With her Kate Bush cover, the artist pays homage to the legend’s 1978 song while combining her “two great loves of lyrical, ethereal artpop with all the grit of ’90s grunge”
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Admittedly I haven’t watched Stranger Things (I hear it’s about some currently-30-year-old children and, like, monsters or something?!), but I do know that the show has been responsible for transforming an entire new generation into retroactive ’80s kids through a soundtrack that isn’t so much responsible for putting artists on the map but, through exposing a new group of listeners to the original map itself, has landed songs of yesteryear on the charts of today.
According to posts from the ~275 music-centric Instagram accounts I follow, the most recent band to be re-introduced to the world in this fashion is Metallica, whose song “Master of Puppets” was used in a scene (they were “stoked”) and soon after, 36 years following its release, hit #1 on the iTunes rock chart. But before a bunch of Stranger fans + the internet at large (re)discovered this particular group of now nearly granddad-aged dudes, they had fixed their ears on another new-to-them legend: Kate Bush, whose 1985 single “Running Up That Hill” appeared on the fourth episode of the latest season and has since hit number one on Billboard charts, now stands at 482 million Spotify streams and has been nothing short of, um, absolutely everywhere this summer.
SO! Now that we’ve all happily jumped (back) on the Bush wagon, I have to—in true Brooklyn fashion—point you in the direction of someone who was a fan, ahem, before it before it was cool (again) man.
That brings me to the latest from Brooklyn artist Kira Metcalf: a cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” (off the 1978 album The Kick Inside) which she recorded a year ago, and that—a day ahead of its wide release—I’m absolutely thrilled to premiere here!
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but like with any good cover, Kira didn’t seek to simply duplicate the track but add her own spin to the song, trading the original piano for guitar, drawing from additional musical influences and playing to her strengths while paying beautiful homage to the original.
“When learning the song I realized it had this very Nirvana-esque chord progression, which made me want to combine my two great loves of lyrical, ethereal artpop with all the grit of ’90s grunge,” Kira said of the cover. “I recorded this last summer and with Kate having this glorious resurgence I figured now was the time.”
Another reason Kira’s cover couldn’t come at a more perfect time: The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever—an annual event, started in Brighton in 2013, where women don red dresses and gather to recreate the music video—is coming up on July 30th (also Bush’s birthday).
Unfortunately, halfway into writing that last sentence I realized that the article describing this phenomenon was actually from Time Out’s Sydney site, and that there’s (currently) no NYC event to be found—which, tbh, is truly nothing short of a travesty. SO: CALLING ALL CATHYS! Please blast Kira’s version of “Wuthering Heights” to practice your choreography, then don some scarlet and come July 30th meet in me in ~the moors~ of Prospect Park.
As far as I know, our Brooklyn Kate Bush doesn’t have a music vid for her cover of the song (yet), and this might just be the perfect opportunity…
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Follow Kira Metcalf at @kirametcalf, buy music on Bandcamp and add songs to your Spotify playlists!
Feature image provided by the artist.