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A couple weeks ago, Kate Bush was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Podcast promoting her new short film, Little Shrew, set to her 2011 song “Snowflake” and featuring a shrew refugee trying to get out of a demolished city. On the episode, the hosts asked Bush if she was working on new music right now to which she replied, “Not at the moment, but I’ve been caught up doing a lot of archive work over the last few years, redesigning our website, putting a lyric book together […] I’m very keen to start working on a new album when I’ve got this finished. I’ve got lots of ideas, and I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space. It’s been a long time.”

Naturally, when the episode dropped, coverage of her response began popping up all over, and I sent these partially factually incorrect but nonetheless real messages to everyone I knew who would be interested:

I started listening to Bush’s music in 2008. I was on a short road trip to Orlando to see the Silver Jews play on their final tour with my cousin, one of the only family members I truly connect with on an artistic and spiritual level. We were taking turns back and forth plugging our iPods into the AUX and flipping CDs in and out of the player when he threw on Bush’s album The Dreaming and asked me if I’d ever heard of her. I had from her most well-known songs “Wuthering Heights” and “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” but hadn’t yet plumbed the depths of her discography. The Dreaming, like all of Bush’s music really, was unlike anything I’d ever heard. It’s an experimental, densely layered, slightly brooding composition featuring a mix of digital and analog recording techniques that, to this day, strike places in my mind no other artist has since. By the time the slightly more conventional fourth track “Suspended in Gaffa” hit, I knew I was going to be obsessed with her for the rest of my life.

In the years that followed, I found out quickly I was one in a huge number of queer people who were instantly and magnetically attracted to Bush’s music. I’ve seen her called a “queer icon” more times than I count in these almost 20 years of listening to her music, and it’s obvious why she’s been given that title. Her songs are often weird and abstract, theatrical and operatic in both their lyrical and compositional approaches. She’s accessible, but she’s not too accessible, not like the more mainstream bubblegum pop stars who also sometimes get labeled as “LGBTQ+ icons.” She takes a lot of risks and seems much less concerned with pleasing the mainstream than she does with putting out tracks that move her and showcase her compositional knowledge and her unique and eccentric sense of musical style. In a 2006 piece in The Guardian, Rufus Wainwright summed up what I’m getting at rather succinctly: “She connects so well with a gay audience because she is so removed from the real world. She is one of the only artists who makes it appear better to be on the outside than on the inside.” Her status as an “outsider” who’s completely disinterested in being an “insider” has always felt reflective of my experience of being a queer and trans person in this world I’m forced to inhabit.

I talk about Bush and her contributions a lot with friends, but when news of her potentially heading back into the studio dropped, I immediately started thinking about a list of songs that make that reflection feel the most pronounced and most vivid. Bush isn’t the only artist whose work profoundly moves me, but she is extraordinary in her ability to balance the terrors and joys of being alive, being in love, being in pain, and/or being desperate to see the face of g-d. These songs are the most emblematic of that, and, of course, they also go so hard for so many reasons.

(Disclaimer: I’m not ranking the songs on this list. Instead, I’m listing them chronologically according to the release date of the albums that included them.)

“Oh To Be In Love,” “L’Amour Looks Something Like You,” and “Them Heavy People” from The Kick Inside (1978)

Every time I listen to anything off The Kick Inside, I’m struck by the fact that Bush was only 19-years-old when this album was released. What’s even more shocking is that she was 16 when she started writing and composing this album in the first place. Very few people in the world had the wherewithal to achieve what Bush did on this album in their late teens, but that’s not really what we’re here to talk about.

