Monday Music, week 7. (Wuthering Heights)

Before You Press Play

A quick warning before you scroll any further.

If you are currently under the influence of anything stronger than a cup of tea… maybe don’t watch the video for this one just yet.

I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Because Wuthering Heights isn’t just a song. The video feels less like something you watch and more like something that slowly happens to you. The movements are strange. The expressions are intense. The wind machine appears to have a personal vendetta. At one point, you’ll question whether she’s dancing or attempting to communicate with another dimension.

And yet somehow, it’s beautiful.

Mesmerising in a way that’s hard to explain without sounding like you’ve completely lost the plot. It doesn’t follow the usual rules of performance. It doesn’t try to look cool. It doesn’t feel rehearsed in the way modern videos often do. It feels dreamlike. Floaty. Slightly unsettling in places. Like you’ve stumbled into someone else’s memory and they’re not entirely sure you’re meant to be there.

Her eyes follow you.
Her movements don’t quite match what you expect.
Her voice climbs and twists in ways that don’t feel grounded in anything familiar.

And before you know it, you’re not watching a music video anymore. You’re trying to work out why it’s making you feel the way it is. It’s so mesmerising that you will end up watching it a few times… Sorry, but enjoy.

So yes. If you’re already a bit wavy, maybe save the visuals for later.

Because this week’s Monday Music isn’t just about listening to a song. It’s about stepping into something that doesn’t quite sit neatly in the world it was created in… and somehow never has.

Press play when you’re ready.

The Song That Found Me First

This wasn’t a planned choice.

There was no moment where I sat down and thought, “Right, I’m going to listen to some Kate Bush this week.” No sudden wave of nostalgia. No recommendation from a friend. No playlist that happened to throw it my way.

It just… appeared.

You know when a song drifts back into your life without asking to do so? Not as some big dramatic reintroduction. Just quietly slipping into your thoughts like it never really left in the first place. That’s what Wuthering Heights has done to me this week.

And I still don’t fully understand why.

It’s been sitting there in the background of my mind for days now, maybe weeks. That voice. That strange, almost pleading tone that doesn’t quite feel like singing in the traditional sense. It’s not trying to impress you. It’s not trying to be catchy. It’s not trying to sit comfortably in your ears like most modern tracks are designed to do.

It feels like it’s asking something of you.

Like it wants your attention in a way that goes beyond enjoyment. Beyond tapping your foot or nodding along while you’re driving. It wants you to stop what you’re doing and listen. Properly listen. Not to the melody or the production, but to the emotion behind it.

And that’s where it starts to get under your skin.

Because the more I’ve listened to it this week, the less it feels like a performance and the more it feels like a conversation. Not a loud or a clear one. More like someone speaking from another room in the house, and you can’t quite make out what they’re saying, but you know it matters enough to get up and check.

There’s something in the way she delivers those lines that feels desperate without being dramatic. Fragile without sounding weak. Emotional without tipping into full force chaos. It sits in this strange space between storytelling and pleading, as if the voice itself is trying to bridge a distance that isn’t just physical.

And maybe that’s why it’s stayed with me.

Because it doesn’t resolve itself at all.

It doesn’t give you a clear emotional landing point the way a lot of songs do. There’s no tidy sense of closure at the end of it. There’s no moment where everything clicks into place and you feel satisfied that you’ve understood what you were supposed to understand.

It lingers.

Like fog hanging around long after the weather has supposedly cleared. Like a thought you can’t quite finish because you’re not sure where it’s trying to take you.

And this is where it becomes personal.

Because sometimes, when something keeps circling back like this, it’s not really about the song at all. It’s about what the song is nudging in you. About what it’s gently pointing towards without saying it outright.

I’ve written before about feeling out of step growing up. About being quiet in spaces that didn’t always reward quietness. About how quickly differences can become a target when you’re younger, especially when it shows up in something as simple as the way you speak.

My stutter didn’t arrive overnight. It developed slowly, over time, after being mocked often enough that speaking became something to avoid rather than something to enjoy. Something to get through rather than something to express yourself with.

And once that shift happens, it’s hard to undo.

