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Post by Lori on Jul 31, 2003 22:51:28 GMT
"It's in the trees! It's coming!"
When I was a child Running in the night Afraid of what might be
Hiding in the dark Hiding in the street And of what was following me...
Now hounds of love are hunting I've always been a coward And I don't know what's good for me
Here I go! It's coming for me through the trees Help me, someone! Help me, please!
Take my shoes off And throw them in the lake And I'll be Two steps on the water
I found a fox Caught by dogs He let me take him in my hands
His little heart It beats so fast And I'm ashamed of running away
From nothing real I just can't deal with this But I'm still afraid to be there
Among your hounds of love And feel your arms surround me I've always been a coward And never know what's good for me
Oh, here I go! Don't let me go! Hold me down! It's coming for me through the trees Help me, darling Help me, please!
Take my shoes off And throw them in the lake And I'll be Two steps on the water
I don't know what's good for me I don't know what's good for me I need your love love love love love, yeah! Your love!
Take your shoes off And throw them in the lake!
Do you know what I really need? Do you know what I really need? L-l-l-l-love, yeah!
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Post by Lori on Feb 13, 2005 16:46:24 GMT
What's Kate running away from? What's so scary? I think I've just started looking into it recently since Futureheads have been playing a fair bit on the radio.
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Post by Neo Stella on Feb 13, 2005 20:01:43 GMT
LOVE Pure and simple.
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Post by Lori on Feb 13, 2005 22:38:42 GMT
Well that's what I thought, but the random lyrics are throwing me off track. "Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake"? Is that to try and stop her from running And the section about her being ashamed of running away from the hurt fox
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Post by Adey on Feb 14, 2005 21:51:48 GMT
I'm in agreement with Neo & Lori - it's love that she is running from. The big question is whether or not this autobiographical.
All the rest of it, shoes in the lake, etc doesn't mean much to me at all, but I'm guessing that she herself is the fox caught by dogs..
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Post by Al Truest on Feb 14, 2005 22:33:25 GMT
Soon, today maybe, this metaphor may become less viable with the (legal) end of sporting with hounds.
Anyway, It seems to me that taking her shoes off represents freeing herself of inhibitions. And being two steps on the water represents an allegory for moving on without fear i.e. the hounds (the scary part of love) and the water (which hounds don't frequent) In other words both parties putting their fears aside while realizing that giving is key - knowing that the fear is unwarranted and that the beating heart of surrender is the best of what love offers.
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Post by Adey on Mar 18, 2005 13:55:30 GMT
I am rewriting here a fascinating article in the Q Magazine series of 5 star album sleevenotes. I found this article/interview to be so informative and so insightfull, that it has coloured much of my understanding of Kate as an artist at the time of Hounds of Love. I hope you enjoy it too, if you haven't already seen it..
"The Dreaming was my 'She's gone mad' album, my 'she's not commercial anymore' album says Kate Bush, amused in retrospect, thinking about her predicament when, after a 3 year silence, she released Hounds of Love. It's predecessor had been the first serious setback in a chart career that began when her debut single, Wuthering Heights, hit number 1 for a month in 1978. When the spell broke - The Dreaming single an aplogetic 48, the album a sorry silver after the parade of platinum - previously paternal EMI executives were moved to make indelicate enquiries about what, for instance, Rolf Harris & Percy Edwards were doing on a record intended for the mainstream youth market.
It was hard to take. The Dreaming was the first album Kate had produced herself. "I wanted to take control of everything and go for it," she recalls. But the charts and the business said she'd failed. So she retreated into normality. For 6 months she saw friends, went to the pictures and dance classes and learned to drive (she bought a modest VW Polo).
Then in June 1983, work began on a 48 track studio in an old barn located handily for her parent's home in the Kentish suburbs of London, and for the house she shared with boyfriend Del Palmer, her boyfriend since the pub rock days of the K.T.Bush band. It wasn't quite state of the art because she couldn't afford it. But if one chart misfire could provoke EMI to turn the recording budget on her like heavy artillery, she had to move out of range. "The way I work is very experimental" she says, "and when you know the studio is costing a phenomenal amount of money every hour, it just zaps creativity."
It was a matter of power and arithmetic. Abbey Road then cost £90.00 an hour, Kate's studio nothing. She'd taken her music making out of the music industry and back to the fond embrace of the family where it all began. After some preliminary doodling at Abbey Road, as soon as her studio was ready she began work on Hounds of Love in January 1984.
