Every Document's Indelible: The National

The glory of it all

was lost on me

The National is without a doubt my favourite modern band, but it's a bit of a challenge for me to figure out why. I know my weaknesses. I know the kind of thing I go for, and most often it's the kind of music I do myself. That definitely doesn't describe The National. Perhaps a deep dive will uncover just what's going on here and why I love it so much.  Maybe it won't. But I also wanted to look at the career of someone whose catalog doesn't go back half a century, someone I could plausibly describe as a modern, contemporary artist. A band whose history actually begins in the current millennium.

The band is made up of singer Matt Berninger and two sets of brothers:  drummer Bryan Devendorf and bass player Scott Devendorf, along with guitarists Bryce and Aaron Dessner (who are identical twins.) They all grew up in Cincinnati, think of themselves as mid-westerners, and formed their first bands in their hometown. Berninger and Scott Devendorf were in a band called Nancy, before moving to Brooklyn. Bryan Devendorf and the Dessner twins played in a number of local bands, before finding their own way to New York to hook up with Berninger and Scott Devendorf.

The National emerged as part of what was sometimes called an indie-rock revival - more to the point, they were part of a specifically New York scene. And the leaders, the obvious heroes of that scene were The Strokes. The National very much thought of themselves, then and now, as timid little fellows following in their mighty wake. The Strokes debut album preceded the National's debut by a mere three weeks - but of course the Strokes debut had been released internationally a few months earlier (the release dates were synced up with their tour stops), they had issued The Modern Age EP at the beginning of the year, and had already built themselves a formidable reputation as a live act. The National had never even played a show. They were simply rehearsing a collection of songs.

National songs as regularly described as "growers" - it often seems, on first listen, as if not much is going on. And then something deep and fascinating just seems to somehow emerge from these shadows, haunting and unforgettable. Their career has followed a similar arc. Each album seemed to build on its predecessor, showing more and more of what the band was capable of doing, until reaching its first full flower on High Violet, their fifth album. The three albums since have each looked, in its own way, to expand upon what they had built, while at the same time trying to avoid the trap of simply repeating what they had done before. It's clearly something that worries them, it's probably one of the reasons they seem to go out of their way to work with so many outside musicians. 

For one of the most distinctive things about The National, more than almost any other band I can think of (even more than Radiohead!) is how much each member appears to enjoy collaborating with outside musicians (many of whom end up contributing at times to National projects.) This is partially a reflection of how, after twenty years together, the band members have very much gone their separate ways. Scott Devendorf is the only band member who still lives in the New York City area. He has also been the least active outside of his work with the band, although he did join up with his brother Bryan and trombonist Ben Lanz in a project they called LNZNDRF, which has issued two albums of experimental, improvisational music.

Bryan Devendorf has returned to Cincinnati. He gives chatty, entertaining interviews and pursues a number of other side projects - besides LNZNDRF, he has another experimental band called Pfarmers, as well as something marginally closer to popular music called Royal Green. He's also been a regular contributor to Aaron Dessner's many projects as a producer.

Matt Berninger now lives in Los Angeles, with his wife Carin Besser, a poet and editor who has been contributing lyrics to National songs from the very beginning. Berninger made a record as part of a duo called EL VY with Brent Knopf of Ramona Falls. He has lent his baritone to work with Phoebe Bridgers, Andrew Bird, Joy Williams, Chvrches, Julia Stone. He finally made a solo album with none other than the legendary Booker T. Jones at the helm.

Bryce Dessner lives in Paris - his wife, Pauline de Lassus pursues her own career as a musician under the name Mina Tindle. Naturally, she has lent her voice to National records and performances. He maintains his own career as a classical composer, and has collaborated with an enormous range of artists, from Philip Glass and Steve Reich to Jonny Greenwood and Sufjan Stevens. 

Aaron Dessner is now based in upstate New York, where he has built his own studio. He maintains, along with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, a second band, the Big Red Machine. They've made two albums, with a remarkable group of guest singers working with Vernon and Dessner: Phoebe Bridgers, Lisa Hannigan, Kate Stables, and the Staves all appeared on the first album; Hannigan, Anais Mitchell, Sharon van Etten, the Fleet Foxes, and Taylor Swift performed on the second album (which is really, really great.) Dessner has produced albums by numerous artists, including Gracie Abrams and Sharon van Etten. Most famously, he collaborated with Taylor Swift as co-writer and producer on her two remarkable pandemic albums, folkore and evermore. As Bryan Devendorf said, you may have heard about it.

The pandemic didn't faze them much - as Scott Devendorf explained, "we've been working remotely for a long time." The engines for new material seem to be Bryan Devendorf, generating beats, and Aaron Dessner, generating melodies. They record these ideas and share the files with one another. Berninger fastens on the ones that suggest melodies he can hum. The words will come later. Scott Devendorf and Bryce Dessner do contribute songwriting ideas, but their largest contributions seem to come when the five of them finally assemble together in the same room and work out how to turn all these interesting fragments into actual songs. It's a band without a real leader, so this is a process that involves a lot of talk, a lot of playing, a lot of experimenting, and a lot of arguing until they discover how it all fits together. It's a process that's led to some rather strange and interesting songs.

And I think maybe this is where I come in. Songs are what I like. I've been writing them for most of my life. Songs are what I'm in it for, songs are what I care about. Even before I discovered rock'n'roll this was true. There were two kinds of music around the house when I was a little wee person - my father's jazz and my mother's folk music, mostly traditional Irish folk tunes, rebel songs and drinking songs. Those were what I went for, from the beginning. It was always songs that I wanted, songs that had words, that told stories, that said things. You could learn them, you could sing them too. That's what always appealed to me, far more than a guy blowing his horn.

Folk songs tend to be very simple in structure - most of the time, they're just a succession of verses. Sometimes they have a chorus, sometimes merely a tag line at the end of the verse, sometimes not even that. (This happens to describe every composition of each of Bob Dylan's first six albums.) By the time I began writing songs I had absorbed the far more sophisticated songwriting of Lennon and McCartney, and everything they'd learned from their American models, Goffin and King in particular. Still, I always knew where I was in a piece of music - this is the intro, this the verse, this the chorus, this the middle eight, this is the coda. But it turns out I also like not knowing. 

It's much harder to get a song to hold together without the support of those sturdy structures that are so well-tested - but when it works, it can be magical. Late stage Beatles experimented with this on occasion, in songs as elaborate as "A Day in the Life" or as apparently simple as "Birthday" (never mind "Happiness Is a Warm Gun") but they didn't last long enough as a band to take it much further. Various songwriters have dabbled in these types of song structures - Kate Bush and David Bowie come quickly to mind. But two of the most interesting contemporary artists who are in the same moment performing songs - that is, a discrete musical piece - that make less use of the traditional song structures than usual are Radiohead and The National. While both bands began playing more or less traditional type songs that they had written, as their careers have unfolded the song structures have gotten stranger and stranger. Liam knows much more about Radiohead and how they operate than I do, but I have the impression that their process involves a lot of jamming, with Thom Yorke free associating over top of it, all seasoned by the berserk genius of Jonny Greenwood. The National's process seems to involve assembling a bunch of bits together into some kind of whole, stitching unrelated pieces of cloth into a usable garment. One doesn't always know exactly where one is in one of their songs, except that it's a damn cool place to be.

8. The National (October 2001)

Berninger arrived more or less fully formed, but the band was still finding itself. Not only had they never played a show; they had yet to give up their day jobs. They certainly didn't seem to realize what an awesome resource they had in drummer Bryan Devendorf, with his remarkable capacity to create grooves out of extremely unusual rhythmic figures (he does do double duty as the cover model.) Bryce Dessner wasn't even a member of the band at this point (he appears as a guest.) The song structures are rather conventional, built around Aaron Dessner's acoustic rhythm playing. It's not bad, not at all - it just doesn't sound even a little like what the band would eventually become. Only two songs - "American Mary" and "Theory of the Crows" - even hint at what they would eventually be capable of.

And if I forget you
I'll have nobody left to forget
I guess that's what assholes get

7. Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers (September 2003)

This was a small step forward, but most of it still resembles the debut. It's strange now, but these were the days when the National was regularly described as an Americana band, playing alt-country music, vaguely related to a band like Wilco. There are some interesting developments - "Available" sounds like a song built around one of those early U2 guitar riffs and "Murder Me Rachael" is the first song that sounds like what the National would become. No strumming acoustic guitars there - the track is driven by Devendorf's drumming and the Dessner brothers playing wild, complementary electric guitar parts. 

Forgive me, girls, I am confused
Stiff and pissed and lost and loose

6. Alligator (April 2005)

This was the big step forward, an album regarded by many as the first real National album. It's an outstanding work, but still mostly because of the quality of the material. The band is still not quite as present, as essential to the whole proceeding, as they would eventually be. But they're getting there. From the beginning, The National have had an exquisite understanding of the power that comes from restraint - but restraint is even more powerful when set against its opposite, and this record is the first time they let it loose. It takes a while to get there. We begin with the secret meeting in the basement of Berninger's brain, and tour some of the strange places that always involves - especially good is "Daughters of the Soho Riots," with the inevitable question "how can anybody know how they got to be this way?" Everything comes to a ferocious head on "Abel", as Bryan Devendorf is finally unleashed while Berninger screams, over and over, "my mind's not right." We finish with "Mr November," their first great anthem, a twisted lament for faded glory and the strangest campaign promise ever: "I'm Mr November, I won't fuck us over." And they've arrived.