You start to hold things back. You second-guess what you’re about to say before you’ve even opened your mouth. You learn to stay quiet in moments where you should probably speak up, because it feels safer to exist on the edges of conversations than risk stumbling your way through the middle of them.

You become very aware of your own voice.

Of the way it sounds, how it might be received or even whether it’s worth using at all.

So when I listen to Wuthering Heights now, all these years later, there’s something in that delivery that feels familiar in a way I can’t quite articulate. Not because we sound alike. Clearly, we don’t. But because there’s a vulnerability in it. A sense that the voice itself is reaching for something it isn’t sure it’s allowed to have.

It doesn’t feel controlled.

It feels honest.

Like someone who has something to say and is saying it anyway, even if it comes out strange. Even if it doesn’t fit neatly into what people expect a voice to sound like. Even if it risks being misunderstood.

And maybe that’s why it’s followed me around this week.

Because there’s a difference between a song you enjoy and a song that unsettles you slightly. One makes your day a bit better. The other makes you stop and think about why it’s making you feel the way it is.

Wuthering Heights doesn’t feel like it’s trying to entertain me.

It feels like it’s trying to get back in somewhere.

And I’m still working out where that is.

Eighteen Years Old and Refusing to Bend

It becomes even stranger when you realise how old she was when she made it.

Eighteen.

That’s it.

Eighteen years old when Wuthering Heights reached number one in the UK charts. And not just as the voice behind it. As the writer. The creator. The person who sat down and decided that this was the story she wanted to tell, and this was the way she wanted to tell it.

She became the first female artist in UK chart history to reach number one with a self-written song.

That’s not just impressive. It’s almost difficult to comprehend when you look at how the industry works now.

We live in a time where songs can have five, six, sometimes ten writers attached to them. Where lyrics are shaped in rooms full of professionals who know exactly which phrases will land on the radio and which melodies will keep people listening long enough to avoid skipping. Everything is polished. Everything is adjusted. Everything is measured against what has worked before.

Kate Bush sat down as a teenager and wrote a song from the perspective of a fictional ghost from a 19th-century novel.

And the public still put it at number one.

But it very nearly didn’t happen that way.

When it came time to release a single from her debut album, The Kick Inside, the record label didn’t want Wuthering Heights to lead the way. They were pushing for a different track instead. Something more conventional. Something with guitars. Something that sounded closer to what people expected a debut single to sound like in the late 1970s.

James and the Cold Gun was the safer option. Although still very different to what was being released at the time.

It had a rock feel to it. A familiarity that would have sat comfortably alongside other releases of the time. It wouldn’t have raised eyebrows. It wouldn’t have made anyone question whether it was too strange for mainstream radio.

Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, was a risk.

It was theatrical. Emotional. Unusual in both its structure and its vocal delivery. It didn’t follow the patterns that labels had come to trust when launching a new artist. And from a business perspective, you can understand the hesitation. Releasing something so different as a debut single could easily have gone wrong.

But Kate refused.

She insisted that if the album was going to be released, Wuthering Heights had to be the first thing people heard.

Think about that for a second. No, really, think about it.

An eighteen-year-old girl in the 1970s telling her record label that she was not willing to compromise on how her work would be introduced to the world. In an industry that was, and still is in many ways, dominated by older executives who believe they know what audiences want better than the artists themselves.

It would have been far easier to agree.

To trust their experience and take the safer route.
To release the track that sounded more marketable and save the stranger one for later.

But she didn’t.

And because of that decision, millions of people’s first experience of Kate Bush wasn’t a guitar-driven rock track that blended into the sound of the time. It was this.

That is the reason I just went with this song this week.

A song about longing. About distance. About trying to reconnect with someone who is no longer there. (Or rather, where she wasn’t, if you know the story. Just listen to the lyrics, or read them… look up the lyrics.) Delivered in a voice that didn’t sound like anyone else on the radio.

It didn’t just introduce her as a singer.

It introduced her as an artist who was willing to protect her own expression, even at the very beginning of her career, when the pressure to fit in would have been at its strongest.

And maybe that’s part of why it still stands out today.

Because you’re not just hearing a young musician finding her feet. You’re hearing someone who knew exactly what she wanted to say and was prepared to argue for the right to say it in her own way.

That level of conviction is rare at any age.

