titular track is about Molly Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses coming alive from the pages of the book, while another song is about a young woman meeting a man and dancing with him and later discovering it was Adolf Hitler, inspired by a friend of hers accidentally having drinks with and getting charmed by a man, later finding out that it was Robert Oppenheimer.
So many of the songs are just stunning, like the restrained and almost minimalistic “The Fog” and the masterpiece that is “This Woman’s Work” – that’s the only song that I’d heard from the album, and there’s a reason why it’s so enduring. It was originally written for John Hughes’ She's Having a Baby, and it’s been featured on shows ranging from The Handmaid’s Tale to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, covered by Emma Ejwertz. It’s one of those songs that I need to make sure I avoid if I’m feeling a little bit fragile, and I don’t often cry to songs.
I want to listen to this album a few times to really get the full experience, it’s definitely one of those you need to sit with, but I’m giving it a 9/10 now with a disclaimer that it might rise if I have time to really digest over a few days. I loved it, I love Kate Bush, maybe in a year I’ll be so deep in her work that I’ll want to go dancing with all the other strange ladies at Wuthering Heights Day.