“Wuthering Heights” is the biggest track of The Kick Inside, but this three-song run of “Oh To Be In Love,” “L’Amour Looks Something Like You,” and “Them Heavy People” that happens toward the end of the album makes me feel truly unstoppable. Each of the songs showcase Bush’s signature mode — somewhat playful piano-driven compositions with her expressive soprano hanging just over them — in a completely different way. “Oh To Be In Love” and “L’Amour Looks Something Like You” both explore the challenges of love and desire. “Oh To Be In Love” describes the beauty and difficulty of being stuck on someone you can’t shake while the more overtly sexual “L’Amour Looks Something Like You” asserts how the exhilaration of sex can take us close to love in certain circumstances. “Them Heavy People” might seem like the outlier here, but it, too, is about how powerful desire is, only this time it’s about the desire to keep growing and changing regardless of fear or anxiety.

“Symphony in Blue” from Lionheart (1978)

Lionheart is the only album I’ve ever seen Bush talk about negatively. The success of The Kick Inside led her management to send her back into the recording studio almost immediately, and the result of that pressure is Lionheart. She has expressed in a number of interviews and videos that the album was rushed and that she “isn’t really happy with it.” I can respect that, and, certainly, Lionheart is one of the lesser discussed albums in her discography. But it did produce “Symphony in Blue,” a classical music inspired track that is undoubtedly one of the greatest Bush compositions in her repertoire.

Combining a nod toward the composition of 19th century French composer Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, lightly syncopated jazz rhythms, and pop-influenced electric guitar, “Symphony in Blue” explores Bush’s inner-world splitting the song between the moods and emotions associated with two colors, “blue” and “red.” The song reveals a push and pull between introspection and the ache and delight of existing more in the physical realm. I also love the sense of humor in her simplistic and true rumination on sex in the song: “The more I think about sex, the better it gets / Here we have a purpose in life / Good for the blood circulation / Good for releasing the tension.”

“All We Ever Look For” from Never For Ever (1980)

Never For Ever marked an incredible metamorphosis in Bush’s creative output. Shortly before she began recording the album, she was introduced to the Fairlight CMI synthesizer that would quickly become an essential part of her songwriting from then on out. Never For Ever isn’t as heavy on the use of the Fairlight as later albums, especially, The Dreaming are, but “All We Ever Look For” is heavy on the use of that revolutionary piece of equipment. Relegating her use of the piano to the background of this track, we hear the crystalline sounds of the synth come through most prominently along with a Fairlight-generated whistle track that accompanies the composition of the song.

“All We Ever Look For” is strange in its constant hits on the downbeats of the track, but it’s also one of the most lyrically complex songs from Bush’s earlier albums. Very simply, the track is about older generations living vicariously through the lives of the generations younger than them and how young people deal with that pressure alongside the opportunity to do something completely different from their elders. It’s so fun to listen to, but it’s also hitting on an aspect of our lives we all contend with yet rarely discuss.

“Sat In Your Lap” and “Suspended in Gaffa” from The Dreaming (1982)

I don’t have a favorite Bush album because most of them are beautiful and perfect to me but if someone had a gun to my head, I’d choose The Dreaming. It’s not the most moving or flawless of her releases, but it is the most daring and unorthodox of all her works. The Dreaming represents an all-out rebellion against being pigeonholed and slotted into pop stardom by Bush and her gang of producer conspiracists. In my opinion, it’s one of the most punk rock albums ever written, which only gives it more gravitas in my mind.

The album begins with “Sat In Your Lap” which arrives in the heat of rapturous, thumping drums and a small orchestra of synth and piano sounds. Its composition is frantic and frenetic, a direct reflection of Bush’s struggle to write the tracks that became The Dreaming in the first place. The lyrics address the psychological impacts of feeling intellectually burned out with some of Bush’s characteristic whimsy: “I’ve been doing it for years / My goal is moving near / Says ‘Look, I’m over here’ / Then it up and disappears.”

“Suspended in Gaffa” similarly puts piano and percussion in the forefront together with an uptempo buoyancy that makes the track feel almost hypnotic. Bush’s vocals stress certain syllables of the words throughout to connect the composition with the spiritual conundrum the speaker is having in the lyrics. The cinematic lyrics describe the feeling of wanting something desperately but not being able to reach it without putting in the work it takes to get it. There’s a raised-in-Catholic-household angst permeating the song that feels especially cathartic for me.

