I started at day one – The Kick Inside, Wuthering Heights era – and came to realise that what she created in that time was a form of expression unto itself. But from there I decided to listen to her. At the time I was quite offended by people saying I sounded a) like a woman, and b) like an artist I’d not heard of. When I began performing in my late teens and early 20s, people said I sounded like a male Kate Bush. Mike Scott, the Waterboys: ‘We had got an old soul back’ I love that she has never played the game in that way – she’s rewritten the rules. As a mother, she has been a big inspiration in the sense that you can have a child and still record and tour when it suits you. I also love that she is an aspirational goddess and at the same time a family woman who lives on a farm it’s a perfect balance of being out of reach but also warm. As a teenager I felt like her voice was my inner voice. Her music is all about combining small details with spiritual, otherworldly, wider cinemascape stuff: a really grand, imaginative to-the-moon-and-back scale, but also the sound of the blood running through your veins. I felt as if I was catching up: I’ve always felt a deep jealousy that I wasn’t listening to the radio when Wuthering Heights first came out. I wasn’t making music yet, but it definitely sparked something in my brain, like: “Oh wow, a female creator has had the vision for this.” Soon after, I went to HMV, bought a couple of records and slowly pieced together a history of her music.
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It was the first music video I’d seen that had a narrative and a famous actor, Donald Sutherland – it was like a movie.
#MELODY ASSISTANT CHANGE TEMPO IN THE MIDDLE PC#
When I was about 14, my dad sat me down at a desktop PC and played me the video for Cloudbusting on YouTube. Rae Morris: ‘Her music has a to-the-moon-and-back scale’
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I’m very, very pleased that it got Kate’s endorsement. When I got to the front the first thing she said to me was: “I like your cover of my song.” That was enough. I met Kate once at a party: it was a record company do and there was an orderly queue to speak to her. We were already in the habit of covering our favourite songs from the 80s, so I suggested that we do Running Up That Hill but that we slow the tempo down as much as we could without it becoming a dirge, and obviously we wanted to keep it electronic with sounds from the early 2000s. Then as I got more and more into the lyrics and they touched me further, it occurred to me that the tempo of the song was a little bit fast for the gravitas of the lyrics to really land. One was the snare sound: really 80s and quite generic. I loved almost all of Running Up That Hill but there were a couple of things which bothered me. Kate’s music meant I could leave the drudgery of my everyday life and my family situation and escape into my imagination – that’s still what I look for today in music. There needs to be enough ambiguity there for it to become very personal to each listener. I’m nostalgic for that period in music because I think we’re given too much information today, so there’s less capacity for us to create those personal universes through somebody else’s work.
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Brian Molko, Placebo: ‘I could leave the drudgery of my everyday life’ In isolation the ideas might not make sense, whereas she can push it to this other place: her choices are really beautiful and massive and dramatic. The wrong person could make what she does sound really cheesy. I don’t think it’s ever very strict verse-chorus. I had never listened to music in such a literary way.Īs a singer, the thing that has directly affected me is her circular style of melodies one comes into the other and they never exactly repeat in the same way. Hearing her talk about Emily Brontë’s novel was something I’d never heard before, either inserting herself into a story that wasn’t her own. The music Kate Bush makes is pretty genre-defying. I hadn’t heard a melody that complex and in that high range before – or a song as exploratory in production and arrangement. The first adult friend I made after moving back was a painter’s assistant named Alison, and she played me Wuthering Heights on a car ride through New Jersey. As a teenager I had moved to Tennessee and tried to do college but ended up coming back home to my parents with my tail between my legs. I was a late bloomer when it came to hearing Kate’s music.