


Jenny Hval: I saw the video for “Cloudbusting” on TV as a child, and I remember crying almost every time it came on. The strings provide a lush yet urgent backdrop as Bush unabashedly takes the voice of the vulnerable child hurtling through a traumatic loss. Moreover, she does it with fearlessly artful execution. In “Cloudbusting,” Bush both celebrates and laments the dangerous imagination, in sound and vision. It’s such an arresting story, partly because it’s based on our deceptively quiet (though nonetheless terrifying) reality: People are mostly guided by fear. In honor of the iconoclastic LP, which turns 30 this week, on September 16, SPIN surveyed a handful of artists - including Jenny Hval, Hop Along, the Dismemberment Plan’s Travis Morrison, Wild Beasts, Angel Deradoorian, Tacocat, and Röyksopp - about some of their favorite songs on Hounds of Love.įrances Quinlan, Hop Along: I’ve only just seen the video, in which Kate Bush plays the song’s central figure: a young Peter Reich as he helplessly witnesses the abduction of his father Wilhelm (played by Donald Sutherland) by the government. Though Bush continues to remain a public enigma (she rarely tours or speaks to the press), her impact - and that of Hounds, specifically - still resonates a generation later. The record’s flip side, meanwhile, unleashed Bush’s edgier sonic interests: There are spoken-word segments and Irish jigs (“Jig of Life”), metal-lite growls (“Waking the Witch”), and haunting Georgian chorale (“Hello Earth”). The 12-track LP runs a sometimes accessible yet undeniably bizarre spectrum, with its first six songs showcasing epic, radio-ready moments like the pleading “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” (Bush’s biggest chart success in the U.S.) and the string-accented title track, which was one of the album’s three U.K. singer-songwriter notice via her 1978 breakthrough single “Wuthering Heights” and acclaimed 1982 album The Kick Inside, but coalesced most exquisitely and her outstanding fifth full-length, 1985’s Hounds of Love. With her famously elusive nature, propensity for literary lyrics, enchanting - often unearthly - vocals, and overall air of theatricality, Kate Bush pushed the boundaries of ’80s pop music, influencing countless would-be contemporaries (Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Marina and the Diamonds). Those qualities initially won the U.K.