You were right about the end

It didn't make a difference

5. Sleep Well Beast (September 2017)

This seems an effort to make a few different kinds of noises - lead single "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness" features a furious guitar solo (from Aaron Dessner - Bryce usually does most of the lead guitar work, and it's not usually featured on record), the frenzied "Turtleneck" was almost The National doing punk rock, and the title track starts strange and just gets stranger. It's the work of a band just a little worried about repeating themselves, and trying to make sure they didn't fall into that particular rut (that's right - this record is to them what Monster was to REM.) I think it's a little uneven - not all the experiments are entirely successful - and as often happens, a couple of songs would only find their best selves after being taken on the road for a while (especially "Guilty Party," which is perfectly fine on the record but truly remarkable in concert, where the Dessner twins always tend to be more assertive with their guitars.) 

Let's just get high enough to see our problems
Let's just get high enough to see our fathers' houses

4. Boxer (May 2007)

Their first masterpiece. It's still the material that is the star, but the band's importance to the whole continues to grow. It's where I came in, the first record by them I heard. So my introduction to the band was the remarkable "Fake Empire" built on that peculiar piano pattern (a polyrhythm according to Bryce Dessner who wrote it, four over threes) and Berninger mumbling away, occasionally tossing out a lyric that simply makes you sit up straight - "it's hard keeping track of you falling through the sky." Which is what he does all the time, it turns out. Just one great song after another, but "Slow Show" will always be my favourite. Irresistible.

Looking for somewhere to stand and stay
I leaned on the wall and the wall leaned away
Can I get a minute of not being nervous
And not thinking of my dick?

3. High Violet (May 2010)

I seem to regard this as the true full flowering of the band, as a band. It takes a while to get going - the opening "Terrible Love" wouldn't really emerge as a great song until they took it out on performance for a while - the version here is somewhat tentative. But the record simply catches fire about halfway through, with "Afraid of Everyone" and "Bloodbuzz Ohio" and doesn't let up. "Afraid of Everyone" opens with a wheezing harmonium and Sufjian Steven' sighing harmonies as Berninger confesses his fears and how he hopes not to hurt anyone, but there's a problem - "I don't have the drugs to sort it out." A gnarly guitar lick makes its first appearance, the drums kick in, and he vows to defend his family. But he still doesn't have the drugs to sort it out. And everybody slowly goes nuts - the drums, the guitars, and Berninger howling that something has stolen his soul.  Simply stunning. "Bloodbuzz Ohio" follows, beginning with Bryan Devendorf pounding his drums and one of Berninger's best, and strangest,  stories - it makes no sense at all, and it stays with you. He was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees? Whatever - the real business is "I still owe money to the money to the money I owe." It all concludes with the haunting "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks," which often features as the final encore. The Dessner twins take up stations at opposite ends of the stage strumming acoustics, with all the other musicians standing in between them, singing along. Berninger prowls the centre, off-mic, bawling out the lyrics. It's indescribably weird and completely awesome. Imagine thousands of people singing along with this:

Vanderlyle, cry baby cry
Man, it's all been forgiven
Swans are a' swimming
I'll explain everything to the geeks.

2. Trouble Will Find Me (May 2013)

This takes the template of High Violet and expands on it somewhat. I sometimes think it's slightly uneven - but that's probably just what I think when I'm not actually listening to it. The same way I think it may have too many ballads sharing a similar mood, or that the uptempo songs are not among their best... no, not really. When this music is playing, it draws you in completely. The ballads may sort of share a similar mood - Berninger is always going to be Berninger (the band has positively embraced the Sad Dad tag often hung on them - they actually had t-shirts made.) Still, each track manages to give Berninger a musical setting that sounds unique, each approaches with a musical taste all its own - the electric guitar motifs of "I Need My Girl" and "Fireproof," the piano chords of "Pink Rabbits" and "Heavenfaced." And the uptempo songs are pretty great, too. The opening "I Should Live in Salt" harkens back to the sound of their first two records, with its strummed acoustic guitars, but at a level far beyond what they were capable of back in those early days. And "Don't Swallow the Cap" is one of the greatest songs and recordings they, or anyone else for that matter, has ever made. It's been their show opener of choice ever since. I'm fascinated by the song's structure, and the occasional stunning line that Berninger lets slip along the way ("I need somewhere to be but I can't get around the river in front of me.")  It begins with a quick four bar intro that slips into the main verse melody, and Berninger sings a quick verse. Then we get the first pre-chorus: "Everything I love is on the table / everything I love is out to sea."  Berninger sings another verse and the pre-chorus again, which is extended this time: "I'm not alone, I'll never be / And to the bone I'm evergreen." We then get a completely new melody for a different kind of verse, ending with "I see a bright white beautiful heaven hanging over me" - and finally we get the complete chorus, going from everything he loves through his not being alone to "if you want to see me cry play Let It Be or Nevermind." But it's a song, of course. Not only do we not know if he wants to hear the Beatles or the Replacements; we also don't know if he's suggesting Nirvana as an alternative or telling us not to bother. Ah, ambiguity! They do this second type of verse again, with a full chorus, and conclude with one of their raveups, with Bryce Dessner torturing his guitar. It's so freaking great.

I have only two emotions
Careful fear and dead devotion
I can't get the balance right

1. I Am Easy to Find (May 2019)

Made as a kind of collaboration with the film maker Mike Mills, as a companion to his short film of the same title about a woman's life (Alicia Vikander, no less, played the lead and it's her face on the album cover.) Mills contributed song ideas and lyrics as well as the overall vision, and the project took the band to some brand new places. The most significant, obviously, are the many female voices we hear on this record. Until this record, all National songs - like those of pretty well any typical rock band - had been various types of male monologues. Many of those monologues are addressed to women. On this record, the women not only get to sing along - they get to answer back. David Bowie's longtime bandmate Gail Ann Dorsey is the voice most often heard, but Kate Stables, Lisa Hannigan, Eve Owen (daughter of Clive), and Bryce Dessner's wife Mina Tindle (Pauline de Lessus) also feature prominently. Only the gorgeous final track, "Light Years," is a Berninger solo performance. One of the tracks, "Rylan," had been a concert favourite for years without finding its way on to a record. Here it's a duet with Berninger and Kate Stables that seems to be addressed to someone's troubled child: "Is it easy to keep so quiet? / Everybody loves a quiet child." The remarkable "Where Is Her Head" is mostly a duet with Aaron Dessner and Eve Owen, with Berninger interrupting in the middle to complain that he's hitting the wall. And "Not in Kansas"... I don't even know where to begin with this remarkable track. It's absurdly simple for a National song - a repeated sliding riff from Aaron Dessner's guitar and a long intense, absorbing, stunning, recital from Berninger that is at once a tour through childhood memories, an account of spiritual homelessness, a worried look at America today... all these things, and quite a bit more. Into the middle of it all is interpolated a chorus (sung by Dorsey, Hannigan, and Stables) from "Noble Experiment" by the extremely obscure 90s indie band Thinking Fellers Local Union 282 (never heard of them, either!) and then Berninger resumes his strange confession. The same female chorus concludes the track with the assertion that it's time to call an end to this noble experiment, move on from humanity, and find some new creature to be. 

I raked the leaves and I started fires

Now I read whatever you give me

It's half your fault, so half-forgive me

In the summer of 2022, with the pandemic sort of behind us, the National went back out on the road. They've let it be known that they're working, in their usual unhurried way, on a new album. Several candidate songs have been regular parts of their current live set, along with the tremendous new single, "Weird Goodbyes." The core five have regularly brought in reinforcements on the road - Ben Lanz and Kyle Resnick have been fixtures in their touring lineup for many years, providing additional keyboards, vocals, and the occasional horn part. Whichever of the many, many singers the members have worked with over the years always seem to be happy to show up and help out if they're in the neighbourhood. And of course the very nature of the songs on I Am Easy to Find required augmenting the band with two women for many of the vocal parts - Kate Stables and Mina Tindle usually assumed this duty on the road. They're a truly great live band - the evidence is all over YouTube, folks - and many of their songs only seem to find their best, ultimate form after being worked over, and over again, in front of an audience. 

So I guess I have to go see them, don't I?

The Beatles: The Singles

 Let's face it - there's simply no end to me talking about The Beatles.

Liam wrote about the albums back in 2018 and I had my say, as a form of comment on his work, at the time. But I did reconsider how I would rank the 13 albums today. Having done so, I checked with what I had said back in 2018. 

Nothing had changed. (But there's still a chance that Revolver might move up a place. We'll see.)