In the windowless room she'd designed, communicating with Del at the desk through the mic and headphones, she settled into a looser variant of the rhythm based writing method she'd developed on The Dreaming (inspired by sessions on Peter Gabriels's Games Without Frontiers) and contined with what she calls the "very male" production style she wanted then - weight and strength to justify herself in the man's world of the studio.
But progress was slower than ever. "In music," she says "you have to break your back before you even start to speak the emotion." On lead vocals, where most singers strive for one good 'take', she routinely assembled 6 to choose from. She would often create arrangements on the Fairlight and then replace the synthesised lines with natural instruments: hence the "real" strings on Hounds of Love & Clodbusting and a kit snare drum on Running Up That Hill, although the rest of the rhythm track comes from Del Palmer's programming. Even the muted sounds of waves between And Dream of Sheep & Under Ice had to be re-recorded because the effects disks available didn't provide "the right kind of sea".
And the words came harder than ever, she says. As usual, many of her starting points were in books and films - Cloudbusting from Peter Reich's book about his inventor Father Wilhelm, Hounds of Love from a 1957 horror movie called Night of the Demon, and the whole of the Ninth Wave from both memories of war films like The Cruel Sea and keeping company for years with a macabre painting called The Hogsmill Ophelia (it shows a doll drowning in sewage; "It cost me all the money I had once", she says).
For more than a year, sightings of Kate were rarer than Ospreys, and when she did emerge it was to find the chubby cheeks and double chin she acquired during studio immersion (through lack of excercise and too much chocolate) translated by the tabloids into "Kate blows up to 18 stone" rumours.
"Between albums I always get fat in the papers," she says. "It's quite funny, me as this balloon. And then by the time I start doing the interviews I've lost all that weight again, it seems. It must go into the music."
Hounds of Love was completed in June 1985, which meant the resumption of negotiations with the outside world. She won an argument with EMI about which track should be the first single - they wanted Cloudbusting - then lost one about it's title. "For me, Running Up That Hill really is A Deal With God, but I was told that radio stations in Spain, Italy, America and so on would refuse to play it with God in the title. Ridiculous. Still, especially after The Dreaming, I decided I couldn't be bloody minded."
.. to be updated with the second part in the next day or two..
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Post by Al Truest on Mar 18, 2005 22:13:01 GMT
I too find this informative and revealing. Kate is a rare artist. One that can balance the art and the business and remain patient amongst the angst and anxiety. A visionary genius she is. The sum of her talents may be her hallmark.
Thanks for sharing this Adey.
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Post by saloldgal on Mar 18, 2005 22:19:49 GMT
Thanks for posting the Q article above. I'm sure it must have taken a while to transcribe - especially if you type as poorly as I do! I agree with you; it is a fascinating look at how Kate works. I am looking forward to reading the rest, whenever you have the time to spend posting it.
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Scott
Reaching Out
Get out of my house
Posts: 266
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Post by Scott on Mar 18, 2005 23:46:36 GMT
Sal, Please tell us you have heard of cutting and pasting!!! By the way, have you been out to Anna Maria lately? What a beach.
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Post by saloldgal on Mar 18, 2005 23:55:51 GMT
"Hounds of Love" was the first Kate CD I bought, and I instantly loved the "Hounds of Love" track.
Like previous posters have said, I think that the "hounds" that she is running from represent love (or really the attendant commitment, vulnerability, and so on). She alludes to a history of seeing threats where there were none (as when she was a child), so perhaps this isn't the first time she has been down this road.
As for the part about taking her shoes off, throwing them in the lake, and being two steps on the water, I think this represents the lengths she goes to trying to avoid/resist love. Just as someone pursued by bloodhounds might try not to leave a scent trail by removing their shoes (throwing them into the water, where the hounds won't find them) and wading along a riverbank, she is doing all the things people typically do when spooked by the realization that they are falling in love. In particular, people spooked by love tend to "turn off", withdrawing to the point that they become almost unrecognizable to the (perplexed) object of their affection... much like a prison escapee wades through water to avoid leaving a recognizable scent behind.
What I don't understand is how the lines near the end that start with "So take your shoes off..." figure in.
Regarding the part about the fox, I don't thing that she is saying that she ran away from the fox and is ashamed of doing so. I think she is saying that her enounter with the terrified fox (presumably about to be torn to bits by hounds) makes her feel ashamed that she is afraid of and running away from love. I think that the shame she feels comes from a sudden realization that she has totally lost perspective and perhaps become a little self-absorbed, turning a basically positive situation into an all-consuming crisis. That fox might represent a homeless person, a cancer patient, or some story on the evening news. Whatever it is, for her it is a wake-up call -- a reminder of what real suffering is and how great the distance actually is between her and those experiencing it. She is falling in love, and that is a GOOD thing!
