Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1985…
#8 – Hounds of Love – Kate Bush
English singer-songwriter Kate Bush’s fifth studio release, Hounds of Love, was her biggest success and is widely considered her best album. It sits squarely in her avant-garde, art pop comfort zone while remaining accessible to mainstream audiences.
It’s been awhile since I last wrote about a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame class — the class of 2013 in February, to be exact. My plan with the Hall of Fame series is to cover all of the inductee classes back to the first one in 1983.
Before I move on to the class of 2012, however, I need to acknowledge the newest Rock Hall inductees from 2022 and 2023. Over the next three weeks, I’ll feature the most recent 14 artists inducted into the Hall in the Performers category.
Stranger Things is a big deal in my house. Equal parts Stephen King and Steven Spielberg, the hit Netflix series is a winning blend of humor, horror and heart. My daughter Fiona has watched every season multiple times, and has bought enough merch to fund the series’ upcoming final chapter.
Fiona is so rabid about the show that her practice is to binge each new season without interruption starting the moment it drops. So for season three, that meant an 8-hour stretch starting at midnight. And I’ll add that we were on a family cruise vacation at the time. She’s crazy.
When this song popped up as today’s Random Weekend selection, I realized that as much as I love Side One of Kate Bush’s 1985 album Hounds of Love, I’ve never paid much attention to Side Two.
In fact, until I read about today’s SOTD, the album’s final track, I didn’t know that Hounds of Love was conceived as two individual suites: Side One, ‘Hounds of Love,’ contains five songs, while Side Two, ‘The Ninth Wave,’ contains seven. The album’s four hits (‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),’ ‘Cloudbusting,’ ‘Hounds of Love’ and ‘The Big Sky’) all appear on Side One, along with a favorite of mine, ‘Mother Stands For Comfort.’ I guess that explains why I know that half of the album so well.
1993 saw the release of Kate Bush’s seventh studio album, The Red Shoes. This was her follow-up to her two most successful releases, Hounds of Love and The Sensual World, and it joined those albums in reaching Platinum status in the UK.
This would be Bush’s last album for 12 years, a hiatus she spent raising her son.
Meet Me In Montauk 