So let's do the singles instead. The Beatles released 22 UK singles, and we need to account for one UK EP as well. (Magical Mystery Tour, which was actually a double EP, can be consigned to the album bin.) Fully half of their singles stood completely alone, and would not be issued on an album at all, until being gathered up in some later compilation. Of the others, most functioned as a kind of advance trailer for a subsequent  album on which it would be included. The title tracks for their two films were released as singles at the same time the films and albums were released, in an obvious bit of cross-platform promotion. Just two of their singles were drawn from an album that was already available (and both were issued within the same week as the album it came from.)

23. "Love Me Do" (October 1962)

Sixty years on, it still sounds... different somehow. The song is basic to the point of being crude, just a simple verse repeated as often as necessary, with an equally simple middle section. It's the sound that's different, and I'm neither old enough nor British enough to fathom just how odd it must have sounded coming out of English radios in 1962. That simple plodding beat, that harmonica hook, and especially those strange Northern voices. From the very beginning, there was no one like them. The flip side, "P.S. I Love You," is a pretty standard piece of early 1960s pop, which wears its US influences - especially the Brill Building songwriters - on its sleeve. Both sides would be included on their first album when it was issued six months later in March 1963.

22. "The Ballad of John and Yoko" (May 1969)

Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman on 12 March 1969, and John and Yoko were keen to get married themselves. Making it happen was an adventure - they couldn't get on the cross channel ferry at Southampton, as Yoko wasn't British. So they went to Paris but they hadn't been residents long enough. They finally got married in Gibraltar on 20 March instead. From there, they instantly went to Amsterdam to stage a week long media event, and made a day trip to Vienna before returning to London. John wrote a song about the whole adventure, and being John, wanted to record it that very minute. Ringo was tied up with his film, George was out of the country, and John and Paul were not seeing eye to eye - their business dispute was growing more and more bitter. But what choice did he have? At that moment, none that he could imagine. So he went to Paul's house in London and played it for him. And he and Paul went into the studio and cut the track that same day. The song is quite witty and quite irritating - Lennon takes for granted that the entire world is as deeply invested in his trials as he is himself - and there's no real arrangement. They just bash it out. The chorus got Lennon into some trouble - "Christ you know it ain't easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are going / They're going to crucify me." There were radio stations that refused to play it, although its biggest sin is presumption - come on John, being hassled by the man isn't quite as rough as being nailed to a cross. But it does provide the song's greatest moment, Lennon's utter exasperation after he wearily notes how much the press is enjoying the whole show:

The men from the press say
We wish you success
It's good to have the both of you back
CHRIST!

21. "Yellow Submarine" / "Eleanor Rigby" (August 1966)

Really silly, really great. Children will be singing about living in a yellow submarine as long as there are children to sing. While repetition has dulled its novelty it's still impossible to resist when it catches you in the right mood. It's placed this low mainly because the single has no intrinsic value of its own- it will always be thought of as a piece of the mighty whole that was Revolver, issued on the same day as the single. And that is what it was always intended to be, sitting between the serene beauty of "Here There and Everywhere" and the nasty snarl of "She Said She Said." EMI had grown very tired of watching other artists seize upon the most obviously commercial pieces from a new Beatles album and turning it into a hit single of their own. This was a kind of corporate pre-emptive strike to prevent that sort of thing.

We do need to talk about the stunning b-side, even though it also has its true home as the second track on the album. More than half a century on, it remains an utterly unprecedented piece of pop music. George Harrison is rightly thought of as the man who brought Indian classical music to the west. We should not forget that he brought it to his own bandmates as well, who were both fascinated by some of the possibilities it opened for them. In particular, both Lennon and McCartney were struck by the notion of building an entire piece of music around a single chord. 

John and Paul had both begun writing music on the guitar, and both approached composition as guitar players typically do - the vocal line was what shaped the melody and the harmony to support that melody line was made with a sequence of changing chords on the guitar. You can't really do much else with a guitar. You can certainly play both harmony and melody on a piano, of course. But while Lennon and Harrison would both eventually write songs on the piano, only McCartney was sufficiently adept enough on a keyboard to play both harmony and melody. But Indian music dispensed with this western notion of harmony entirely. And so Lennon brought "Tomorrow Never Knows" to the Revolver sessions, a song which sets its melody over nothing more than a single C chord. Lennon's characteristically horizontal melody adds to the general sense of a drone. McCartney wasn't quite as formally radical, but "Eleanor Rigby" modulates between just two chords, and those two chords are as alike to each other as two chords can possibly be: G major, which is G-B-D, and E minor, which is G-B-E. Just one note in the triad changes, and only by a single tone. His melody, like so many McCartney melodies, is aggressively vertical. The track is done at an extremely fast tempo - just try singing along with the record - and rather than Beatles instruments it was scored by George Martin for a string octet playing an arrangement heavily influenced by the jagged, ominous film scores of Bernard Herrmann. 

The story that is told in these three short verses is as utterly bleak as anything one will find in contemporary art. McCartney is usually seen as the lightness to Lennon's shade, but he had as little use for the standard pieties of modern Christianity as his bandmate. The despair here is not personal - it's universal. The priest wipes the dirt from his hands, and we reach the awful, damning conclusion: no one was saved. Simply devastating. It's as final, as chilling, as the famous piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life." All the lonely people.

20. "From Me to You" (April 1963)

The third single, coming a month after their first album, is something of a holding action that repeats the tried and tested parts of their previous hit - the personal pronouns, the harmonica hook. It doesn't have anything like the same energy - well, how could it? - but they did their best to spice it up and make it interesting.

19. "All You Need Is Love" (July 1967)

The song was written to order, by Lennon at the last minute, for a huge media event. It's really not much of a song, and one strongly suspects that everyone involved was acutely aware of that fact. It met its moment, and offered a lot of appropriate sounding sentiments, and the band and George Martin tossed the kitchen sink and anything else handy they had lying around into the recording to spice it up and make it all sound a little more interesting than it really was.

18. "Can't Buy Me Love" (March 1964)

Released as a standalone single, it wasn't supposed to be part of A Hard Day's Night at all - but Richard Lester didn't want to use "I'll Cry Instead" and so this became the soundtrack to the unforgettable dash down the fire escape. Lester was right , of course - McCartney's opening wail simply sounds like freedom busting through. It's not really much of a song, a simple enough twelve bar structure that George Martin cunningly reorganized (it was Martin's idea to begin with a fragmentary line from the song's middle section, and that idea is the best thing about the record, along with Harrison's guitar solo.) It was written and recorded in a terrible rush, like most everything they did in the first part of 1964, during a three week stand in Paris, and finished off at Abbey Road. I've always thought much more highly of the b-side, "You Can't Do That" - it's one of Lennon's early nasty songs, with the author taking one of his rare guitar solos. While the band's live performances suffered greatly in the din and strain of Beatlemania - it's extremely hard to play music when you can't actually hear what you're doing - this song regularly survived somehow, rising above the enormous din. It's a consistent live highlight, on the bootlegs, and on the Hollywood Bowl recording.

17. "I Feel Fine" (November 1964)

Lennon was always enormously proud of this record. He would claim to his dying day that this was the first deliberate use of feedback on a pop record (he may have been right) and he was just as proud of the little guitar riff he built the song around. (He acknowledged nicking it from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step" - it's not quite an exact copy, but the resemblance is pretty plain.) I don't like it nearly as much as he does. There's really nothing to the song except that riff. It is a neat little riff though, and Ringo's work is peerless, as always. That "Latin" beat he's playing is actually lifted almost entirely from Ray Charles' "What'd I Say," a number the Beatles had often played in their Hamburg days, usually with Pete Best behind the kit. McCartney still talks about the first time they played "What'd I Say" with Ringo filling in for Pete, and how they all looked at each other in astonishment. Wait a second - it can sound this good? There is, after all, no type of shuffle beat that Ringo Starr can't play better than any drummer alive or dead.

16. Long Tall Sally (EP) (June 1964)

The EP format - a 7 inch disk played at 45 RPM, but typically holding two songs in each side - never really caught on in North America. It was invented by RCA Victor, who issued a couple dozen Elvis Presley EPs, but none of the other US companies followed suit. They were much more popular in the UK, and are an important part of the very early discography of both the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. The Beatles, not so much - they issued EPs as well, but all but one of them used material already issued on album or single. This was the exception. Even so, two of the tracks are somewhat unremarkable covers - the Beatles loved both Larry Williams and Carl Perkins, but despite being the greatest cover band that ever walked the earth, they rarely did much with either man's material. There's only one original song, "I Call Your Name" which is a very early Lennon tune, which McCartney recalls as the first John original he remembers ever hearing. It's the other cover that's worth the price of admission, as McCartney gets his teeth into Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally" and actually outdoes his idol for sheer energy and frenzy. McCartney doesn't have a clue what the actual lyrics are - does anyone? - and it matters not one bit. Harrison and Lennon each get off a wild guitar solo, and the whole thing is over in a breathless two minutes and three seconds. Mercy.

