Kate Bush

Like a storm being born again

A couple of quick notes:

1.    Your comments on The Relay Friday were great and I read every single one. My apologies for not responding but I had to take both Linden and Cap to the vet. Linden is slowly recovering from a virus and Cap needed to get her pre-op blood work (she needs to get spayed in a couple of weeks).

2.    I got some comments about the the #GetTheFascistOffTheLists post that includes Amazon bestsellers. Some people misconstrued this to mean I promote book sales on Amazon. I don’t link to the right-wing books at all. The links to books like The 1619 Project  or Unthinkable or any of the banned books I recommend will take you to Bookshop.org, a website that supports local independent bookstores. I refer to the Amazon list is because the vast majority of books are sold on Amazon and it is the most accurate snapshot of the kinds of books people in this country are buying.

The first Kate Bush song I ever heard was Pat Benatar’s version of “Wuthering Heights,” a track from her first album, The Kick Inside, which had been released in 1978 when she was nineteen. I didn’t know who Kate Bush was, though, until 1987 when a friend of mine mentioned that Benatar’s “Wuthering Heights” was actually a cover. By then Kate had already released five albums, including her two greatest, The Dreaming and The Hounds of Love, so I got to listen to all of them back to back.

I don’t remember how, but the last song on The Kick Inside (the title track) and the last one on her two-album masterpiece, Hounds of Love (“The Morning Fog”) became inextricably linked for me. When I made a mixed tape, which I spent far too much time doing in the 80s, the first song was always followed by the second as if they were two halves of the same same song. And that’s how I still hear them.