How Kate Bush helped me at the low points in my life

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Sometimes a song can carry a person’s grief for a few precious minutes, absorb sadness in the weight of its notes, rhythms and silences. This happened to me very powerfully when I was a new mother, struggling after a difficult pregnancy and birth, when my grief for my late father had returned. I was a parent thinking of another parent who wasn’t here any more. 

Nostalgia radio stations soothed me, like the Absolute 80s channel, full of songs I enjoyed during earlier tough times in my life. I would sing Yazz’s huge 1988 no. 1 hit, The Only Way Is Up – a song I loved as a ten-year-old – to my baby in the kitchen, feeling every line resonate. “We’ve been broken down,” I sang. “Hold on, hold on.” A song from my past became a place of familiarity, almost as if it had its own powers of empathy. 

Songs can connect us deeply with our pasts, reconnecting us to the building blocks of who we are. A pioneering 2009 study led by Professor Petr Janata of the University of California, Davis, revealed that memorable songs activate the same part of our brains as that responsible for autobiographical memory: a crucial part of our identity. Songs are often most meaningful to us when we’re adolescents and young people, he said, when the brain is developing most rapidly. By longing for songs from those times, we are longing for those original moments of delight to be re-ignited.

Another song that soothed my grief more profoundly came later, at my dream gig, Kate Bush’s first concert in 35 years, at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. I’d been asked to review it, so left my baby behind with my husband; the journey was a terrifying blur. Early on, Bush played two of my favourite songs of hers live for the first time – Hounds Of Love and Running Up That Hill. For a while, I felt unable to immerse myself in these songs I knew so well – they felt like they were from another world, and another version of me. But then a new track came along and upturned me completely.

She played Among Angels, a piano-and-vocal track from her 2011 album, 50 Words For Snow. Bush’s lyric was directed at someone in great need. “I might know what you mean when you say you fall apart”, she sang. 

There were angels that could be called if they were needed, she added, in whose hands her listener could “rest your weary world”. In those moments, in the middle of a rapturous crowd willing her on, it felt like Bush was singing to me. 

I cried buckets that night, and have revisited the song regularly since; it created a world in which other people knew how I felt and could give me comfort. When I hear it now, I think of my father as the angel Bush sang about, shimmering in the edges of my life, helping me along. Songs can provide ideas to console us, I have realised, and give us strength. 

We all experience grief in our lives, and many of us will have found some support, however momentary, in a song. This is because 95 per cent of people experience musical stimuli as something that provides or produces pleasure; only five per cent have a condition called musical anhedonia, where brain structure from birth or subsequent injury impairs those neural connections. 

A song can therefore appear in our saddest moments as a solid set of rungs to grip onto. This is partly because we usually hear songs on the radio or on the formats on which they were originally released – in other words, in the same form as when they were originally recorded. The song isn’t changing in the space of live performance. Its familiarity is reassuring. When we hear the same notes placed in the same way, we are unconsciously remembering all those previous instances in which that song gave us succour. A song carries our previous selves when it is repeated.

But if a new song has grabbed us when we are grieving, something different has happened. Out of the blue, a new moment of understanding has arrived. Our feelings have been reflected by another person, or other people, in an uplifting art form. That sense of serendipity gains a sense of authority when we know it can be shared with, and listened to, by others. 

Songs at funerals also often give us opportunities to remember people we grieve for. In more secular services today, songs are often chosen to capture an element of a late person’s personality, or a person can even choose a song themselves if they are suitably prepared. In 2018, my friend Pat Long, a music journalist turned editor, died of a cancerous brain tumour at the age of 41. He had typed up his funeral wishes, including three songs, one of which was played as his memorial service came to a close.  

The song was Pressure Drop, the 1970 reggae hit for Toots And The Maytals, lifted by a high-tuned crisp snare and a lean, sprightly bassline. As it played, we felt our limbs stir, our feet twitch. I talked to Pat’s wife about it later, the author Kat Lister, who herself has written powerfully about the machinations of grief. “A lot of the lyrics are heavy, but there’s a momentum and lightness there,” she said. “It was important to have that mood in the room on that day… and that all came from him.”

Many people contacted Lister about the song after the funeral, saying how it had lingered in their minds over the following days – and how it continued to pick them up. I felt the same. We were unusual custodians of Pressure Drop now, carrying it in an altered, heightened way through our ordinary days, our longer lives. 

Listening to it alongside The Only Way Is Up and Among Angels, it reminds me that songs are not just about soaking up loss. They are about savouring life.

These songs and others are explored in Jude Rogers’s The Sound Of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives, published by White Rabbit on 28th April, and available to pre-order now.