15. "Let It Be" (March 1970)

Shortly before he was killed, Lennon remarked that he didn't know what McCartney was thinking when he wrote something like this. On the face of it, this is an astonishing sentiment from John Lennon, of all people. But Lennon never knew Mary McCartney. Cancer had taken her nine months before her eldest son first met John Lennon. Paul McCartney was a Northern boy, and it was not his way to let anyone see his pain. He has always chosen to present a brave face to the world. (But let anyone, anytime, disrespect a nurse and they will be shocked at the fury they have summoned. As Margaret Thatcher would one day discover.) This is Mary McCartney's song. Paul dreamed about her one night, (apparently during the White Album sessions,) and found the experience enormously comforting.

It is, of course, an exquisitely beautiful song. It's built around the eternal I-V-vi-IV chord progression that has been the basis of literally dozens of popular songs by artists from Bob Marley to Lady Gaga, and most everyone else in between. (I was shocked to discover I had never used it myself, and immediately set about correcting my oversight.) But I don't think McCartney and the Beatles took the time to work out how best to arrange and record it. They only got to grips with it in the final week of January 1969, while they were also preparing the songs for the rooftop show, and temporarily integrating Billy Preston into the fold. And they basically set all of this work aside once they were done with it. The January sessions produced one single - "Get Back" / "Don't Let Me Down" - the legend of the rooftop show, and a bunch of rumours, as bootlegs from the sessions slowly made their way into public awareness. The world was vaguely aware that McCartney had written a beautiful "religious ballad." But the track sat in the EMI vault for almost a year., before the remaining band members (Lennon had quit a few months earlier) assembled at Abbey Road to finish it.

There are three different "official" versions of the song. Two of them, the single version and the album version, are based on Take 27 as recorded on 31 January 1969.  Martin and McCartney added orchestration and backing vocals in January 1970, while Harrison recorded a new guitar solo to replace the one he had earlier overdubbed (in April 1969) in place of his original solo. Martin and McCartney were thinking of combining the two solos, but they ended up sticking with the second one, from the preceding April. This was the version of the song that was issued as a single in March 1970. Phil Spector remixed the track later that month, removing the backing vocals, using the most recent Harrison guitar solo from January 1970, and bringing up the orchestra. This version appeared on the album, when it was released in May. Finally, a third version, based on a completely different take from the January 1969 session, with a slightly different lyric, was used in the Let It Be film. It was never issued as an audio track until the deluxe edition of Let It Be was released in 2021. 

Got all that?

14. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (October 1963)

The record that conquered America. Bob Dylan heard this, and totally lost his shit.  The chords were outrageous, he said, and the harmonies made it all valid. He also thought they were singing "I get high, I get high" which may have led him astray. Almost sixty years on, the sheer energy of this track could still power a city. America capitulated, instantly, and the world soon followed. Wisely. This is what the Irresistible Force sounds like.

13. "Lady Madonna" (March 1968)

After the year of psychedelia, and the shocking failure of the Magical Mystery Tour film (well, it is pretty awful), the Beatles - got back. They were about to head off to India, they weren't sure when they were coming back, and they wanted to put out a single before they left. This was the best candidate they had. This is practically a Fats Domino tribute, and something of a throwaway, but they all loved Fats Domino and they have some fun with it, imitating a horn section with their voices and doubling piano lines with electric guitars. Years later, Paul would notice that he ran through the days of the week and somehow forgot Saturday.

12. "Hello Goodbye" / "I Am the Walrus" (November 1967)

Lennon was pretty bitter about his track being relegated to the b-side. One can't blame him. "Hello Goodbye" is extremely minor. It was literally based on a word game McCartney was playing at home with a friend, to prove that he could write a song about anything. Well done, Paul. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. It spends about three minutes going absolutely nowhere, then circling back around to go there again. The weird coda at the end is pretty cool, though.

Lennon had long been interrogated about the deeper meaning of his lyrics, and as usual he was of two minds about it. On the one hand he wanted to be understood and believed; on the other hand, would you give him a break? It's only a Northern song. "I Am the Walrus" was in some respects a way of lashing out at everyone who were taking it all too seriously. The words make very little literal sense - many of the words have been invented for the occasion, in the fashion of his hero Lewis Carroll (whom Lennon knew far better than he did James Joyce). But while they may not pack much literal meaning, they still communicate on an emotional level, aided as they are by the drive of the melody, the power of the vocal performance, and George Martin's absolutely stunning arrangement. An incredible recording.

11. "Something" / "Come Together" (October 1969)

Lifted straight off Abbey Road two weeks after the album had released. It was apparently Allen Klein's idea to give George the a-side, and it's certainly a lovely song, although Frank Sinatra's claim that "Something" (which he hilariously credited to Lennon-McCartney) was the finest love song of the twentieth century is simply bizarre. The song is wonderfully typical of the typically inarticulate George Harrison - there's certainly something about this woman, but just try to get him to tell you exactly what it might be. You'll be out of luck. Go ahead and ask, and he'll just say "I don't know, I don't know." Lennon is barely present - his piano can be heard faintly in the middle section. So it's George playing a very minimal rhythm guitar, supported by Paul and Ringo. It's an arrangement that leaves an enormous amount of space for the rhythm section, and McCartney and Starr simply played their asses off. Both of them are astonishing on the track, although McCartney has spent the last 50 years worrying that his bass playing is a little busy, and maybe George should have said something about it. (It's not, Paul. Relax. It's perfect.)  I've always thought George Martin's string arrangement was slightly over the top, as close to syrupy as Martin - whose taste and restraint were always impeccable - could ever get. That's a very minor quibble. George does a nice job singing it, and plays a wonderful tasty guitar solo. He would one day be surprised when he played the song live, and found his bandmates were all hugely disappointed when he didn't duplicate the solo from the record. They all sang his own solo back to him after the show to impress upon him just how iconic it was, and insisted he learn it properly. Poor George, he had no idea it was so memorable and so important.

Lennon's b-side nicks its opening line from Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me" (the loathsome Morris Levy, who controlled the copyright, sued Lennon for his presumption) but the song was completely rearranged in the studio - the general "swampy" feel of the arrangement was McCartney's idea. Lennon was not feeling particularly warm about his old bandmate at that moment, but no matter how much they got on each other's nerves they always recognized when the other guy had a better idea. (Lennon got his revenge by studying how McCartney played a piano part and then playing it himself, and also by doubling his own voice rather than letting Paul sing along.) The lyrics are gibberish, but memorable gibberish, with individual lines that somehow jump out and mean something anyway and other lines so obscure that people still wonder to this day what he was actually singing (is it "hold you in his armchair?" Is it "hold you in his arms, yeah." No one will ever know for sure.) The whole thing just sounds utterly fabulous, especially the rhythm section - as always, Ringo and Paul absolutely rule - and Lennon sings the hell out of it. As he usually did.

10. "A Hard Day's Night" (July 1964)

Released to coincide with the opening on the very same day of their first film, six days after the songs from the album had taken up one side of their fifth album. A nifty bit of cross-platform promotion for the summer of 1964. Generations of guitar players would puzzle over the famous opening chord. (The actual guitar chord is simple enough - as George said in one of his last interviews, it's just an F chord with a G on the top. It was the bass note, and its ensuing harmonic, played by McCartney that made it sound so unique. George said we'd have to ask Paul about that. Paul obliged - a D, on the twelfth fret. Why on earth Paul was playing a D note remains a question for another day.)

It's a marvellous song, written to order by Lennon at the last minute once they had the film's title. The record is even better than the song. Lennon couldn't easily hit the notes in the middle part of his own song, but luckily he had a bandmate who could, which permits the delicious little overlap of the two vocal parts as the verse starts up again. Bonus points for Ringo's cowbell in the middle section.. 

9. "Please Please Me" (January 1963)

Holy hell, what a record. And what a thing to achieve on just their second studio date, way back in November 1962. It was famously George Martin who suggested trying Lennon's slow, Roy Orbison-influenced ballad at a faster tempo. Perhaps because they were embarrassed at not having thought of it themselves, they dug into it with an energy that is simply overwhelming. This is the sound of the Beatles splitting the atom, and the world would never be the same.

8. "Get Back" / "Don't Let Me Down" (April 1969)

This was, for the longest time, the only tangible evidence that the January 1969 sessions had taken place at all. It sounds almost casual, effortlessly brilliant, but Peter Jackson's massive documentary shows how much work went into making it sound that way. The magic may begin with inspiration, but it's achieved with perspiration.

7. "Paperback Writer" / "Rain" (May 1966)

Geoff Emerick succeeded Norman Smith (christened "Normal" by John Lennon) as the Beatles recording engineer in April 1966. Smith had been promoted to become a producer, and as such he would certainly distinguish himself - he was at the helm for Pink Floyd's debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as well as the Pretty Things S.F. Sorrow, which is something very like a rock opera well before the Who did Tommy or the Kinks made Arthur. But Emerick, a callow 20 year old with little respect for authority and none at all for the traditional way things were done at EMI's Abbey Road studios, would help the Beatles produce sounds never heard before on records made in the UK. It began right here, with the way he recorded Starr's drums and, especially, McCartney's bass. The Beatles had been complaining for years that they could never get the same kind of bass sound as what they heard on the American R&B records they all loved so much.

