This is quite the appropriate song to start off the RSS series. In the last couple of years I've been able to listen again to some of that music from my childhood and hear it with fresh ears and even enjoy it, this being one of those prime cases. When I was growing up, the earliest two artists I can recall are Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell. This is because my brother and I had a portable tape cassette recorder and our parents allowed us each to buy one prerecorded cassette. My brother got Johnny Cash's Greatest Hits and I got Glen Campbell's, and those two cassettes were the ones that got played the most for at least a year or two. At the time I didn't really care for Cash, although I liked one or two songs on the cassette, and instead favored Glen Campbell's more pop-oriented country. This was partly due to my incipient rebellion as my parents and grandparents favored country music. Having listened to my mother's Columbia House record collection and my grandfather's 8-Track collection, I already knew that my musical taste didn't necessarily correspond with theirs. For example, it took my until I was in my 30s before I could get over the constant Bob Wills' "Ah-ha!"s to enjoy his Western-style Swing. The stuff that I did favor tended to smooth over the countryness of music. I discovered Glen Campbell through my grandfather's 8-Track that had "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" on it. I was initially taken aback, as the title was a direct reference to one of my favorite science fiction books and although the song itself didn't reference anything in the book, it has a haunting refrain that has been with me ever since. I also favored my grandfather's well-played Statler Brothers' Greatest Hits. From my mother's collection, I would often listen to Elvis Presley and The Kingston Trio, neither which would be considered country, although they were far away from the rock music of the time.

That's all to say that my distaste for country music started fairly early. It was cemented in the 1980s when I worked for the local radio station as a DJ. It was a wonderful job, except for the music. It was a bit like being a fisherman who hated to eat fish. The 1980s were a particularly low point in country music, too (not that there haven't been some major troughs since). Two songs still drive me up the wall, as I swear I had to play them at least daily for months: Sylvia's "Nobody" and John Anderson's "Swingin'." (The only high point in the job was being able to put on the Eagle's "Lying Eyes," which was long enough to be able to go to the bathroom and get back in time to get another song cued up. At the time, most country songs rarely ran over 3 minutes, and this was in the time where records were records and not CDs, so getting another one ready meant you had to start the record in your local monitors until the song started, then spin the record backwards three turns so that you knew when you flicked the turntable switch that the song would start in three seconds.)

I started to come back to country music in the 1990s through the efforts of certain artists that bucked the Nashville establishment: Lyle Lovett, Dwight Yoakam, k.d. lang, and Rosanne Cash. These were "new" artists, though, and not the country and western establishment that I associated with the music of my childhood, all twang and slide guitar.

Johnny Cash was one of those traditional artists, or at least I thought he was. But then I heard his albums with Rick Rubin, including his cover of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage," which seems as if it had been written for him (and really, is much better than the original). The biopic Walk the Line had me revisit my assumptions about Cash as well as the fact that my band started to cover his "Cocaine Blues," a song I had been unfamiliar with before. Eventually I picked up the album, At Folsom Prison, that features that song as well as provides the beginning/opening of the movie. Finally, I was able to appreciate Cash as something more than just another country crooner.

"Greystone Chapel" isn't the best song on the album, but it is unique. It was written by a Folsom inmate named Glenn Shirley that Cash befriended (and whom he tried to help once the man was released from prison). Cash had only sung it in concert once before the recording session, and it's not the most polished song, but it fits perfectly into Cash's ouvre, what with its combination of sin and salvation. The style of the song isn't anything special, a basic country shuffle, but when you listen to it you can hear all the things that made Cash's appearance at Folsom great: his connection to the inmates through his own sins, his honest belief, the backing of both June Carter Cash and the Statlers, and the rapturous applause of the crowd. This track also features a bit of business from the prison at the end that truly marks its time and place, with an announcement about one of the inmates needing to go to the custody office, introducing Johnny Cash's father, an "appreciation gift" from the Assistant Warden (which sounds like they are putting manacles on him), and then the instructions for how the prisoners should leave, complete with clanking chains.

