Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights (1978)
This is the second post I’ve focused on Kate Bush (the first, Tiny Moments, Part Two, could have been featured under this theme as well). I’m starting to think the parade may not stop here.
This song is based on Emily Brontë‘s classic 1847 novel of the same title, though Kate Bush has intimated that it was actually the 1939 Hollywood film adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon that captured her imagination. No matter, ’tis what ’tis.
I’m only going to go so deep here and cut right to the chase on her artful musical treatment of the subject. If you really want an in-depth analysis of this bit of brilliance and the whole of its literary and inspirational backdrop, check out British pianist and scholar Nicky Losseff‘s 15-page dissertation on the subject, originally published in Popular Music in 1999. It’s equally brilliant, and I’m not going to re-invent her wheel.
Kate’s song lyric concerns Catherine Earnshaw. Note that her use of ‘Cathy’ shouldn’t confuse the listener in thinking of Cathy Linton, daughter of Catherine and Edgar Linton; it’s mom she’s singing about. ‘Cathy’ clearly makes for a much more musical setting. The focus scene is from early in the book when the Manor’s guest, tenant Mr. Lockwood, is caused unquiet slumber (winky-wink) by Catherine’s ghost.
There are two worlds in the song, the supernatural and the mundane. Like a Wagner opera assigning leitmotifs to characters, Kate assigns A-major to one world and Db-major to the other. The first is shifting and unpredictable, the second familiar and concrete.
As music geeks might note, A and Db are almost as far as you can get from each other in the tonal spectrum (called the “circle of fifths” if you want to impress your friends, family and colleagues). What better tonal dichotomy to set these two literary worlds apart?
One key is assigned to the verse, the other to the chorus. The song’s two verses are about struggle: the first recounts their struggle in the past, the second Catherine’s struggle in the netherworld (“the other side from you”). The melody here is up and down like a toilet seat, and the chords shift grotesquely from the first A-major in each of the first four bars (Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, gives an amusing account of her first experience hearing Wuthering Heights in the BBC‘s documentary The Kate Bush Story, referring to the verses in “the key of Q”). The world of the past and of the macabre reflect the lyric in the chord progression.
The lead-in to the chorus sets up the modulation to Db; the first half of the chorus sits on the dominant Ab before finally asserting the new key on the word “home”. It’s the first and only tonal stability the song will ever enjoy, and a resolution that could only have existed in the song itself.
In the novel, the reader doesn’t know at that point that it’s Heathcliff, and not Lockwood, that Catherine’s ghost is after when she appears in the window. Only in the song, too, is the narrative told from Catherine’s PoV; Kate Bush elected to tell the story that way exclusively in her lyric.
Mind you: this song was Kate’s stepping-out, the lead single from her debut album. The co-signatories to her very first record deal, EMI, wanted to lead with the crunch-guitar rocker James and the Cold Gun. She refused, and insisted that Wuthering Heights be her first foot forward. She was nineteen. Can you imagine what would have happened if she’d caved under the brutal boot of the Duke?
One of two things, methinks: either I’d have posted James under the Not As Advertised series, or… I wouldn’t have posted any Kate Bush songs at all.