"Paperback Writer" is a strange song indeed, one of Paul's stories about an odd character who wants to be a hack writer. The track is strange, driven by a jagged, spiraling  guitar riff and lush California style harmonies. Lennon's flip side is even stranger. They recorded the backing track at an extremely fast tempo. It was then drastically slowed down before Lennon recorded his vocal. The record as issued sits in between - the instruments we hear have been slowed down from what they actually played while Lennon's voice is higher than what he sang. (So yes, Starr's drumming, so berserk on the record that it surprises Ringo to this very day, was even wilder as it was played.) This was also  where they discovered the fun one could have by running a tape backwards, and had trouble resisting the impulse to try everything backwards for some time after.

6. "Help!" (July 1965)

The single was kind of a trailer for the film of the same name (which opened a week later) and the album (which followed two weeks later.) More canny cross-platform promotion! It's a very great song, of course, one that Lennon was justly proud of for the rest of his life. (Typically though, he was proud of it because he thought he was being honest about his life, not for any other reason.) He would also eventually complain that they took it at too fast a tempo, "trying to be commercial."  He was quite wrong about that. It's the very speed with which the band plays the song - and they take it very fast indeed -  that lends the record its touch of panic, something that would have been missing entirely had it been done at a ballad tempo. (Which is how everyone else who assays the song has to do it - only the Beatles could pull it off at such a tempo.)

On the flip side, "I'm Down," McCartney tried to write his own Little Richard type song and succeeded, magnificently. He recorded it on 14 June 1965, along with two other new songs he had - "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Yesterday." All the same day. The mind reels, and reels some more. Not that anyone thought it was a big deal at the time. This track was only issued as this b-side and wasn't available on album for years afterward. The other two tracks were buried on the second side of the Help album, although they didn't stay buried very long.

5. "Day Tripper" / "We Can Work It Out" (December 1965)

Oh man, what a riff. You can have "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." Give me this one! All due respect to Jagger's wonderful rant, but this record is so much more interesting.  It just doesn't quit, continually finding new ways to raise the ante as it goes along. It's mostly Lennon's song - he says the guitar riff for this one was also based on "Watch Your Step" though I don't hear it this time - and no one's too sure what it's actually about. Both Lennon and McCartney would later think it had something to do with drugs - it was written and recorded shortly after their famous Beverly Hills excursion with Peter Fonda and several Byrds, which would eventually prompt "She Said She Said" on Revolver. But it sounds to me mostly like Lennon complaining about some woman. His verse melody is a little closer to McCartney's comfort zone than his own, so - just as in "A Hard Day's Night" - they trade off the lead vocals. Lennon's vocal dynamics on the chorus are a wonder - he sings the line "it took me so long to find out" three different times in three different ways, each of them wonderful (first time straight, second time with his "Twist and Shout" edge, third time with his gorgeous falsetto.) The rave-up after the second chorus, a duet between Harrison's guitar and wordless vocals is utterly fab. And Ringo, as usual, is peerless driving it all forward. (And his overdubbed tambourine work is surely the best use of that humble little instrument ever.)

This was released as a double a-side, but McCartney's "We Can Work It Out," fine as it is, will always seem like a humble b-side to me, "Day Tripper" is that great. "We Can Work It Out" is often presented as an example of the Lennon-McCartney duality. In fact, even the song's composers seemed to think so sometimes. There's McCartney all optimistic that we can work it out, and there's Lennon impatiently warning that life is too short for this nonsense. I beg to differ. There is indeed a duality in their two parts, but that's not what it is. There was a lot of Andy Capp in the young Beatles, Northern lads with pretty prehistoric ideas about a woman's place. So this sounds to me like yet another of McCartney's arguments with Jane Asher over her having the temerity to live a life of her own that didn't always revolve around Paul McCartney. It's McCartney who's being the impatient one. He's being a positive nag, in fact. We can work it out if you'll just see things my way. Lennon is the diplomat, trying to soothe these troubled waters.

4. "Hey Jude" / "Revolution" (August 1968)

Lennon thought it was important that the Beatles say something about the whole subject of revolution. Oddly enough, Lennon seems not have been very clear in his own mind just what he thought of it (count me out? count me in?) although his crack about Chairman Mao has stood the test of time extremely well (he actually caught some flack for it in the day.) It's been overshadowed, and quite rightly (as Lennon himself freely acknowledged) by the mighty a-side. 

After all these years, after all those football stadium crowds doing the singalong at the end, it's very difficult to get to the heart of what makes "Hey Jude", the song and the record, so powerful, so moving, so unforgettable. But no one has come closer to penetrating to the heart of that mystery than the great Brian Phillips:

It’s so much sadder than you remember. Also more ambiguous. The song’s familiarly makes the melancholy hard to detect, maybe, but it’s in there: It’s that gentle, restless churn that you feel in the pit of your stomach. A kind of mournfulness, which the song keeps trying and failing to close around like a pearl. “Hey Jude” literally sounds like a sad song someone is trying to make better. Most piano power ballads don’t come anywhere near the depth or the uncertainty of that feeling.... “Hey Jude” is a song singing to itself, reminding itself what a song should do. Let the world under your skin. Let it into your heart. Don’t make it bad. Don’t make it colder. None of this will work, in the end—all the great pop songs know that pop songs never work—but what else can you do but try? Let it out and let it in. 

I really can't add much to that, save to point out that McCartney gives one of the greatest vocal performances of a career that is not exactly without accomplishment. I don't know if he - I don't know if anyone - has ever sung better. He inhabits and expresses an enormous range of emotions -  resignation, empathy, warmth, passion, urgency - and he does it all so naturally, so gracefully, so effortlessly you never notice him doing it. You just feel it happening around you. Which is how it's supposed to work. He takes his sad song. He makes it better.

3. "Ticket to Ride" (April 1965)

The song's placement in the Help! film is now so unforgettable - that iconic guitar arpeggio ringing out as the scene suddenly shifts to the Swiss Alps - that it's easy to forget that the single had been issued on its own fully four months prior to the film and the album. There's something rather grown-up about the song's concerns, although this went right under the radar in early 1965. So did the undercurrent of dread that runs through the song. The woman in the song isn't breaking up with her boyfriend. We haven't stopped going steady. No, living with me was bringing her down. Something a little more significant is at stake, has been lost, and has yet to be fully processed. The song stays on the same A chord all through the introduction and half way through the verse, too shocked to even move. The feeling of loss is overwhelming, but it's all boiling away under the surface, under a stiff upper lip, held off at a distance by the guitar calmly repeating its arpeggios, and the drums playing their odd pattern. Lennon begins each verse like a man in a state of shock, who hasn't even begun to absorb the news and what it means, numb with disbelief and denial. But he thinks he's going to be sad. Not yet, but very soon - probably as soon as his chum begins to sing along in support - and for a long time after. But she don't care. 

2. "Penny Lane" / "Strawberry Fields Forever" (February 1967)

There were moments when John Lennon and Paul McCartney were as close, as complementary, and as utterly different as two sides of the same coin. This amazing record is one of them. It began with John Lennon, off in Spain shooting a film, bored and lonely and lost without his bandmates, writing a ballad that looked back at his difficult childhood in Liverpool. It was the first song the band worked on when they reassembled at the end of 1966. While it may have started out as a quiet ballad, everyone was so enthusiastic about it that they quickly threw everything but the kitchen sink into the arrangement, with poor George Martin doing his best to make all of Lennon's many wild ideas come to life. As is well known, Martin worked a miracle to produce the record in the end, merging two takes recorded at different tempos and in different keys and somehow coming out with a coherent record in which every component part somehow sounds clear and distinct as a bell. This, of course, makes it quite impossible to play along with the record - it's not in concert pitch at all but rather in that mysterious space between A and B flat - "in the cracks" as classical musicians say.

Some dozen years later, Lennon would tell Martin, to his producer's dismay, that he doesn't really like the "Strawberry Fields Forever" record anymore and wishes he could do it all over again. Lennon was often unhappy with his own work, but in this case one can actually understand why, to a point. There's a simple, beautiful song that gets just a little lost underneath the extravagant production. It's nothing revolutionary - it's just a lovely little ballad about feeling lost and afraid.  But still... what a record.

Paul McCartney knew what Strawberry Field meant to Lennon, and he was moved to write his own Liverpool song. And strangely enough, there are a few lines in the song when McCartney sounds exactly like John Lennon - he occasionally gets a touch of that nasal Lennon noise into his voice ("four of fish and finger pies in summer.") But being McCartney, he approached the subject of remembering the hometown they'd left behind somewhat differently. Lennon wrote about how he remembered feeling; McCartney wrote about what he remembered seeing and hearing. There's something almost kaleidoscopic about it, because it's not a single memory - sometimes the sky is blue, sometimes it's raining. It all sounds like a summer day - but a nurse selling poppies from a tray is something that happens in November. Still, all these things could and did happen in Penny Lane and McCartney remembers it all. 

