Kate Bush, Blow Away (1980)
For a prog junkie who loves ambitious, outsize forms (all bands have their moments, my faves had their quarter-hours), It’s a personal paradox that some of my favourite musical touchstones last five seconds or less. Some of these eighth-notes have unlocked my love for an artist’s entire oeuvre.
Here’s one: Blow Away from Kate Bush’s Never Forever. It’s a gentle memorial to a stage technician, a musician himself, who was tragically killed in a work-related accident on her only-ever tour just a year earlier.
The lyric asks, when a person dies,
So where does it go?
Surely not with his soul
Do all of his licks and his R&B blow away?
The responsive piano arpeggio heard in each verse (0:27, 2:06 and 2:19) is a leitmotif – a ‘lick’ – a subtle bit of word-tone painting that haunts the song conspicuously. The melodic style of it is squarely hers, but the thematic device isn’t – she didn’t do a lot of Wagner in her songs. Certainly, she was calling out to something.
The cry moment happens at the end of the song. Following the second iteration of the brief, functional ‘chorus’
Please don’t thump me,
Don’t bump me,
I want to stay… here…
The music slows and pauses. Then in a gut-wrenching envoie (at 3:11), Kate embellishes the leitmotif with an irregular 2+2+2+3 rhythm in the piano and doubles it in perfect unison with her pure, textless voice. It’s formless, soaring, and just so desperately human.
Bill’s ‘lick’ has blown away and Kate wants to go with it.
It’s an absolutely breathtaking musical gesture from an artist who breathed them (I find it tough to even write about this one without welling up).
Kate Bush had already earned her starhood for many defensible reasons, but here, in three short seconds, she became a musical giant.