“Hounds of Love” from Hounds of Love (1985)

Aside from The Kick Inside, Hounds of Love is Bush’s most successful commercial album to date. It features most people’s favorite Bush song — thanks in no small part to its TikTokification after being featured in Stranger Things in 2022 — “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).” And don’t get me wrong, that is one of the most perfect songs ever written and shows most succinctly Bush’s eventual mastery of the Fairlight CMI. But “Hounds of Love,” with its booming, resonant percussion and plaintive synth, will always be my absolute favorite. It’s one of Bush’s songs that accidentally perfectly describes the feeling of coming out as queer and accepting yourself for who you are. Of course, the normal interpretation is about the speaker being hunted down by love and eventually giving into it. But when I first heard it, I immediately recognized the fear and fulfillment that accompanies accepting who you are.

“Love and Anger” from The Sensual World (1989)

The Sensual World is one of Bush’s most underrated albums. “This Woman’s Work,” the last track on the album, gets a significant amount of attention, but people seem to forget other tracks exist there. I’m going to keep this one short because even though Bush has always felt the meaning of “Love and Anger” is a little “elusive,” it has always seemed to be expressing the difficulty of being a private person trying to vocalize your deepest, most intimate feelings for another person. And listen, Kate, I fuckin’ get it.

“Rubberband Girl,” “Constellation of the Heart,” and “Why Should I Love You?” from The Red Shoes (1993)

The Red Shoes also feels wildly underrated. I would argue it’s probably Bush’s most accessible album and contains some of the most personal tracks she’s ever written. The compositions are as experimental, wistful, and emotive as ever but they also loom so large it feels as if they’re consuming you as you listen. I love “Rubberband Girl” because it’s the closest Bush has ever come to a true pop song that was representative of what was on the airwaves at the time it was written. At the same time, it fools you entirely — technically, the song breaks all of the conventions of what makes pop so digestible. And although the delivery is especially silly and whimsical, the lyrics are pretty straight-forward in expressing the speaker’s desire to be resilient against all odds.

Whenever I listen to “Constellation of the Heart,” I’m baffled by how it wasn’t chosen as one of the singles from this album. I guess, though, despite its twangy, plucky electric guitars and uptempo drumbeat, it is fairly high-concept in its lyrics. In “Constellation,” Bush’s speaker discusses moving away from old creative pursuits in order to explore new ones but you’d have to be familiar with Bush’s discography to fully grasp the message: “We take all the telescopes / And we turn them inside out / And we point them away from the big sky / Put your eye right up to the glass, now / And here we’ll find the constellation of the heart.”

“Why Should I Love You?” is just one of those songs that feels like a sonic hug. I love how the church organ setting on the synth sets the tone for a track that eventually blasts into stratospheric, electric celebration on the chorus. And man, it’s just so funny in its approach to discussing what it’s like to be in love with someone. On it, Bush’s speaker asks her lover exuberantly, “Of all the people in the world / Why should I love you?” It really is like that sometimes.

“Joanni” from Aerial (2005)

Aerial is a little dryer in terms of songs that make sense thematically for this list. That being said, the album does have a song about Joan of Arc called “Joanni” that feels pretty ethereal despite also feeling a little too close to the adult contemporary electronic music that ruled late night radio during the late 1990s and early 2000s. “Joanni” is an ode to Joan’s strength and perseverance and it’s particularly interesting that it’s a song by a “queer icon” about a “queer icon.” Whenever I listen to it, I wonder if Bush felt a special connection to Saint Joan like I did when I was growing up in Catholicism. It certainly seems like it from this small, luxuriant tribute. It’s a good reminder of the power of archetypes in our lives — how they can help us harness our power and march courageously into whatever life has in store for us.

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