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Is music simply an adolescent’s sport? Glance on the streaming charts on any given day, and also you may assume this is axiomatically the case. Many of the largest singer-songwriters round for the time being – Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo – are nonetheless of their early or mid-twenties. Taylor Swift is handled like a seasoned veteran, a determine whose storied profession deserves subdividing into 11 distinct eras, on the grand outdated age of, um… 34. Where does this depart all of the precise veterans?
On Friday, Kate Bush, the elastic-voiced singer-songwriter behind “Wuthering Heights”, revealed that she is plotting a return to music, after greater than a decade away from the highlight. Bush’s final stay performances had been in 2014 (a residency on the Hammersmith Apollo), and her final new document was three years earlier than that (2011’s 50 Words for Snow).
At her peak, Bush was an artist of uncommon brilliance, making rock music that was pensive and prickly and unusual. Hers was a voice that appeared to leap throughout octaves from a standing begin, crystalising right into a singular, iridescent falsetto. There was nobody else like her, and there nonetheless isn’t. So it’s a very good job she’s back: in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Bush mentioned she was pursuing “lots of ideas” for brand new music. “I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space, it’s been a long time,” she famous.
In her hiatus, Bush has nonetheless orbited the zeitgeist, thanks mainly to season 4 of Netflix’s sci-fi sensation Stranger Things, which soundtracked a key scene to her “Running Up That Hill”, propelling the track to No 1 almost 4 a long time after its launch.
This unlikely resurgence launched Bush’s music to a brand new wave of youthful followers who may properly expect extra on this vein when the pioneering English musician lastly phases her comeback. But they’re unlikely to get it. At 66 years outdated, Bush is half a lifetime away from the younger maverick who broke new floor for feminine singer-songwriters within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. The factor is, this solely makes the prospect of extra music all of the extra tantalising.
There is typically a way, with regards to singer-songwriters within the twilight years of their profession, that decline is one thing of an inevitability. In some methods, it is: even lots of the unimpeachable greats – Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell – have fallen prey to it. But when your early work is one thing as seismic as Highway 61 Revisited, or Blue, this is no slight.
Growing older could take away some instruments from a musician’s arsenal – vitality and vocal vary being probably the most common and keenly felt adjustments. But it provides simply as many: expertise, depth, perspective. Many songwriters do a few of their most interesting and most potent compositions within the late phases of their profession.
There’s one thing fantastic about tracks comparable to Randy Newman’s “Wandering Boy”, or Bruce Springsteen’s “Ghosts” – wealthy, poignant songs that these males wouldn’t have written of their youthful heydays, regardless of being nice songwriters. With 2016’s Blackstar, David Bowie launched one in every of his most interesting and most profound data on the very finish of his life; Gil Scott-Heron did comparable with 2010’s I’m New Here. Greatness, this is to say, needn’t diminish with age.
Bush is a very attention-grabbing case, as a result of there has all the time been a divide between the favored understanding of what her music is – languid rock bangers, most prominently the No 1-charting “Wuthering Heights” – and the difficult, experimental actuality. Hounds of Love, the 1985 album from which “Wuthering Heights” is drawn, straddles each worlds. Half of it is a set of infectious radio-ready singles, whereas half is an elaborate and conceptual work weaving seven songs into one piece of music. Her later works continued to iterate and experiment: 50 Words For Snow comprised seven lengthy and complex songs, the longest of which lasts almost 14 minutes.
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It is, due to this fact, inconceivable to actually guess what new music from Bush would sound like – but you may guess it gained’t sound very like the thumping and accessible “Running Up That Hill”. Her subsequent album won’t make its means onto Stranger Things 5, but that’s most likely a very good factor. What issues is that Bush has one thing new to say, and a brand new method to say it. She makes music that no person else can – so how candy it is that she’s not finished but.
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