At eighteen, it’s extraordinary.

A Voice That Shouldn’t Have Worked

Let’s talk about the voice.

Because it’s the first thing most people notice, and often the first thing that divides them.

There’s no easing into it. No gentle introduction. No familiar tone that settles you before the rest of the song unfolds. It arrives high. Urgent. Almost breathless in places. Like it’s already mid-sentence by the time you realise what you’re listening to.

And if we’re being honest, it shouldn’t have worked.

Not in the late 1970s, when radio was full of grounded vocals that sat comfortably in the mix. Voices that were rich, smooth, and controlled. Designed to reassure you. Designed to sound confident and complete from the first note to the last.

Kate Bush’s delivery in Wuthering Heights feels like the opposite of that.

It wavers and climbs unexpectedly.
It stretches certain words out in a way that feels more emotional than musical.

There are moments where it almost sounds like she’s speaking rather than singing. Moments where the pitch feels less important than the feeling behind it. Like she’s not performing a song as much as she’s inhabiting a character who needs to be heard.

Because that’s exactly what she’s doing.

She isn’t singing as herself. She’s singing as Cathy. As a presence. As someone trying to reach across a divide that can’t be crossed in any normal way. And when you approach it from that perspective, the unusual delivery starts to make sense.

This isn’t meant to sound perfect.

It’s meant to sound desperate.

It’s meant to feel like someone who has waited too long to speak and now doesn’t know how to moderate what comes out. Someone who has something important to say but is painfully aware that they may not be listened to once they’ve said it.

And that’s a very different kind of vocal performance than what most pop music asks for.

Pop tends to reward control. Clarity. Consistency. Voices that fit neatly into the production without drawing too much attention to themselves unless it’s for a well-timed high note or a polished run.

This voice demands space.

Which is probably why it was such a risk at the time. It didn’t sound like the radio. It didn’t sound like rock. It didn’t sound like disco. It didn’t even sound particularly interested in sounding like music in the traditional sense at all.

It sounded like emotion.

And emotion, when left unfiltered, can be uncomfortable.

Growing up, I became very aware of my own voice in a way that most people probably don’t think about until much later in life. When speaking becomes something that can be mocked, something that can draw attention for the wrong reasons, you start to notice every hesitation. Every stumble. Every moment where the words don’t come out the way you wanted them to.

You become cautious.

You hold back and speak less.
You learn to avoid situations where you might be asked to explain yourself out loud.

Because the safest voice is often the one that isn’t used at all.

So listening to something like Wuthering Heights now, where the voice is allowed to exist in all its strangeness without being smoothed down or corrected, feels almost confrontational in its honesty. Like a reminder that expression doesn’t always need to be tidy to be meaningful.

That sometimes, the way something is said matters just as much as what is being said.

And sometimes, sounding different is exactly what allows you to be heard. My stutter taught me that even if I can’t talk too well, I can talk in a different way. This is what created this blog, I just wanted to be heard in my truest form, and that is exactly what Kate did with this song.

Literature in the Charts

The more time you spend with Wuthering Heights, the more unusual its very existence starts to feel.

Not just because of the voice, or the atmosphere, or the way it refuses to sit comfortably alongside other songs from the same era. But because of what it’s actually about.

This wasn’t written as a vague love song that could be applied to anyone. It wasn’t inspired by a breakup, or a fleeting relationship, or some romanticised idea of longing that’s been filtered into something easily digestible.

It was written from the perspective of a ghost.

More specifically, from the perspective of Catherine Earnshaw, a character from Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, returning after death and begging to be let back into the life she once had. The entire song is essentially a conversation with Heathcliff from beyond the grave. A voice at the window asking to be recognised. Asking to be allowed in.

And this reached number one.

In a decade where music was becoming increasingly commercialised, where image and sound were starting to align with what labels believed would sell best, a teenage artist released a song rooted in 19th century literature and still managed to connect with a mainstream audience.

That’s remarkable.

Because she didn’t just write this as an adult reflecting on something she’d studied years before. Kate Bush was only seventeen years old when she wrote Wuthering Heights, reportedly inspired after watching a BBC adaptation of the novel on television.

Seventeen.