The arrangement is every bit as elaborate as that of "Strawberry Fields Forever" but to a completely different effect. Its various components are in such perfect balance that individual components often never stand out, not even the piano that is the basis of the track. The recording process began with three separate piano tracks set down by McCartney in succession, working alone without a click track (it was 1966.) After a reduction mix, they started adding on to it - Lennon on another piano, McCartney's bass, Starr's drums, woodwinds and brass scored by Martin. And as a piece of formal composition - well, McCartney modulates through no less than seven key changes - seriously, seven - so smoothly and so naturally that you never even notice it happening until the moment when you're supposed to notice, when he kicks it up a tone for the final chorus. That's without even taking account of how he switches from B major to B minor ("had the pleasure to know") in the middle of each verse. Bloody Paul McCartney. This is a mastery without limits, a thing that can't be taught.

It was the first Beatles single since "Love Me Do" that didn't go to number one in the UK, held out of the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck. The band was delighted by this, finding it an enormous relief.

1. "She Loves You" (August 1963)

I have previously written, at considerable length too, about this great, great record. So let me just say it again: no other band, no other musicians, in the world was even remotely capable of this sort of thing. Not in their wildest dreams. Not then, and not for years and years afterwards. There were professional session players who could summon up this level of precision. There were other bands who could generate the same brute force. But there was no one, anywhere in the world, who could do both. At the same time. 

How could there be? When they made this record, in July 1963, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr were by far the most experienced, the most practised rock band in all the world. This was their music. It was, for all intents and purposes, their invention. No one knew it better, no one had been playing it longer. They were inventing this music, and they were inventing the thing that performed this music. In the six years to come, they would get more sophisticated than this. They would get back to this mountain top and many more besides. But they would never get better. Because it doesn't get better than this.  It just doesn't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kate Bush: A Woman's Work

"Artists shouldn't be made famous."

There's something weirdly comforting about the story of Kate Bush's life and career. It provides proof that sometimes good things really can happen to good people. Fortune has smiled upon Bush for almost all of her life, sometimes in ways that beggar all belief. This despite the fact that she has spent her professional life working in the music business - an industry that has typically taken good people, stolen from them, abused them, and then fed them to the dogs. And that's if they were men. Women have always had it much worse.

She was born in July 1958, the youngest of three children born to Robert and Hannah Bush. The family might be described as affluent middle class. Her father was a doctor; her mother, a nurse, had emigrated from Dungarvan on the southern Irish coast. Her two brothers are considerably older: John Carder Bush (known to everyone as Jay) was born in 1944, and Paddy Bush was born in 1952. That was the year the family moved into East Wickham Farm.

East Wickham Farm is a remarkable place. It must have been a wonderful place to grow up. It's in Kent, south of the Thames, and the main house, while surrounded (if not submerged) by trees does face out onto a moderately busy suburban artery. It's just ten minutes from the heart of downtown London. But in back of the house there are acres of open land, with an eighteenth century rose garden, a Victorian pond, various outbuildings, and an ancient farm house, known to all in the family as "the barn" in the midst of it all. It was a mildly eccentric and deeply artistic household. Her father played the piano well enough to find his way through bits of the standard classical repertoire; her mother had been a dancer back in Ireland. Their daughter would inherit both gifts, while having the run of this wonderful old place, and the complete and utter support of her parents and her brothers as she began to chart her own artistic path. She took to the piano naturally, and began writing her own songs at age 11.

Her brothers weren't always around, as both were charting their own unusual artistic paths. Jay had gone off to Cambridge just as Kate was beginning her schooling and made a career for himself as a photographer and poet. Paddy had become a specialist in ancient European instruments - he actually made medieval instruments for a living. Both were involved in the English folk music scene as their little sister, a young teenager by now, began writing all these striking songs. They made tapes of them, and played them for friends. And it turned out that one of Jay Bush's friends from Cambridge, a man named Ricky Hopper, was actually acquainted with a famous rock star.

Really, how likely is that?

But there was once a time when famous rock stars felt, as if it were some sort of civic duty, to lend a helping hand to young artists. David Gilmour was impressed enough by what he heard on this 15 year old girl's demo tape that he helped her record a demo at his home studio, and played on it himself (one of the tracks from this session was actually issued as the b-side to "Army Dreamers" in 1980.) It was the first time in Bush's life that she had even played with other musicians - that fascinated her, along with the range of sounds generated by an electric piano. Gilmour also went round to East Wickham Farm and made several recordings of her performing her songs at the piano. He tried playing the tapes for his friends in the industry, but had trouble getting anyone interested. Eventually, he simply organized and paid for a professional session himself in an EMI studio, with Andrew Powell at the helm. This took place in the summer of 1975, and this did the trick. EMI signed her to be a recording artist. But she was still only 17 years old, and everyone - her family, Gilmour, the record company itself - agreed that she was too young to begin her professional career right away. It was agreed that she should finish her schooling first, and make her first record in a couple of years. 

So that's what they did. Bush prepared for her first recording sessions by forming a band. They called it the KT Bush Band - she was joined by drummer Vic King, guitarist Brian Bath (who would later be part of the Tour of Life), and bassist Del Palmer. It wasn't a terribly ambitious project. They played a couple dozen gigs around London in the spring of 1977, performing early versions of some of the songs from her debut and a collection of covers. The real point was to get Bush accustomed to playing with other musicians. But something else happened. Bush and Del Palmer fell in love.

It's one of the crucial relationships of her life. They were a couple for almost fifteen years, they remain friends and collaborators to this day - indeed, Palmer plays, along with Bush's husband, on her most recent work. And Palmer brought something crucial to the table, which she almost instantly recognized was something she very much needed. He would challenge her. Bush grew up the favoured baby in the bosom of the family. Her parents and her brothers were fiercely supportive of her, and fiercely protective as well. They were, however, just a little capable of approving of everything she did. Their little girl was a prodigy. Every song was wonderful. Every idea was worth pursuing. Palmer would have none of that, and had no hesitation in telling her what he thought. (By all accounts, her husband Danny McIntosh is similarly unimpressed by her genius!)

Bush began, like many young songwriters, by setting her own poems to music. She was a pre-teen when she began this work, and her first two albums consist almost entirely of songs written by a teenager, by one in the process of growing from a girl to a woman, and interested in both the open innocence of childhood and what it means to be an adult. As she has been happy to acknowledge, the two greatest influences on her songcraft are clearly Elton John - "he was the only songwriter I knew of that played the piano" - and David Bowie. (Bush, aged 14, was in the house at the last Ziggy Stardust show in 1973 and like any good English schoolgirl had his picture on her wall. When she actually met him many years later, by chance one day at Abbey Road, she was so flustered she had to leave the room.) John and Bowie have both made much more use of elaborate and unpredictable song structures than is typical of American songwriters (who tend to be more straightforward Verse-Chorus writers.) Bush's early songs, like John's, were typically based on very clear, and very memorable, piano parts (this has changed as she's grown more adept with synthesizers and rhythm tracks.) But John, of course, has been prolific to a fault. He had already made eleven albums in his first seven years as a recording artist, before Bush made her debut - while she has issued just nine albums altogether in the more than 40 years since she made her debut, John has put out an additional 20. And John has never written his own words. Bush has her own stories to tell, and like Bowie, these do not have much to do with self-expression. That's a fairly small part of her work, especially as her writing has developed. From the very beginning, her songs could be about anything - in particular, whatever book she happens to be reading that week or whatever interesting thing came across her television.

But while she initially appeared to be another singer-songwriter, unusual only by being a woman in a man's game, and by being a teenager, it soon became quite evident that even the songs were merely a means to an end. Not to mention that the subject matter of so many of her songs was  itself extremely unusual. But as she developed as a musician and as a recording artist, she grew less exclusively interested in songs strictly for their own sake and equally interested in what could be achieved with sound itself. There has been an artistic price of sorts to pay, in that she's had very little real contact and interaction with her own audience for most of her career. Her work can sometimes seem very insular. 

She is also very, very English. It is, in fact, difficult to think of an artist who has been less influenced by American music and culture. She's only made a few brief visits to North America over the years, and performed there just once, on Saturday Night Live in 1978. The music and art and culture that have shaped her have been almost entirely European, and usually British. She has an obvious fondness for 1970s British prog-rock, in particular Pink Floyd and Genesis. It might be noted that these may have been the two British prog-rock bands with the least interest in instrumental virtuosity (for good reasons, of course!), and the ones most interested in mood and texture and, sometimes, narrative. David Gilmour, of course, was her key sponsor, and she would work with Peter Gabriel on multiple occasions. When Bush chooses to rock out -  which she generally does at least once on each album -  she rocks out like they would. One doesn't hear even a trace of The Blues. 

She is an extremely unusual artist, and she has charted for herself an extremely unusual career.  Her journey did not include any of those dreary lengthy periods of paying her dues, learning her craft in front of half-interested audiences, having to hustle for a record deal. She has never had to make a living apart from music. She was sponsored by a famous rock star, who helped her get a recording contract. Pop stardom practically sought her out while she was still in her teens. She neither embraced it nor turned her back on it. She simply didn't let it shape her course, in any way. She was able to opt out of the whole record-tour cycle that takes up the lives of most musicians. She did a series of concerts in 1979, when she was 20 years old. It would be 35 years before she would do it again, in 2014. She assumed complete control of her artistic life while still in her early 20s, and has followed her unpredictable muse with resolute single-mindedness wherever it led. 

