Hello Earth

Side B of Hounds of Love is called “The Ninth Wave” — a song cycle about a woman floating alone in the ocean at night, drifting between consciousness and hypothermia, dreaming and dying and perhaps surviving. “Hello Earth” arrives near the end of this suite, at the moment when the protagonist has ascended — somehow, in the logic of the dream — above the storm to see it from space. She watches the weather systems forming over America. She speaks to the planet from above it.

The arrangement is extraordinary: Fairlight synthesizer, orchestral strings, and a Georgian folk choir whose sample fills the song with the quality of ancient, collective human sound. Bush described it as “a lullaby for the Earth.” The choir — from Georgian composer Giya Kancheli — was not originally composed for this context; Bush found it, recognized something in it, and built the song’s emotional architecture around the fit.

The tension between the cosmic scale of the imagery — a woman floating in orbit, watching storms develop over continents — and the intimacy of Bush’s vocal is the song’s defining quality. She sounds close, personal, frightened, in awe. The Earth below her is enormous. The voice addressing it is small. The gap between those two scales is where the feeling lives.

“Hello Earth / With just one hand held up high / I can blot you out / Out of sight.”

“Hello Earth” is buried on Side B of an album whose Side A generated all of the commercial attention. “Running Up That Hill” is magnificent; “Hounds of Love” is extraordinary; the Ninth Wave suite is something else entirely — a forty-minute work that rewards the kind of sustained attention that pop music rarely asks for and almost never earns.

Kate Bush earned it.