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Post by saloldgal on Mar 19, 2005 0:25:03 GMT
Sal, Please tell us you have heard of cutting and pasting!!! By the way, have you been out to Anna Maria lately? What a beach. I know quite a bit about it - do it all the time myself! For some reason I had the impression that he had typed it in from an old magazine - but maybe he didn't. In that case, I can stop worrying about the backache he might be getting while hunched over his keyboard, tapping away into the night... Haven't been over there since last spring, but we'll probably be going again soon. The perfect time is AFTER the winter residents leave but BEFORE it gets too hot. However, that is a pretty small window of time, so we will have to move fast!
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Post by Adey on Mar 19, 2005 11:09:32 GMT
For some reason I had the impression that he had typed it in from an old magazine - but maybe he didn't. In that case, I can stop worrying about the backache he might be getting while hunched over his keyboard, tapping away into the night... Don't stop worrying..
That's precisely how I had to do it - couldn't find the same article on the web anywhere to cut & paste from.
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Post by saloldgal on Mar 20, 2005 19:19:06 GMT
Don't stop worrying..
That's precisely how I had to do it - couldn't find the same article on the web anywhere to cut & paste from. Adey, it looks like you have already posted most of that article, but I was able to find a single copy of it online by Googling for the sentence "It was a matter of power and arithmetic." Predictably, the single hit returned pointed to gaffa.org, which is a great resource in general and, in particular, has copies of many interviews with / articles about Kate (see gaffa.org/reaching/ro_int.html). I do a lot of research on the Web as part of my job. I have found that, when I have the hardcopy of an article, the best way to locate it on the web is to search for a unique phrase or sentence from the body of the article. Then you can be pretty certain that any hits returned are exactly what you want. The problem with searching on key words (e.g. sleevenotes "Q magazine" "Hounds of Love") is that, typically, you end up with a few hits, none of which are what you need, or you end up with tons of hits and no assurance that slogging through them will pay off. Even searching for the title (when an exact title is available) doesn't work as well because the hits returned include every page that makes reference to the article rather than only those pages that reproduce it. Anyway, to complete what is already posted above, I am pasting the balance of the article below. It is posted at gaffa.org/reaching/i85_q1.html"In August, Running Up That Hill went to number 3, her first British Top 10 hit since Babooshka, five years earlier. For the album launch at the London Planetarium on September 5, she and Del decided to "come out" by appearing in Public together for the first time. Subsequent tabloid "wickedness", as Kate ingenously calls it, in fabricating a row between Del and Youth, who'd played bass on The Big Sky, hardly mattered when the album was ecstatically reviewed-even the dauntingly unfashionable "concept" aspect of The Ninth Wave-and went straight to number 1 where it stayed for a month. Though "career" is not a notion Kate Bush readily relates to, hers had undoubtedly turned around. Hounds Of Love and Cloudbusting (with the stunning Donald Sutherland video) were also substantial single hits and the album reached Number 30 in America, still her highest placing there. Even so, she expressed herself surprised by some reactions to her work, "controversial" interpretations which, she always said, never occurred to her when she was writing the songs. For instance, some were keen to see drugs references in Under Ice where she sings of "speeding" and "cutting little lines". Kate insisted the image was simply about skating. Then there were the hounds on the cover, draped about a smoochy-eyed Kate with suggestive languor. No, no, it was just a matter of getting them to lay calm and still for the shot, she said. "It worries me if there is any kind of sexual connotation. My God! Should I be careful? The thing is I can't see myself sexually I just see me being silly. " Naive or not, she preserved her mystery. Hounds Of Love is essence of Kate Bush, the unbridled expression of someone who had achieved the creative privacy she needed-incommunicado without forgetting how to communicate. "I've made some of my best decisions in the last two years, " she said that autumn, thinking of the studio in particular. "I have to go back to the work because that's what matters. Work obsesses my life and everyone around me is dragged into it. It's terrible, really. " Only, somehow, it's not. --Phil Sutcliffe Q Magazine "
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Post by Adey on Mar 21, 2005 11:13:43 GMT
Thank you Saloldgal! Yoy saved me a job I was just about to get into. I should have guessed that Gaffaweb had Sutcliffe's excellent article somewhere.. Thanks for the search tips, always appreciated.
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