In the lyrics of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (1985), a woman floats atop a sea, drifting in and out of consciousness as fear and exhaustion overtake her body and mind. She withers away in memories of a life filled with promise and regret, while also longing to run up a hill to fulfill an otherworldly swap with her romantic partner to “exchange the experience”.
That same voice seeks meaning in the abstract realm of fantasies, where logic is defined by the childlike idealism of a beautiful, nostalgia-tinged blue sky, scored to an array of adventurous synths. A soundscape where the Fairlight CMI of the production evokes both a cutting realism mixed with an otherworldly dreamscape. For listeners embarking on the 47-minute journey for the first or 100th time, a visual mosaic of lush images, galactic experimentation, and old-world folk charm awaits. Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love finds a musical artist embracing a willingness to canvas beauty in emotional explosions and subtlety.
Forty summers ago, during the afterglow of the “Live Aid” concerts, Kate Bush broke a two-and-a-half-year silence with her fifth studio album. That prolonged absence from the industry followed the Top 40 failure of the expressionistic singularity, The Dreaming (1982). For an artist as celebrated as Bush was by the early 1980s, and with a creative sensibility that favored the abstract, an album of nonstop abstract experimentation should have been expected, not shunned.
Her fourth outing allowed Bush to not only produce her work independently of co-producers but also drive full force into the aura of weirdness mixed with intellectualism that her fans had been waiting for. Since she was signed to a contract with EMI, her art needed to meld with mainstream taste in her next album, as two monetary flops in a row would spell a clear death sentence to that deal so defiantly forged by the artist since she was a teenager.
Hounds of Love not only succeeded without a tour, but it also showcased an artist not afraid to fall flat on her face in the public consciousness (she rarely did). If The Dreaming was Bush’s oscillating hellscape of bizarre fragmentation and nightmarish beauty, Hounds of Love was the album that taught pop how to dream and capture those contradictions in sound.
Running with the Hounds
When I first heard “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” on a greatest female singer-songwriter compilation CD in the summer of 2002, I was struck by how it sounded like what imagination feels like. The track opens to the sounds of mournful synths that remain steady throughout the entire song. A slow hum of electronic emoting that sounds like an entryway for the protagonist to slow-motion run into a calm dimension, in tandem with a heavenly-sounding tinnitus-like vibration, is a foreboding drum. The LinnDrum sounds hold steady but give way to a second synth that plays like howling dogs mixed into an electronic violin.
Kate Bush’s vocals roar in with delicacy on top of a broader, richer pitch than what can be heard in her higher performances years before. As she tells her story about swapping places with a lover to share how it feels from both perspectives, the sounds complement the expected originality of the story.
The imagery positions the man and woman almost as if they are performers for a deity, trying to grapple with the idea of one another, whilst the track’s god watches and judges. The video’s dueling ballet of contrasting feelings between Bush and the dancer Misha Hervieu reflects this visualization.
“RUTH” sounds like highbrow erotica mixed with existential longing, with a universality across all social dynamics. All of that exists inside an ethereal palette of auditory sensuality. It provides visuals indicative of a deeply personal mime performance or Kabuki theater set in the clouds right before a thunderstorm.
If “A Deal with God” (as it’s known to Kate Bush) opened the album with creative emotional perplexity, the title track grounds the bombastic auditory panorama. “Hounds of Love” starts with the sound bite “It’s in the trees, it’s coming!” from Jacques Tourneur‘s 1957 horror flick, Curse of the Demon (also titled Night of the Demon), but it’s once again the production that takes the listener’s imagination into those trees and beyond.
The tempo remains relatively the same as “RUTH”, but drifts into earthly nature and a sense of defiance. The synths find their protagonist comparing the longing for love to being “ashamed” of running away from an injured fox left to succumb to the cruelty of the wilderness. The voice’s propulsive swoops paired with rising violins resemble an aerial tracking shot barreling full force into the wind atop the treelines. The locomotive intensity of the track is trying to feel something, anything, before hopefully landing into the loving embrace of another.
We segue immediately into the Disney song on steroids propulsion of “Big Sky” with a bass line, drum machine rhythm, up-tempo dynamism set to a story about a young girl’s wonder when daydreaming. Again, the listener is being driven forward as we “pause for the jet” the Fairlight CMI provides our ears.
Kate Bush ends the tune across minutes, not seconds, with a tribal beat and refrain of “Rolling over like a great big cloud/ Walking out in the big sky.” She references Noah’s Ark in the lyrics, invoking the vision of a chorus line of animals, people, memories, disappointments, and the sometimes-lost sense of wonder that adulthood brings. All running through a giant field as the sun’s rays shine down on the army of dreamers.
Hounds of Love‘s tone and mood drastically shift with “Mother Stands for Comfort”. Bush sings about the non-judgmental passion that comes with motherhood, even if protecting a child who turns out to be a murderer lands at their doorstep. The song is classic Kate Bush, featuring a piano, but the synth riff sounds like an alien being that has infiltrated the Fairlight and is sharing its perspective on human compassion, even if the actions being observed are morally grey.
“Cloudbusting” is like “Big Sky” but quieter. It embraces a story and musicality even more epic. The song transitions from motherhood in the previous track to fatherhood, telling Wilhelm Reich’s story from 1973’s A Book of Dreams from the POV of his son Peter. Strings that rise and fall in intensity against a one/two drumbeat find Bush stretching her vocals across arrangements that conjure longing for the past and the bewilderment of awe that children instill in their parents.
