- Hounds of Love is an album about all types of love and relationships as well as dreams. It has ongoing thematic elements of airplane pilots communicating over their radios, presumably informing each other about an on-coming storm, and a person who's floating alone, out at sea, and is experiencing a series of wild visions as she's about to drown.
- Running Up That Hill(Deal With God) is about the desire to reach full empathetic understanding with your love in order to redeem all previous mistakes and misunderstandings, taking it to the level where one will struggle to break-through the fabric of one's reality in an appeal to God to physically switch bodies and reach full understanding of the other person's point-of-view. If empathetic understanding can't be achieved, then that would mean the ruin of her relationship and her love is too special for her to lose. In the video, they twist their bodies around one another in an attempt to become one; running, flailing, combining, flowing, passing through one another, and moving in unison but never able to fully accomplish their task.
- Hounds of Love is about feeling frightened by love. Love will force you to commit. Love will cause you to get hurt and to hurt others. Love is something you don't feel you deserve and you're too much of a child to possibly allow yourself to feel it. But you still must struggle to stop yourself from running from it as though love is a pack of dogs chasing after you and fall to the ground. Embrace the love that's surrounding you. Find that love only brings love. But to do this, you'll need help from your lover first to remind you of all of this and, no matter the fierceness of the struggle, to not let you go.
- The Big Sky is about being child-like and susceptible to change in such a way that one can not be readily defined and is often misunderstood, even by one's self: like a cloud in the big sky. "This cloud looks like Ireland" is a reference to her Irish roots and how Ireland may be the source of all of her inspiration. "This cloud looks like Noah" means that some people may view her as a prophet of some sort, which isn't true. She's just a person, an ever changing cloud, expressing as she wishes like a child.
- Mother Stands for Comfort is about a broken relationship between a child and one's mother created through lying, manipulation, and misplaced devotion that can only be mended through mutual trust and love.
- Watching You Without Me is about a relationship that has become completely non-communicative and is slowly fading away.
- Jig of Life is about a relationship in which one lover refuses to let go of an ended relationship with the impassioned devotion of a cultist. It also has something to do with "The Land of Water" which is far too cryptic for me to fully decipher, but boy is it impressive!
- Hello Earth is about the final moments of a person's life as they reflect upon the planet earth. Presumably nuclear war has started and the missiles are scattering all over earth, metaphorically represented as storms.
- The Morning Fog is about seeping into death, submitting to drowning, just as the sun rises over the horizon of the ocean, revealing the morning fog. Kate Bush then tells all of those whom she loves just how much she loves them.
- The Dreaming
- Suspended In Gaffa is about paralysis and inability to move beyond one's spiritual, emotional, or intellectual level or situation due to one's personal limitations, the nature of which evades all of her analysis and introspection. At first I think of it as being a sort of silly and off-beat song, but as it builds, I can feel her desperation to move on and I totally connect. In the video, she is a mad sort of child-creature that's locked away in a run down barn that's covered over with dust and constructed from loose planks of wood that only allow glimmers of light to seep in. Every so often, in her desperate attempts to conjure up the energy to excel beyond the walls of the barn, she reaches a moment of enlightenment and purity and she comes to understand her emotional depths, but those moments are ephemeral and she is immediately thrown back into her old situation of desire, wants, and needs.
- The Red Shoes
- Eat the Music is about being torn apart by one's desire to meet the expectations of others, in Kate's case, to meet them musically, and the struggle to maintain composure and an understanding nature, especially for the tender-hearted people in one's life.
- Never Forever
- Breathing is a commentary upon scientific pursuit when it doesn't consider life in an empathetic matter and, unintentionally (since ambition wishes to only feed it's self and doesn't recognize it's ramifications beyond that) denies living beings of their most fundamental right, to breath. It's told from the perspective of a person who's slowly choking on nuclear fall-out. I feel especially connected to it because to breathe is always the first step to recovery for me, and it prevents one from recovering in that step. And it's told with such empathy for the person passing away, how could anybody not be moved?
feb 1 2009 ∞
feb 17 2009 +