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I bought this in 1986, having heard Bill Humphries sing the praises of Kate Bush for months. It was the Spring-Summer of my triumphant return to UT Austin (before the inevitable Second Fall from Grace that was to occur a couple of years later), and while I had listened to this album quite a bit during my commute back and forth to classes that Spring, it cemented its hold in my heart during Winedale summer, as I prepared for the Shakespeare course that Mike Godwin had instructed me to enroll in during the Spring, then followed up for an intensive Summer section. Listening to it now reminds me of that summer, especially the first song, "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" and the entire "Ninth Wave" second half, in that I had indeed made a deal with God that I would try and turn my school life around and I was immersed, not so much in water, but in the creativity and spirit of Winedale. The album is somewhat bittersweet, and so was that summer, for while I indeed did well that year, it was a rough period, made more so by the ties I had been making with my girlfriend of the time (who would eventually become my wife, uhm, ten years later).

I had been primed to fall for the Divine Miss Bush for years, having spent my high school years listening to a progression of pop music (Elton John and Fleetwood Mac) to "hard rock" (Styx and Journey) to "art rock" (Genesis, Rush and Yes). The next step along that road was to experimental rock, and Laurie Anderson had been my introduction and Kate Bush became my guide in the form. At the time, since I hadn't heard much of Bush's previous work, I simply saw her as a companion to Peter Gabriel (she had, after all, performed a duet with him on his recent album, So, as had Anderson), who also went into the studio to drench her songs in layers and layers of production. The strangeness of some of "The Ninth Wave" washed over me, and it wasn't until years later that I actually took notice of how many things were actually going on in those songs. Now that I look at this album and compare it to her previous work, I see how some had rightly accused Bush of "selling out" to pop music, much like they had accused Gabriel of the same (my favorite memory of which is my friend Karl Rehn's rewrite of the chorus of "Sledgehammer" as "I want to be / Phil Collins"). Hounds of Love is defiantly pop, but this is pop with an edge.

Take, for example, the opening song, whose title was changed because her record company feared that "A Deal with God" would raise fundamentalist hackles in the States and Italy. Its insistent drum beat over the atmospheric synths belie the lyrics, which have nothing whatsover to do with the diety, but instead describe the love/hate symbiosis in most relationships. The titular deal is the narrator's urgent desire to be able to switch places, so as to better understand each other. (Of course, in all modesty, you could also read the lyrics as the narrator wanting to swap places with her lover so they could experience orgasm from each other's point of view. I'm just saying, and those moans in the background bear me out on this, I think.)

"It's in the trees! It's coming!" What? This is a pop record? What was that? That was the beginning to the second song, "Hounds of Love," that's even more over the top in its attempt to describe how much it feels to be the object of someone's affection, or perhaps the narrator's fear of being in love itself. As she runs from those hounds, she's unsure if she wants to be in love or to be pursued by love or to give in to her own feelings. I was 20, and in the throes of my first love affair, and I knew how she felt to be hounded by love.

"The Big Sky" changes the mood to be a little more light-hearted, almost childish, as the narrator rolls in the grass and focuses her attention on the shapes that she can see in the clouds. What I like most about this song is the vocal nonsense sounds in the background that are almost like Philip Glass in their repetition. Each of these first three songs are "big music," in the phraseology of Mike Scott of the Waterboys: they fill the room/car/arena with their sounds, so much so that the louder you play the song the more you hear going on.

But, as celebratory as the last song was, Bush quickly turns to a darker subject, and one of my favorite songs she has ever done, "Mother Stands for Comfort." Unlike the ambiguous nature of the first couple of songs, it's not hard to follow the lyrics on this one: from the breaking glass at the beginning, to the industrial background sounds, this is a song about a broken person, who adores his mother who "knows that I've been doing something wrong / But she won't say anything." In the chorus, the narrator even calls himself a madman. This is a sincerely creepy song, in which the music both supports its eerie theme as well as coats it over in slinkiness.