"I'm not the shy, retiring, fragile butterfly creature you sometimes read about. I'm tough as nails."

9. The Red Shoes (November 1993)

For all her good fortune, the period leading up to this record was easily the most difficult time of Bush's life. Alan Murphy, who had first played guitar for her on the Tour of Life in 1979 and appeared on all of her records since that time, died of AIDS in late 1989. And her long relationship with Del Palmer was coming to an end. While it would not seem to damage their professional relationship, it still had to have been an upheaval. They had, after all, been a couple since Bush was eighteen years old. Worst of all, her mother died in early 1992. It seems to have left her a little unfocused when it came to the record she was working on. There are some very strange things about it. For one - famous guest stars? On a Kate Bush record? But that's Eric Clapton playing guitar on one track, Jeff Beck on another, and Procol Harum's Gary Brooker adding keyboards.

 Even stranger was the appearance of Prince, who had expressed interest in helping out. Bush sent him "Why Should I Love You"  and asked him to do some background vocals. Prince, being Prince, remade the entire thing. It was now effectively a Prince track with Bush singing lead. Del Palmer says he and Bush spent two years trying to figure out how they could turn it back into a Kate Bush track. In the end, being a polite English lady, Bush seems to have decided it would be rude to turn down Prince's gift, so she issued it more or less as he'd remade it. It fits very strangely with the rest of the record. Which does have its moments - the lead single "Rubberband Girl" is glorious, utterly irresistible, as close as Bush would ever get to duplicating Madonna's sense of sheer pop fun. But those moments are in short supply here.

Bush ended up quite unhappy with the whole thing. It was the one time she recorded digitally, and she soon decided she much preferred analog. Almost twenty years later she would remake three of the tracks here entirely from scratch. She would also record new vocals and drum tracks for four other tracks and release the new versions of those seven songs from this album as part of her strange 2011 project Director's Cut (which also revamped four tracks from The Sensual World.) But that was far in the future. For the moment, she simply disappeared. She dropped completely out of sight for twelve years, with no music, no public appearances of any sort, no interviews. It was as if she had fallen off the face of the earth.

8. 50 Words For Snow (November 2011)

The shortest of the seven tracks here comes in at just under seven minutes, and the first thing one notices about the project are the two very distinguished male voices making guest appearances. The title cut basically just explores a groove for eight minutes while the estimable Stephen Fry, one of Britain's two great national treasures (David Attenborough being the other, of course!) intones, with varying degrees of dramatic emphasis, fifty different words for snow. And "Snowed in at Wheeler Street," about two lovers somehow unstuck in time, who keep meeting and being torn apart, is a duet with Sir Elton John. The longest track, "Misty," is about a sexual encounter between a woman and a snowman; "Snowflake" is literally about the life of a snowflake, from its birth in the clouds until it falls to earth.  

It's pretty obvious that Bush couldn't care less about pop success anymore, not that she ever cared all that much. She's simply following her wayward muse and sculpting more extended and idiosyncratic soundscapes.  It's a record for people who have been with her all along on her strange journey. This is her most recent recording - it's now eleven years old - and yet it's not the last we've heard from her. Three years later, to the astonishment of her fans and followers everywhere, she performed a 22 date residency at the London Apollo, with a show every bit as wild and ambitious as the Tour of Life had been back in 1979. And, at least according to the testimony of those fortunate enough to be there, every bit as astonishing. The live recording she issued two years later confirms that she and her musicians sounded fabulous. The few scattered videos available on YouTube (Bush requested that her fans not film and photograph shows, and for the most part they actually did as she requested) do suggest that this was a truly remarkable show.

7. Lionheart (November 1978)

Bush felt that EMI rushed her into this second album, and she would never, never permit that to happen again. She still had plenty of songs lying around that hadn't found a place on her debut, and this is still a singer-songwriter album, with Andrew Powell still in the producer's seat. The players are mostly experienced pros from the UK scene - Stuart Elliott and Duncan Mackay from Cockney Rebel, Frances Monkman from Curved Air, David Paton from Pilot,  although players from Bush's inner circle are present as well - Brian Bath and Del Palmer, who would soon be joining her in concert, and brother Paddy plays on more than half the tracks. But the songs for the most part aren't quite as striking as the ones on her debut. Furthermore, she hasn't quite taken control of her own sound yet - partially because she's not completely in charge, and partially because she hasn't yet quite figured out how. She only turned 20 while it was being recorded. But she had an idea of where she wanted to go and what she wanted to be. Powell speaks regretfully about the omission of a song called "Never For Ever" which didn't make the cut for this album (nor the succeeding album of the same name.) Powell describes it as a gorgeous, intimate ballad, with the best string arrangement he ever wrote. But Bush was already making a determined effort not to repeat herself, and not to be placed in any particular pigeon-hole, saying she didn't want to forever be associated with "soft, romantic vibes."

Having made two albums, surely it was time to do some live shows. That's what musicians do, after all. But Bush, of course, had not come up the way most musicians do, attracting notice with their live performances and being allowed to record. She had always been a self-contained player, and very much a creature of the studio. She went into her first serious live performances free of any pre-conceptions of what a live performance of popular music should be like, and she devised a two hour show that was absolutely stunning in its ambition and originality. The only musicians who had even scratched the surface of what she would present on what she called the Tour of Life were David Bowie, with the wild sets for the Diamond Dogs tour, and Peter Gabriel with his numerous costume changes while performing with Genesis. Along with the elaborate set, and seventeen costume changes, Bush included magicians, dancers, poetry, and a very well rehearsed band. There were 24 performances over six weeks in April-May 1979, and it  remains a remarkable achievement to this day. Luckily the highlights were preserved on a film, Kate Bush at Hammersmith Odeon. 

Having demonstrated her complete mastery of live performance, she would not perform another show for the next 35 years. Typical.

6. The Sensual World (October 1989)

A quick word about the album cover, and how carefully Bush has tended her own image. The original photograph is in colour, and slightly more revealing - her entire hand and other shoulder can be seen clearly. But it's also far too sexy for how Bush likes to present herself - she'd had a big fight with EMI early in her career about that very subject, almost all of it over a single promotional photograph. So for this album cover, this picture was cropped, put into black and white, and one shoulder was completely lost in shadow. The album itself doesn't seem as ambitious as Hounds of Love, but it's still something more than a simple collection of songs. Bush said she thought of it as a collection of stories, which does help give the songs a kind of perspective. These are generally somewhat odd stories that don't have much to do with each other. The problem is that these stories are joined to the least interesting and the least varied collection of musical settings of her career. But it does, of course, have its moments. The title track had to be rethought when Bush couldn't get permission from James Joyce's estate to use a lyric based on Molly Bloom's soliloquy (they would relent a generation later, and she would recut the song as originally intended for Director's Cut.) She turned it instead into a fantasy about Molly Bloom stepping out of the book and into the real world. And "Love and Anger" is impossible to follow or make much sense of, but strangely memorable anyway. I think the record bogs down after that, but it rallies impressively towards the end. Bush had discovered the Trio Bulgarka, a group of women who sang traditional Bulgarian folk music, and had made use of them of two tracks. But being Bush, she didn't feel right about only asking them to fit themselves into her music and wanted to provide them with something more in their own comfort zone. That would be "Rocket's Tail," but after a couple of minutes the drums crash in and it turns into a hard rock track driven by her old friend David Gilmour's guitar. I know, it makes no sense. It still works. And the album concludes with "This Woman's Work," which is simply breathtaking in its delicate beauty, its aching passion, its raw power, its desperate urgency - yes, all of these things, as great an achievement as anything this artist has done in her remarkable career. The song was actually written to accompany a specific scene in a forgotten John Hughes movie, and was almost left off the album. (She says that Del Palmer absolutely insisted it be included.)

5. The Dreaming (September 1982)

A very weird album cover - there are chains, and there's a tiny key on her tongue. What does it it all mean? Who knows. And this was, in its moment, a very weird album. It's taken us many years to catch up with it. She very much wanted to leave her past behind - she even regretfully cut ties with Jon Kelly, her co-producer on Never For Ever and the engineer on all of her records, solely because she wanted to build a new sound from scratch. This is her first fully mature record, where she leaves behind the singer-songwriter, alone in her big house with her piano, and emerges as a completely different kind of artist altogether. Bush takes total control of her sound - her discovery of the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, which was a very early sampler and digital audio workstation, greatly reduced her dependence on other musicians to get the sounds she was after. It gave her new ways to develop her songs, building them up for rhythm loops or samples of other instruments, rather than piano melodies. And in fact, the melodies are not particularly memorable, by Bush's standards at  least. The abrasive lead single, "Sat in Your Lap," released more than a year ahead of the album, was the first clue - it's  built on a jagged rhythm part, with Bush screeching parts of the vocal. On the album's next track, she sings about a failed robbery in a Cockney accent - later on she adopts a broad Australian voice for the title cut and literally brays "hee-haw" like a donkey in the concluding "Get Out of My House." It sounds like a deliberate attempt to confound expectations, and it did succeed in confusing her fanbase. It also worried her record company - the album only went to number three, and all Bush's sonic experimentation used up a great deal of expensive studio time. EMI conveyed their concerns. Bush responded by building her own 48 track studio at East Wickham.

