Kate Bush Songs For "Stranger Things" Fans
Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" quickly shot to the top of the charts after it played a key role in the fourth season of "Stranger Things." Bush herself celebrated the song's newfound popularity by issuing a statement on her website that read, "You might've heard that the first part of the fantastic, gripping new series of 'Stranger Things' has recently been released on Netflix. It features the song, 'Running Up That Hill' which is being given a whole new lease of life by the young fans who love the show—I love it too! Because of this, 'Running Up That Hill' is charting around the world and has entered the UK chart at No. 8. It's all really exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who has supported the song. I wait with bated breath for the rest of the series in July."
The "Stranger Things" team took a careful approach to getting Bush to approve the song's usage. "Kate Bush is selective when it comes to licensing her music and because of that, we made sure to get script pages and footage for her to review so she could see exactly how the song would be used," Wende Crowley, Sony Music Publishing's SVP of creative marketing, told Variety.
The song's appearance on the show has garnered Bush a new legion of young fans, but Bush has been iconic for decades. Since she released her debut single, "Wuthering Heights," at the age of 18, she has continuously broken artistic boundaries, releasing a total of 10 studio albums, all of which reached the UK Top 10. All the while, the artist has remained reclusive, embarking on only one tour in 1979 and re-emerging a full 35 years later for a residency in London.
Bush began writing songs at the age of 11 and was discovered by Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. Her music is lush, surreal, and unabashedly weird, and her repertoire includes everything from antiwar protest songs to explorations of literature, queerness, and much more, making her the perfect artist to represent the "Stranger Things" band of outcasts. Today, her influence can be heard in the work of Björk, Billie Eilish, FKA Twigs, OutKast, and countless other artists. For any fans of "Running Up That Hill" looking to dive into Bush's body of work, these eight songs are great places to start — and perhaps you'll even find your very own Vecna song among them.