Most people at that age are trying to find their place socially. Trying to work out where they fit in at school. Wondering what they might want to do with their lives once the safety net of education disappears. Writing diary entries about crushes or friendships or whatever small dramas happen to fill the space at that time of life.

She watched a period drama and decided to write a song from the perspective of a dead literary character attempting to reconnect with the love she lost.

And it’s important to understand that this wasn’t some one off moment of inspiration that she somehow stumbled into by accident.

By the time she signed her recording contract, Kate Bush had already written dozens of songs. Not fragments. Not unfinished ideas. Complete pieces of music that she had been developing throughout her teenage years. She wasn’t discovering songwriting when she wrote Wuthering Heights. She had already been living inside it for a long time.

While other artists were still trying to shape their influences into something recognisable, she was creating entire emotional landscapes from scratch. Writing about grief. Memory. Longing. Story. Not in the way pop music often approaches those themes, but in a way that felt rooted in character and perspective.

That changes how you hear the song.

Because suddenly it isn’t just impressive that it exists. It becomes almost surreal that someone so young would choose this as the story they wanted to tell, and then tell it in a way that refused to simplify or modernise the emotional intensity of the source material.

Literature and pop music rarely meet in that way without one diluting the other. Stories are simplified. Themes are softened. Complex emotions are flattened into something that can be repeated in a chorus without losing listeners halfway through.

Kate Bush didn’t do that.

She leaned into it.

She kept the obsession. The regret. The sense of unfinished connection that runs through Brontë’s novel. And rather than translating it into something modern and relatable, she preserved its strangeness.

The result is a song that feels less like a retelling and more like a continuation. As if Cathy’s voice never really stopped speaking and this is just the moment it finally reached us in a form we could hear.

Which ties back into what I’ve always tried to focus on with Monday Music.

Meaning over hype.

Because this wasn’t written with charts in mind. It wasn’t built around a beat that would sit nicely on a playlist. It wasn’t created to capture attention in the first ten seconds before a listener decided whether to skip.

It was written because there was something to express.

A feeling that couldn’t be simplified without losing its weight. A story that demanded to be told in a way that didn’t prioritise convenience over honesty.

And maybe that’s why it still resonates now.

Because even if you’ve never read Wuthering Heights, even if you’re unfamiliar with Cathy or Heathcliff or the world they inhabit, the emotional core of the song still finds you. The sense of longing. The frustration of being shut out. The desire to reconnect with something that has already slipped out of reach.

Those are human experiences.

And when they’re expressed without being smoothed into something more palatable, they tend to stay with you longer than anything designed to be immediately understood.

Which is exactly what this song does.

The Artist, Not the Product

It’s easy to talk about the song.

About the writing. The voice. The fact that she was seventeen when she wrote it and eighteen when it reached number one. All of that is remarkable on its own. But none of it happened in isolation, and none of it makes complete sense until you start to understand the way Kate Bush approached creativity as a whole.

Because she wasn’t just writing songs.

She was building worlds.

From a very young age, she wasn’t interested in music as something that simply existed to be heard in the background of people’s lives. She saw it as something that could carry narrative. Something that could communicate emotion in a way that words alone often struggled to do. And crucially, something that didn’t have to stay confined to sound.

Long before music videos became a standard part of promoting a single, she was already thinking about how movement could be used to tell a story. Not in a choreographed, commercial sense. Not in the way pop acts would later use dancers as visual support for the performance. But in a much more intentional, expressive way.

She trained in dance.

She studied mime under Lindsay Kemp, a performer known for his work in physical theatre, who also mentored artists like David Bowie. And that influence shows in everything she did. Because mime, at its core, is about communicating emotion without relying on speech. It’s about gesture. About stillness. About tension held in the body rather than released through language.

That matters when you listen to Wuthering Heights.

Because suddenly the voice isn’t working alone. It’s part of something larger. A physical performance that exists alongside the music. The reaching hands. The way she turns away and then back again. The urgency in her movements that mirrors the urgency in the lyrics.

When you watch the video now, it feels strange.

Not because it’s technically outdated, but because it doesn’t behave the way modern performance is expected to. It doesn’t aim for perfection. It doesn’t try to present her as polished or untouchable. There’s a vulnerability in the way she moves that feels almost uncomfortable at times, like you’re watching someone express something too private to be staged.

