Kate Bush is an artist I admire greatly, and she’s a big influence on my own paltry work. I look to Kate Bush when I need to take risks for the sake of the fiction, when I need to be brave.
This song, ‘And Dream of Sheep,’ was first released on Hounds of Love in 1985.
It’s quite sad. And beautiful.
That, in and of itself, is a huge accomplishment, just the song.
A live version is coming out on a concert album called Before the Dawn, due out next week. Bush made a video for it — nothing new there. The song is sung from the POV of someone who is lost at sea. In the cold water. Wearing a lifejacket that blinks its feeble red light:
Little light, shining
Little light, guide them
To me
My face is all lit up
My face is all lit up
If they find me racing white horses
They’ll not take me for a buoy
Let me be weak, let me sleep,
And dream of sheep
Oh, I’ll wake up to any sound of engines …
I grew up on an island surrounded by the North Atlantic, and I’ve returned to it. Drowning, hypothermia, loss at sea, the terrible solitude of survival, however brief, in cold salt water: these are not abstract images but hard, hard realties. My grandfather Francis, who served in the Royal Navy in WWII, ended up in the water like that three times. Three God damned times: ship destroyed, buddies dying, bobbing in helpless misery in salt water where others wanted to kill him. Him, and how many others? He came home. He never spoke of it. I only learned about after he’d died.
That water not unforgiving — it’s indifferent. And there’s the terror of the solitude.
So the song has its power.
The video, recorded last month, shares that power. Bush is really in water there. not terribly cold … but cold enough that she developed mild hypothermia and had to stop filming for a day.
Dangerous? Perhaps. What risks will you take to communicate?
michelle butler hallett 
I’m plunging into my writing time with images I had not previously considered. Thank you Michelle!