From one child to another, "Cloudbusting" is told from the point-of-view of Peter Reich, the young son of Wilhelm Reich. Drawn directly from Peter's book about his experience, it tells the story of when the government agents came for his father, interspersed with a child's love for his father and the dreams his father had instilled in him. It's an effective piece in that it makes you want to know more about Reich and his beliefs about Organon.

Thus ends side one on the album (for this was when artists still thought of Side A and Side B to match the order of songs on a piece of vinyl). Side B has an overall title of "The Ninth Wave," and describes a shipwreck survivor lost at sea, struggling to keep his or her head above the water. The opening song, "And Dream of Sleep," sets up this situation, and also manages to prefigure some of the experimental sections that follow in its small snippets of sound that merge into a collage all the while Bush sings sweetly about being seduced by sleep, which she cannot fall into lest she drop into the deep water and drown. The next section, "Under Ice," is chilling (pun intended), for the water the protagonist is in is cold, and the very real danger that she faces is underpinned by the minor key and urgent violin part. "Waking the Witch" puts the sound collage in the foreground, like a view into the protagonist's mind, a jumble of phrases and voices that abruptly seques into a call and response between a sinister male-type voice and a desperately stuttering staccato female voice, separated by sections of childlike chanting. This is the weirdest song on this album, and while there's nothing as outre in it as the braying donkey in "Get Out of the House" on The Dreaming, it would be hard to describe this as pop. (Interestingly enough, it's theme of judge and jury and the helicopter sample that ends it recalls, unintentionally I think, Pink Floyd's The Wall.) Returning to a more sedate, if still not normal, mood, "Watching You Without Me" starts as a lullabye, broken by a bridge of either nonsense or foreign lyrics not repeated in the liner notes as well as a repeat of the stuttering "talk to me, talk to me, talk to me" heard earlier. The point of the song, I think, is to provide a calm trough between "Waking the Witch" and "Jig of Life," the latter being a minor-key and darkly urgent variation on the traditional jig. By this time, the drowning theme has been downplayed to some extent, as these middle songs likely portray an inner struggle in the protagonist. "Hello Earth" brings us back to the story, however, by an implied comparison of the drowning person in the overall black sea to the Earth in the inky depths of the Universe. "With just one hand held up high / I can blot you out / out of sight" is a line written as if the Earth is viewed from off-Earth (the Moon or a space capsule), and later in the song the viewer sees storms forming over America and tries to warn the sailors and other in the water, including the poor drowning person, who is in the path of the storm. And then the finale comes, like the calm following the storm, a simple love song that is either the protagonists parting thoughts or, if you want to believe that she is actually rescued before drowning, her affirmation of life and understanding of the tenuousness of our existence by reiterating what she plans to do: "I'll kiss the ground / I'll tell my mother / I'll tell my father / I'll tell my loved one / I'll tell my brothers / How much I love them."

Is this pop? Maybe, perhaps, somewhat. Bush had always played with pop music tropes from her first success, the book turned song "Wuthering Heights," and each successive album contained some nods towards a simple ballad, but it wouldn't be until two albums following this one that Miss Bush would write her own "Sledgehammer" in "Rubberband Girl" (on The Red Shoes, an album that would also feature a song co-written and performed as a duet with his purpleness, Prince). To me, though, Hounds of Love is Bush's career high point, where her experimental art sensibilities were leavened with enough pop understanding to achieve a masterpiece of production, performance, and purpose, propelled with a singular power of vision and which wraps up in a peaceful platitude. Other albums contain highlights; only this one is perfection.

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Comments

Groon says:

My favorite Kate Bush album, and one of my favorite all-time albums! Greatm insightful review and comments. My favorotie song has always been "Mother Stands for Comfort," especially when halfway through this beautiful song, in the background you can hear the clipped, gated yelling from "Waking the Witch." It's a great contrast.

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