Kate Bush: Aerial

There it sits on the desk in front of me, opened but unplayed. It was twelve years in the making. The last time I had a new Kate Bush album, I weighed a lot less and had a lot more hair. I lived in a different neighborhood, worked for a different company, drove a different car, had different friends, still had my band, well.... lots of things were different.

What hasn't changed: my utter fascination, admiration and adoration of the music of Kate Bush. I won't explain that. It's like explaining a nicotine addiction to people who have never smoked cigarettes. You won't understand and I don't care. She simply is the one real genius of modern pop for the last fifty years. Every disposable tart act out there stands in her shadow, and so do most of the modern songwriters. It isn't that she is perfect. Kate takes some getting used to if you were as I was raised in the American South on country and blues and whatever the radio served up in the Sixties. On the other hand if like my son, you never are too far from your Pink Floyd mp3s and have a slightly cynical attitude toward whatever the machine is serving up this week, well then you might understand. I dunno. If you understood, you'd have this CD.

And maybe like me, it would be sitting there open and unplayed. You see, when I get a new Kate Bush CD, my mind goes away for awhile. It's like getting a sugar straw full of liquid LSD. It makes me doubt my talent, my skills, my music, my romances, my life, my job.... it makes me weak kneed and slobbery. For you readers who think this is a sex thing, well... you are right about that. She is 47 and I am 51 and so the f**k what.... she is Kate Bush. No one does it better; no one ever has.

I've simply too much to do to risk losing it to this sultry delicious maddening woman. I may have to stare at that soundwave profile of a bird call for another month until I've completed mixing my own album and finishing this production of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". If I listen to that album, I'll stop working, start analysing and comparing, and dammit, another silly season will be done before I've the guts to get back to my own work.

.... it's just too risky.... it's like... well... you know what it's like.... but i just gotta... too weak... too overcome by.... KateLust.

Bye bye focus... hello Kate.