And yet it’s completely deliberate.

Every gesture is part of the storytelling.

The way she drifts across the frame. The way her arms extend as if she’s trying to bridge a distance that can’t be crossed. The way her expression shifts between longing and frustration within the same line. It feels theatrical because it is theatrical. Not in the sense of exaggeration, but in the sense that each moment is meant to carry emotional weight.

Kate Bush approached music like theatre.

Like each song was a scene that needed to be inhabited rather than performed. And that changes the relationship between artist and audience entirely. Because instead of simply listening to what she was saying, you were invited to witness how it felt.

To see the emotion rather than just hear it.

That’s a very different kind of connection.

Especially in an industry that, even in the late 1970s, was beginning to shape artists into products. Into images that could be marketed consistently. Into sounds that could be relied upon to deliver similar results with each release.

Find what works. Repeat it. Refine it slightly. Release it again.

Kate Bush didn’t follow that model.

Not because she was trying to rebel against it, but because she was too focused on expression to allow herself to be reduced to something repeatable. Each song demanded its own visual language. Each story required its own atmosphere. The movement had to match the emotion. The performance had to reflect the character.

She wasn’t interested in looking perfect.

She was interested in being understood.

And that often meant allowing herself to appear strange. Allowing herself to move in ways that didn’t fit conventional ideas of how a female artist should present herself at the time. Allowing vulnerability to sit at the centre of her work rather than pushing it to the edges where it could be controlled.

Because vulnerability, when it’s genuine, is difficult to package.

It doesn’t always photograph well.
It doesn’t always fit neatly into a brand.
It doesn’t always make sense on first listen.

But it stays with people.

And that’s the difference between an artist and a product.

A product is designed to be consumed quickly. To deliver a familiar experience that satisfies an expectation. An artist is often trying to communicate something that isn’t easily explained, something that might not even be fully understood by the person creating it until after the fact.

Kate Bush allowed that uncertainty to exist in her work.

She allowed silence to carry meaning.
She allowed movement to replace explanation.
She allowed the performance to feel unfinished in places if that was what the emotion demanded.

And because of that, what she created felt less like entertainment and more like an invitation into her imagination.

An invitation that didn’t require you to understand everything immediately.

Only to feel it.

Which is probably why, all these years later, it still feels so difficult to look away.

There Was No One Like Her Then

To really understand how unusual Kate Bush was when Wuthering Heights arrived, you have to look at what else was happening at the time.

The late 1970s were loud in very specific ways. Punk had exploded into public consciousness with an urgency that felt almost confrontational by design. Raw guitars, short aggressive songs, music that didn’t want to entertain so much as challenge. It was stripping everything back to something immediate and unapologetic, rejecting the polish of the decade before in favour of something more honest, even if that honesty came wrapped in noise and anger.

At the same time, disco was thriving in the opposite direction. Where punk pushed against the system, disco offered escape from it. Smooth vocals sat on top of carefully arranged instrumentation, songs were built to move bodies rather than provoke thought, and the entire experience leaned into rhythm as a kind of relief from the tension that other movements were beginning to highlight. It understood exactly what it wanted to do and delivered it with precision.

Rock, meanwhile, had already established its place. Familiar structures, recognisable sounds, artists working comfortably within a framework that audiences had come to expect. It was dependable in a way that allowed listeners to engage without needing to question where the music was trying to take them. Guitars, drums, bass, vocals, all arranged in patterns that felt safe because they were known.

Each of these movements had a clear identity. They understood themselves, and more importantly, the industry understood them. They could be marketed. Categorised. Positioned within a scene that made sense to radio stations and record labels alike.

And then Wuthering Heights appeared.

A theatrical art pop track written from the perspective of a fictional ghost in a 19th century novel, delivered in a voice that didn’t sound like it belonged to any of the worlds developing around it. It didn’t try to align itself with the aggression of punk, the escapism of disco, or the familiarity of rock. It simply existed alongside them, operating on a completely different emotional frequency.

That’s often the hardest place for an artist to exist.

