"I think probably the only thing that is around in these songs is that I was really lonely when I wrote a lot of them. But it was really by my own choosing because I was devoting myself to songwriting and dancing and I wasn't really going out and seeing people"
About this Quote
Loneliness, in Kate Bush's telling, isn't a tragic backstory stapled onto the art; it's a production choice. She frames isolation as both raw material and self-imposed discipline, the kind of emotional austerity a young artist signs up for without quite knowing the long-term cost. The sting in the line comes from that quiet double accounting: she was "really lonely", and she also engineered the conditions that made loneliness inevitable.
That tension is classic Bush. Her music often sounds like it arrived from a private theater no one else had access to, full of voices, characters, and motion. Here, she reveals the less romantic mechanism behind that imaginative density: she was indoors, practicing, writing, dancing, not "going out and seeing people". The phrasing is almost apologetic, but it refuses a victim narrative. "By my own choosing" functions like a moral clause, a way of claiming agency while admitting deprivation. It's the artist's bargain stated plainly: attention is finite; devotion crowds out ordinary intimacy.
Context matters because Bush became famous early, and her craft was unusually physical and solitary at once. Pairing songwriting with dancing signals a total-body commitment, not just diary confessionalism. The subtext is that the songs aren't simply expressions of loneliness; they're solutions to it - companionship built out of imagination, rhythm, and voice. She's pointing at the hidden engine of her work: not suffering for its own sake, but the deliberate narrowing of a life until music is the main conversation partner.
That tension is classic Bush. Her music often sounds like it arrived from a private theater no one else had access to, full of voices, characters, and motion. Here, she reveals the less romantic mechanism behind that imaginative density: she was indoors, practicing, writing, dancing, not "going out and seeing people". The phrasing is almost apologetic, but it refuses a victim narrative. "By my own choosing" functions like a moral clause, a way of claiming agency while admitting deprivation. It's the artist's bargain stated plainly: attention is finite; devotion crowds out ordinary intimacy.
Context matters because Bush became famous early, and her craft was unusually physical and solitary at once. Pairing songwriting with dancing signals a total-body commitment, not just diary confessionalism. The subtext is that the songs aren't simply expressions of loneliness; they're solutions to it - companionship built out of imagination, rhythm, and voice. She's pointing at the hidden engine of her work: not suffering for its own sake, but the deliberate narrowing of a life until music is the main conversation partner.
Quote Details
| Topic | Loneliness |
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