It’s so singular and self-contained in its two minutes and 10 seconds, it’s no wonder she released it as a b-side, as it might throw most any album off-course. “Under The Ivy” is just a handful of piano chords and Bush’s raw voice, with a touch of electronic processing, the singer first beckoning, then imploring a listener to burrow into a secret place, conjuring intimacy, invention, self-discovery and sex with a slightly frightening intensity.
The crown jewel here might be “Under The Ivy,” which Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell calls her “meta-song” in his introduction to her 2018 lyric compendium How To Be Invisible. That’s never an issue with the originals. How True Is 'Respect'? Fact-Checking the Aretha Franklin Biopic As with most of her covers of classics, Bush charts a course between respecting the original and being Kate Bush, a fascinating dance that can feel restrained by politesse.įlashback: Tina Turner Covers Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson on Debut Solo Album The Billie Holiday vehicle “The Man I Love” gets a less-radical transformation, with production/arrangement by George Martin in the style of Lady Day’s 1939 Vocalion recording, complete with muted trumpet.
Uilleann pipes also color an oddly perky, pitched-up cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” alternately sung and whispered, with dubby synths billowing in the background and a choir of backing vocals. Take the reading of “Rocket Man,” written by another soulmate, Elton John, arranged with fiddle and uilleann pipes into loping Celtic reggae (something to do, perhaps, with the “high as a kite” line?) His Marilyn Monroe tribute “Candle In The Wind,” meanwhile, gets swirled into ambient synth-pop, Bush veering midsong, it seems, from fangirl into Monroe herself, as she chirps the word “superstar” - a state Bush knew plenty about herself when she tracked this in ’91, years before the song was reimagined as a tribute to another British icon.
This set finally bundles the evidence: 34 tracks, including some of the avant-pop auteur’s most gorgeous, extravagant, intimate, and bonkers material - b-sides, remixes, and an album’s-worth of stray, often strange covers. Like her American soulmate and former collaborator Prince, Kate Bush generated cartloads of top-flight recordings during her hypercreative peak years that, for whatever reasons, didn’t make it onto albums.