Because when you don’t fit neatly into a category, it becomes difficult for the industry to know what to do with you. Radio stations tend to prefer familiarity because it keeps listeners comfortable. Labels tend to prefer predictability because it makes success easier to replicate. Audiences are often guided by what they already recognise, even if they don’t realise it at the time.

Kate Bush offered none of those things.

Her work was theatrical without being musical theatre, emotional without being confessional in the traditional sense, literary without feeling academic. She wasn’t trying to recreate the sound of the time so much as translate stories into music in a way that felt closer to performance art than to pop.

And yet people listened.

More than that, they connected.

Which suggests something important about audiences that often gets overlooked in discussions about what sells and what doesn’t. People aren’t always looking for the safest option. They aren’t always drawn to what they already understand. Sometimes they respond to something precisely because it feels unfamiliar, because it offers an emotional experience that hasn’t been smoothed down into something predictable.

Wuthering Heights didn’t behave the way a debut single was expected to behave. It didn’t introduce Kate Bush as a singer in the conventional sense. It introduced her as someone who was willing to approach music from a different angle entirely. Someone who saw songs not just as melodies with lyrics attached, but as stories that could be inhabited through sound and movement.

While other artists were aligning themselves with genres, she was aligning herself with ideas. With characters. With emotional states that didn’t necessarily translate neatly into the musical landscape of the time.

She wasn’t chasing trends.

She was following instinct.

And instinct doesn’t always lead you somewhere comfortable. It leads you somewhere honest.

Which is why, even now, when you place Wuthering Heights alongside other tracks from the late 70s, it still feels like it arrived from somewhere else entirely. Like it slipped through the cracks between movements rather than emerging from any one of them.

There was no blueprint for what she was doing. No established path she could follow and no guarantee that audiences would understand it once they heard it.

But she made it anyway.

And somehow, against the expectations of the industry and the assumptions of the time, it found its way into the mainstream without losing the very things that made it strange in the first place.

There really was no one like her then.

And There Has Been No One Like Her Since

If Section Six is about understanding why Kate Bush stood apart from her peers in the late 1970s, then this is where it becomes clear just how difficult it would be for someone like her to emerge in the same way today.

Because the landscape has changed.

Modern music exists in an environment that moves faster than ever before. Songs are no longer given the space to grow quietly over time. They are released into an ecosystem where their success is often determined within hours. If they don’t connect quickly, if they don’t capture attention in those crucial first seconds, they risk being skipped, forgotten, replaced by something else that does.

Streaming has reshaped the way artists create, whether they intend it to or not.

Hooks are expected early. Choruses arrive sooner. Production choices are often influenced by how a track will sound through phone speakers rather than how it might feel in a live room. There’s an unspoken understanding that accessibility matters, that clarity helps, that sounding familiar increases the likelihood of being added to playlists that might introduce the music to a wider audience.

None of this is inherently wrong.

But it does create an environment where risk becomes harder to justify.

Because risk doesn’t always perform well immediately. It doesn’t always fit neatly into algorithmic recommendations. It doesn’t always lend itself to being summarised in fifteen seconds of video content. And when success is measured in streams rather than in long term connection, the pressure to sound recognisable can begin to outweigh the desire to sound original.

Kate Bush emerged at a time when artists were still allowed to develop without quite so much instant scrutiny. When a song could take a moment to settle into the public consciousness before being judged. When audiences had the opportunity to hear something unusual more than once before deciding whether they liked it.

Wuthering Heights would be a difficult sell today.

Not because it lacks quality, but because it refuses to behave in the way modern releases are often expected to behave. The vocal doesn’t sit comfortably in the mix. The structure isn’t designed for quick consumption. The emotional tone is intense in a way that might feel unfamiliar to listeners who are used to more grounded delivery.

It asks for patience.

It asks for attention.

And those are increasingly rare commodities in a culture that encourages constant movement from one track to the next.

That’s not to say that originality no longer exists. There are still artists creating work that pushes boundaries, that resists easy categorisation, that prioritises expression over immediate accessibility.

But they often exist at the edges.

In smaller scenes.
In independent spaces.
In communities that value authenticity over reach.

Which brings us back to why someone like Kate Bush feels so singular even now.

