This Album is Lonely, Part 2 (What Would We Do Without You?)

In my last post, I asked you to revisit a long-neglected album from your collection and tell us about it. Since I'm not the kind of guy who will ask the troops to do something I'm unwilling to do, I sat down this morning, tabbing through my albums for something I hadn't heard in a while. I found Kate Bush's The Sensual World, which was the first CD I bought, back in 1989. I was 16 or 17 and a year or so away from college.I hadn't really been a Kate fan before this album; I vaguely remembered "Running Up That Hill" and the "Don't Give Up" duet with Peter Gabriel, but I didn't like either of them all that much at the time. Then I saw the video for "Love and Anger", fell in love with both her and the song, and bought the album. I've listed to a couple of songs from it recently, but it had probably been two or three years at least since I've listened to it in its entirety.So I hit play — from the beginning, I was a little surprised by how familiar, yet different, it sounded. The breathy, warm "Mmm, yes" that opens the album sent a little thrill through me, just as it used to. I was young and pretty new to sex and sensuality, and "The Sensual World"'s interpretation of the conclusion of Ulysses (which I hadn't read at the time, but I was familiar with some of Joyce's other work), coming through my speakers in that voice, with those beautiful eyes looking out from the album cover, gave me one of my first inklings that sex could be more than what I knew of it, that the word sensual wasn't just a synonym for sexy. Today, the beauty of the song is still there, but some of the power is gone, as the message is no longer new.Then the reason I bought this album in the first place, "Love and Anger", came up. As I've said, I loved this song, but I now realized I never really knew why, aside from purely sonic reasons (the layered voices singing "What would we do without you", Gilmour's guitar, and, of course, that voice). Today I realized that song carries elements of the sort of love affair I've always been looking for: something intense, a little scary, occasionally sad, and gorgeous. Then something strange happened, and I still don't really understand it. About halfway through the song, I nearly broke down. There I am, at work, sitting in my office, a breath away from crying my eyes out. For the rest of the song, all I could do was sit there staring blankly at my computer screen, letting it all wash over me as I fought it. It wasn't nostalgia, it wasn't disappointment, it was ... I'm not sure. I wish I could explain it better, but I can't. After that, the rest of the album was less intense. I connected to first and last songs more than the middle then, and I still do, although hearing "Deeper Understanding", about a person looking to cure loneliness through computerized technology, is a very different experience today than it was in '89.As a whole, this album stands up remarkably well to me. It doesn't sound like it was made in this century, but it doesn't sound especially dated, either. The production and mastering hold up much better than they do in many '80's CD's, and the work Bush did with the Trio Bulgarka on this album has aged pretty nicely. The songs still speak to me, and the voice is still beautiful. So are those eyes.