4. Aerial (November 2005)

After twelve years of complete silence, Bush dropped this double set out of a clear blue sky. Asked why it had taken so long, Bush smiled and said that having a little child running about rather cut down on the time available to her for messing around in the studio. She didn't begin to make any real progress  on the record until little Bertie started school. Like almost all double sets it would have made a remarkable single album instead, but we'll be happy to have it all nevertheless. The first of the two records tends to be more oriented towards songs. The second is an extended piece of connected songs called A Sky of Honey, which would form the concluding portion of her Before the Dawn performances in 2014. In that respect it's structured like a larger Hounds of Love, which had dedicated one album side to songs and one side to an extended conceptual piece (which would also be part of the Before the Dawn performances.)  

More here than anywhere else in her career Bush reminds us how she grew up a fan of English prog-rock. Her version of it is quite without vanity. She has no interest in demonstrating how clever she is as a composer, or how skilled her band members (which generally includes her husband) are on their instruments.  I, of course, am always more interested in the songs than anything else and happily there are indeed some very strong ones here, including some of the extended ones on the second half of the record, like "Nocturn" and "Sunset." Two tracks in particular are especially notable: "How to Be Invisible" and the remarkable "Mrs Bartolozzi," a reverie about watching clothes splash about in a washing machine. Really, that's what it's about. It's marvellous. Alas, the lone single, "King of the Mountain," is not one of them. It has something to do with Elvis Presley and America, but Bush has never had much interest in or understanding of America. It's a big album (running 81 minutes), and a dense album that takes some time to sink in. But it's also reassuring to discover that she hadn't lost a thing in twelve years, as a musician, as a singer, or as a writer.

3. The Kick Inside (February 1978)

An amazing debut, and quite possibly the finest record ever made by a teenager. She was 19 years old when this was issued, on my birthday in 1978 - and two of the tracks actually date back to her sessions with David Gilmour back in 1975. The idea that the record that is "The Man With the Child In His Eyes" was made by a girl of 16 is very hard to grasp, in the same way that quantum physics is hard to grasp. How does even happen, how does it possibly work? This is very much a singer-songwriter album, and the songwriting can be a little uneven, I suppose, especially on the first side. The melodies, however, are all outstanding, as are the performances. And no one was writing like this. There were some distinguished female songwriters, even in the 1970s, but not all that many, and women like Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian often seemed preoccupied with finding a place, or carving one out, in a man's world. Bush had come from a very different place in the world, she hadn't scuffled for years in the industry, and it gave her a freedom all her own, to write about desire and sexuality as casually and as naturally as men had been writing about it all along. 

Bush was very young when most of these songs were written and she could honestly summon a child's sense of wonder and discovery at the world in ways that simply are no longer accessible to older writers. She happily incorporated themes and ideas from her wide and idiosyncratic reading, some of which were very strange indeed. The stunning title track, which concludes the album, is a love song to a brother; it's also a suicide note from a woman who has been committing incest with that brother and is now pregnant. The seven songs that make up the second side of the vinyl are all brilliant, without exception. And of course "Wuthering Heights," with that unforgettable opening piano fill and Bush's wild vocal - keening, pleading, sighing - was like nothing anyone had ever heard before. Bush insisted - insisted, like the stubborn teenager she was - that this extremely weird track be her first single. EMI wanted to issue "James and the Cold Gun" instead, and it's a great track as well, as close to hard rock as Bush would ever get. It had even been a live favourite with the KT Bush Band. But Bush got her way, and "Wuthering Heights" quickly shot to the very top of the UK charts, where it stayed for a month. She was the first UK woman to write her own number one hit. 

In case you've forgotten, she was 19 years old when she did this.

(That's the Canadian album cover by the way. It's both a) the one I'm accustomed to, and b) much better than the awful UK original.) 

2. Never For Ever (September 1980)

 Let us first praise the cover illustration, a striking pencil drawing by Nick Price depicting a horde of strange creatures, animals and monsters, all flying out from under Kate's skirt. Brilliantly done, and utterly hilarious as well. Definitely her best cover art. The sessions for this third album were interrupted by the filming of a Christmas TV special for the BBC. Did she perform her biggest hit, the song that had made her famous? Of course she didn't. Of the ten songs she sang on the program, only four had even been released to the public. Two would one day come out on b-sides, and one was a short piece written for the occasion to introduce Peter Gabriel, her sole guest. Her other three songs would eventually appear on this album when it was released. That would happen almost a year after their television premiere. (She also performed a brief piece by Erik Satie, and sang a duet with Gabriel on a Roy Harper song.)

Bush had by now had taken full complete artistic control of her work. She felt no need to go out on tour again - been there, done that - she promoted the record entirely with interviews featuring her polite and gracious self, and a series of very memorable videos. It turned out to be all that was necessary, as it became her first UK number one album. It's a big step forward. Bush has taken over production duties herself, with the assistance of engineer Jon Kelly (who had engineered her first two albums) It's a wild and wooly batch of songs - "Babooshka" is about a wife destroying her marriage through her own paranoia and "The Wedding List" is about a widow's quest for revenge. The other songs generally cover even stranger ground. But the highlight is surely the remarkable finale, "Breathing," sung from the viewpoint of a child in the womb contemplating a world devastated by nuclear fallout. 

1. Hounds of Love (September 1985)

This is her most complete achievement, the one that best displays all her varied abilities and ambitions - as a songwriter, as an artist of pure sound, as a singer. It was the first record she made entirely on her own terms, literally in her own backyard at East Wickham Farm. The second side is a concept piece called The Ninth Wave - she would perform it in full as part of her Before the Dawn show almost 30 years later. It's a connected series of songs that's basically about someone who has fallen overboard and is passing the night alone in the ocean, afraid of drowning, afraid of falling asleep, hoping to be rescued.

The first side is more conventional, consisting of five ordinary songs - well, as ordinary as you're likely to get from Kate Bush. The unforgettable "Cloudbusting" is based on Peter Reich's memories of growing up with his deeply eccentric father, the psychologist Wilhelm Reich who came to believe that he had built a machine that could make it rain. "Mother Stands For Comfort" is not very comforting - the child being comforted is a murderer, a madman secure in the knowledge that his mother will always protect him. The wonderful title track, inspired by a couple of her beloved horror movies, compares falling in love to being pursued by a pack of hounds and is built entirely around pounding drums and cellos sawing away furiously. 

Hounds of Love also includes what must now be her most famous song of all,"Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God.)" It opens the album, and the premise is strange and interesting enough - the deal with God is that a man and woman be able to swap bodies so they might better understand each other. It's built on a galloping rhythm track and a strange, eerie hook from the Fairlight. It stalled at #30 on the US charts, but made top ten in Bush's traditional areas of support - the UK and the commonwealth, parts of Europe.  Then, in 2022, the song became a key motif in the fourth season of the hit Netflix show Stranger Things. In the modern world, licensing music for television and movies has become a crucial revenue stream for musicians. But Bush doesn't need the money, and has generally not allowed her songs to be so used. But she happened to be a fan of the show, so in this case she made an exception. Much to her surprise, and everyone else's as well, at age 64 she ended up with by far the biggest hit of her career. It would become her first top ten song in the US, and a number one everywhere else. All this more than thirty years after she had originally issued the song, and more than ten years since her last record of any kind. Who else could this happen to? Good fortune, on a level that truly surpasses belief, simply follows this woman around.

And why not? She is, by all accounts, an absolute sweetheart of a human being - still somewhat shy even now, but unfailingly friendly, modest, and generous. Good things should happen to good people more often. But as an artist, however, Bush is as ruthlessly single-minded as any artist could possibly be. She is not one for half measures. She does not aim to please. You have to reckon with her and her work on her terms. She isn't coming to meet you half way. Her way is the only way. She hopes people will like what she does, and is grateful and appreciative when they do - but whether they do or not ultimately doesn't matter in the slightest. She will do what she wants to do. She always has. She always will.

 "I'd like my music to intrude." 

McMurtry

 Great songs are what I like. Great songs are what I'm in it for, great songs are what I've never stopped looking for. Great songs, above everything else, are what I want from music itself. Inevitably that leads me to James McMurtry. He doesn't have much of a voice, it's true, though he has figured how he can effectively deliver his lyrics and tell his stories. He's got a tight little band, and they're rocking more than usual on his most recent record. And he's always had the songs. He can even make getting old sound pretty cool.

And in a way back corner of a cross-town bus
We were hiding out under my hat
Cashing in on a thirty-year crush
You can't be young and do that