She didn’t have to choose between mainstream success and artistic freedom in the way many artists do today. Wuthering Heights managed to become a chart topping single without sacrificing the very things that made it distinctive. It didn’t dilute its strangeness in order to be accepted. It didn’t soften its emotional intensity to avoid alienating listeners.

It remained exactly what she intended it to be.

And that balance is difficult to achieve in any era.

Perhaps even more so now, when the systems that distribute music are designed to reward consistency over experimentation. To highlight what works quickly rather than what might endure over time.

Kate Bush created something that didn’t just fit into its moment. It stepped slightly outside of it.

And because of that, it has never really felt tied to the time in which it was released.

There has been no one quite like her since.

Let Me In

After everything else, it always comes back to the song.

To that voice at the window.

To the feeling that something is trying to reach you from a place you can’t quite see clearly anymore. Because once you’ve understood who Kate Bush was when she wrote Wuthering Heights, once you’ve seen the landscape she emerged into and the way she chose to stand apart from it, the song itself starts to take on a slightly different weight.

It stops sounding theatrical for the sake of it.

It starts sounding necessary.

The pleading tone that runs through it no longer feels like a stylistic choice. It feels like an emotional one. Like the character she’s inhabiting has been waiting too long to be heard and now doesn’t know how to speak in a way that won’t overwhelm the listener.

“I’m so cold, let me in your window…”

It’s such a simple line when you read it back. But when she sings it, it carries something heavier than the words themselves suggest. A distance that can’t be closed in any ordinary way. A sense of being shut out from somewhere you once belonged.

And maybe that’s why it’s followed me around this week.

Because sometimes the things we try to leave behind don’t leave us in return. Sometimes they sit just out of view, waiting for a moment when we’re quiet enough to notice them again. A version of who we were. A part of ourselves that we stopped showing because it felt safer to keep it hidden.

For me, growing up with a voice that didn’t always behave the way I wanted it to meant learning very quickly that silence could be protective. That speaking less could draw less attention. That fitting in sometimes required stepping back from expression rather than leaning into it.

And once that habit forms, it can stay with you long after the original reason for it has passed.

So when I listen to Wuthering Heights now, there’s something in that delivery that feels like it’s pushing against the idea of staying quiet. Like it’s refusing to let distance become permanent. Refusing to accept that once you’ve been shut out of something, you have to remain outside forever.

It’s asking to be let in.

Not just physically, but emotionally. To be recognised. To be acknowledged as something that still matters even if time has moved on.

The ghost in the story is trying to reconnect with Heathcliff, but the metaphor stretches further than that. It becomes about memory. About identity. About the parts of ourselves we abandon because they don’t fit neatly into the roles we end up playing as we grow older.

Maybe that’s why this song resonates differently depending on when you hear it.

Maybe that’s why it found its way back into my head this week without any clear invitation. Because sometimes music doesn’t arrive when you want it to. It arrives when you need it. When something inside you is trying to speak up again after being quiet for too long.

And sometimes, all it takes is a voice at the window to remind you that it’s still there.

Reader Songs
Real Music Made By Real People

While Kate Bush was fortunate enough to reach a number one single without compromising the strangeness that made her work so distinctive, there are countless artists creating in that same spirit today who may never receive that level of exposure.

Independent musicians writing honestly, experimenting with sound, telling stories that don’t always fit neatly into what algorithms prefer to recommend. Artists who are making music not because it’s guaranteed to perform well, but because they have something they feel compelled to express.

Each week, readers send in their own songs or the work of artists they believe deserve to be heard beyond their immediate circles. Tracks created without major label backing, without marketing teams, and without the safety net of mainstream promotion.

Just people making music because they need to.

Below are some of this week’s submissions. If you enjoy what you hear, consider giving them your support. A listen, a share, or even a simple follow can make more of a difference than you might think.

Also to accompany this blog series, I am also doing a spotify playlist, all songs featured in the Monday Music series will be added to the playlist. All songs added are from the artists profiles, so, don’t hesitate to listen to more of their songs and also follow them. Please do find them on social media too, most of the artists featured are from threads… they commented on my post to get their songs featured, so you are welcome to come find them.

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST LINK HERE

Please like, share and comment. Help my blog get anywhere, lets get this music out there.

THEPLAINANDSIMPLEGUY

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