hounds of love studio album by kate bush

#Hounds of love studio album by kate bush mac

In some respects, this was also Bush's first fully realized album, done completely on her own terms, made entirely at her own 48-track home studio, to her schedule and preferences, and delivered whole to EMI as a finished work that history is important, helping to explain the sheer presence of the album's most striking element - the spirit of experimentation at every turn, in the little details of the sound. If this sounds like heady stuff, it could be, but Bush never lets the material get too far from its pop trappings and purpose. But Hounds of Love was more carefully crafted as a pop record, and it abounded in memorable melodies and arrangements, the latter reflecting idioms ranging from orchestrated progressive pop to high-wattage traditional folk and at the center of it all was Bush in the best album-length vocal performance of her career, extending her range and also drawing expressiveness from deep inside of herself, so much so that one almost feels as though he's eavesdropping at moments during 'Running Up That Hill.' Hounds of Love is actually a two-part album (the two sides of the original LP release being the now-lost natural dividing line), consisting of the suites 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Ninth Wave.' The former is steeped in lyrical and sonic sensuality that tends to wash over the listener, while the latter is about the experiences of birth and rebirth. Kate Bush's strongest album to date also marked her breakthrough into the American charts, and yielded a set of dazzling videos as well as an enviable body of hits, spearheaded by 'Running Up That Hill,' her biggest single since 'Wuthering Heights.' Strangely enough, Hounds of Love was no less complicated in its structure, imagery, and extra-musical references (even lifting a line of dialogue from Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon for the intro of the title song) than The Dreaming, which had been roundly criticized for being too ambitious and complex. This entry was posted in Music, Weimaraner and tagged album cover, Kate Bush, music, The 'Hounds of Love', Weimaraner. You can read about the photo shoot in the photographer’s own words here.

The dogs also featured in the artwork notes in which Bush credits them by writing, ‘Woof to Bonnie and Clyde’. The album cover features Bush posing with her friend’s two Weimaraners, “Bonnie” and “Clyde.” In an interview, Bush said it took all day to get the dogs to settle down, but when the final picture was taken, one of the dogs had actually fallen asleep on her. The lead single, ‘Running Up That Hill,’ widely regarded as one of her greatest hits, helped sell more than 1.1 million copies of the album which achieved double platinum status. “But that was really what drew me in,” added Rotten.īush had a long career and made more conventional music that was, perhaps, easier to listen to:īush’s fifth studio album was Hounds of Love which is considered by many music critics to be her best album, and it’s regularly voted one of the greatest albums of all time. “They just thought it was too much.” One comment was that Bush was the high priestess of too much. The singer, Johnny Rotten, said in a 2014 BBC documentary about the song that a lot of his friends at the time “couldn’t bear Bush’s high-pitched, passionate warbling on Wuthering Heights and other early songs. She also pioneered the use of the Fairlight synthesizer, and produced her own albums.Īdmittedly, “Wuthering Heights,” was possibly the strangest hit single in history. Bush was the first artist to use a headset microphone onstage, something that Madonna would later adopt. Her contributions weren’t all defined by musical notes.

#Hounds of love studio album by kate bush mac

She was important enough in her own right to have turned down an offer to support Fleetwood Mac on their huge 1978 US Rumours tour. If you’re not familiar with Kate Bush, plenty of others are: Prince, Peter Gabriel, and Elton John all collaborated on songs with her, and she inspired younger talent including Tori Amos, Björk, Joanna Newsom, St.

Bush also became the first female artist to have eight albums on the charts simultaneously in the UK. It also hit #1 in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Italy, and was a smash right across the world except in the US where we were grooving to music coming out of the movie, Saturday Night Fever.

Written by Kate when she was eighteen, the single flew to the Number One spot in 1978 and stayed there for four weeks. However else you feel about the song, “Wuthering Heights,” it made its singer/songwriter, Kate Bush, the first female solo artist to top the UK charts with a self-composed song. If you’re not expecting it, her voice can be a bit of a shock (scroll down to the video):