Surrendering to Submersion
“The Ninth Wave” finds a delicate/subtle Kate Bush taking over from the kinetic drama of the first side of the album, but only momentarily. “And Dream of Sheep” sounds like an interlude, but a longer one compared to something like “Prelude” on side two of 2005’s Aerial. The listener is swept up in the swaying longing of a lady lost at sea, set to a lullaby with aquatic noises drowning out her fear of drifting to a certain death. The childlike vulnerability of the track unfolds across a cascade of cinematic Fairlight imagery.
Yet it’s the segue into “Under Ice” that transports “The Ninth Wave” into the eerie Kate Bush ethos that The Dreaming provided in lush, unearthly tones. In Hounds of Love, Synthetic violins accompany Bush’s deeper vocal delivery of a nightmare inspired by her unconscious, drifting REM sleep. The cinematic lens the song conjures maintains a steady, hypnotic hold over the listener for the remainder of the suite. Our minds conjure what it looks like for a woman to be trapped beneath ice as she experiences her final moments before freezing to death. Sounds of thunder crack in the background, complemented by the sound of a beeping SOS signal, which is likely her imagined hope of rescue.
The listener is slowly pulled out of the dim trance by Bush screaming, “It’s me!” when looking at herself from the perspective of those standing on top of the ice, looking down at her frozen corpse. The woman drifting through the water loses consciousness after a brief awakening, where the fear of the enormity surrounding her, and underneath her, sends a signal to her brain to escape reality.
“Waking the Witch” picks back up the empathetic pace of the suite’s opening track. The woman dreams of those in her life, likely past and present, urging her to awaken and not give up. As I listen, I see a woman staring at a wall filled with family photographs, their haunting voices pleading with her. Then, in a violent jolt, the tempo charges to a piercing volume as tentacles spill out of the photographs and grab the woman, pulling her into the ocean and down into the pits of hell. A devilish voice growls with dominance as it seeks to pull her soul away from the life she clings to.
The woman is dreaming of a witch trial, where she smells the fire and brimstone in the onlookers’ voices crying out to watch the damned burn in agony. The sound of helicopters calling “get out of the water” is still not enough to wake up the floating figure in the waves, so we jump to another imaginative fragment.
“Watching You Without Me” sounds like a Fairlight CMI submerged underwater with the hum of a Kate Bush vocal on loop. The drifting woman watches her family moving through their lives without her. Her mind scrambles words forward and backward, much like the brain processing non-linear visuals in a REM cycle while under distress. There’s a playfulness to the sounds, like the urge to burst out laughing at the absurdity of life when you are exhausted from constantly fighting one battle after the next. In the case of the drowning figure, the jumbled words come after a stronger urge to survive keeps failing her.
“Jig of Life” takes us back to the dreamland of the suite’s first song, but there’s a certain cringiness to the theatricality of the concept Bush leans into, because why not imagine an entire Irish jig when the fear of drowning or being devoured by a shark is imminent? For all its maximalist splendor, the track serves as an important bridge to the suite’s crescendo as it gives the protagonist the surge of adrenaline she needs to hold onto her life.
“Hello Earth” is a piece of visual cinema that begins with a drowning woman envisioning a UFO late at night as it flies across a desolate American horizon. As Kate Bush sings “Look at it go”, the tempo drops to a choir of Gregorian chants, mixing the macabre and mournful simultaneously in their deep wails. The choir’s drop in tempo before returning to the woman’s watery, lung-fueled dreamworld conjures an image of her screaming with wide-open eyes into the floating UFO camera.
It watches her with curiosity as the randomness of destruction our world provides randomly appears. She sees a tsunami wipe out a coastline of fishermen and beach goers in one fell swoop before her soul begins to leave her body and ascend into the spaceship. The baritone choir returns and holds its grieving chants as the woman is cast in a bright light set against the dark backdrop of space, and carried far above earthly troubles.
The aliens pull her closer to their craft as she speaks in German, “Tiefer, tiefer, irgendwo in der Tiefe gibt es ein Licht”, “Deeper, deeper, somewhere in the depth there is a light.” The otherworldly beings hold the figure in their gaze, extracting whatever emotional or memoirist processing her aura gives off before…
“The Morning Fog” awakens the woman on a coastline, having survived the rough uncertainty of the open oceans. A cascade of uplifting 1980s synths and samples finds a beaming, grateful protagonist walking back into her life with a renewed sense of wonder. She understands the world better, the fleeting brevity of life itself, and how quickly it can all be taken away. Perhaps most importantly, she thinks of her loved ones and tells them all how much she loves them, which, even in its cheesy or simplistic interpretations, is truly what this album is all about.
Hounds of Love was arranged, produced, and written by Kate Bush in an era when female singer-songwriters, to say nothing of producers, were scarce to find. Apart from its historical significance, it is a piece of music that, like all of the best concept albums, tells a string of interconnected stories against the backdrop of emotional architecture in free fall.
Kate Bush’s 2014 residency, Before the Dawn, memorably staged “The Ninth Wave”. For the millions who weren’t there, the mystery remains. Forty years later, Hounds of Love‘s true power lies in this invitation: to use its sound to neurologically film what our dream worlds sound like.
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