Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Kate Bush starting from her first recordings

Moving is the first song on "The Kick Inside."  There is no video with the recording so I listen in my studio via the PA system. The recording starts with anguished sounds, a mixture of human and animal voices?. Kate sings very high soprano sounding girlish and a little shrill at times but in lovely tune. The song is a minor key slow English ballad, more conventional in form than Wuthering Heights, with drums, bass, and piano prominent in the arrangement, her voice overdubbed in harmony, but the chord changes become more unconventional and interesting, still making musical sense. A recurring line is "please don't let me go." I hear the familiar leaps in the melody and a haunting, Scheherazade-like chord change enters in the middle and again near the end. I got out my guitar. The song is in D minor. The change I noticed goes from D minor to C to D-flat and A, then back to D minor. That's not identical to the 3 and 1/2 tone descent I call the Scheherezade change  (which would be, for example, A to E-flat)  but it has a similar exotic ambiance that shifts the mood from sad to uplifting and back to sad.

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