Kate explains HoL

[nessus (Doug Alan)]

I posted this to net.music a week or so ago, and forgot to send it to
Love-Hounds too, where it really belongs.  So, here it is now...  This
is an article Kate wrote for the "Hounds Of Love" album issue of her
newsletter.  She explains, at least superficially, all of the songs on
HoL, so you may want to take this as a spoiler warning.

[Begin text of quoted article:]

This album is two very separate sides for me.  Each side has a title;
the first side is called "Hounds of Love" and is 5 separate songs, all
individual but in some way are linked because they are forms of love
songs.  The second side is called "The Ninth Wave" and is a conceptual
side consisting of seven tracks that are linked together.

It becomes increasingly difficult for me to talk about the content of
the songs, I'm not sure why -- maybe it's because the more I go on, the
more I feel it's for the songs to say than for me.  Especially with the
second side on this album I see it very visually -- I would eventually
love to see this as a piece of film and so I feel restricted about
talking about these songs other than a brief analysis of the story,
otherwise I find perhaps too much energy is going into talking about the
visual side of it rather than doing it.  I will try to give a brief
analysis and to fill you in more about some of the people we didn't get
round to talking about in the last newsletter.

The first track on the first side is "Running Up That Hill" and I'm sure
you will have all heard this by now.  I am very excited about how it's
been received by people, it's so rewarding after working for a long time
to see that your work is being received with open arms.  This song is
very much about two people who are in love and how the power of love is
almost too big for them, it leaves them very insecure and in fear of
losing each other.  It's also perhaps talking about some fundamental
differences between men and women.

The second song is called "Hounds Of Love" and is really about someone
who is afraid of being caught by the hounds that are chasing him.  I
wonder if everyone is perhaps ruled by fear and afraid of getting into
relationships on some level or another.  They can involve pain,
confusion and responsibilities and I think a lot of people are
particularly scared of responsibility.  Maybe the being involved isn't
as horrific as your imagination can build it up to being -- perhaps
these baying hounds are really friendly.

The next song is called "The Big Sky".  Someone sitting looking at the
sky watching the clouds change.  I used to do this a lot as a child,
just watching the clouds go into different shapes.  It hink we forget
these pleasures as adults we don't get as much time to enjoy those kind
of things, or think about them, we feel silly about what we used to do
naturally.  It's also suggesting the coming of the next flood how
perhaps the "fools on the hills" will be the wise ones.

The fourth song on this side is called "Mother Stands For Comfort".
It's about a son who has committed a terrible crime and how basically
although his mother knows that he's done something wrong she'll protect
him and care for him and hide him from the people who are looking for
him.  It's talking about a mother's love and how sometimes she will
actually go against the morality she feels within herself about what is
right and wrong if the child is endangered.

The last song is called "Cloudbusting" and this was inspired by a book
that I first found on a shelf nearly nine years ago.  It was just
calling me from the shelf and when I read it I was very moved by the
magic of it.  It's about a special relationship between a young son and
his father and the book was written from a child's point of view.  His
father is everything to him, he is the magic in his life and he teaches
him everything, teaching him to be open minded and not to build up
barriers.  His father has built a machine that can make it rain; a
cloudbuster and the son and his father go out together cloudbusting,
they point big pipes up into the sky and they make it rain.  The song is
very much taking a comparison between a yo-yo that glowed in the dark
that was given to the boy by a best friend and it was really special to
him, he loved it but his father believed in things having positive and
negative energy and that fluorescent light was a very negative energy as
was the material they used to make glow in the dark toys then and his
father told him he had to get rid of it, he wasn't allowed to keep it.
But the boy, rather than throwing it away, buried it in the garden so he
would placate his father but he could also go and dig it up occasionally
and play with it.  It's a parallel in some ways between how much he
loved the yo-yo and how special it was but that it was considered
dangerous.  He loved his father (who was perhaps considered dangerous by
some people) and how he could bury his yo-yo and retrieve that whenever
he wanted to play with it but there's nothing he can do about his father
being taken away, he is completely helpless.  But it's very much more to
do with how the son does begin to cope with the whole lonliness and pain
of being without his father.  It is the magic moments of a relationship
through a child's eyes but being told by a sad adult.

"Big Sky" was a song that changed a lot from the first version of it on
demo to the end product on the master tapes.  As I mentioned in the
earlier magazine the demos are the masters in that we now work straight
in the 24 track studio when I'm writing the songs but the structure of
this song changed quite a lot.  I wanted to steam along and with the
help of musicians such as Alan Murphy on guitar and Youth on bass we
accomplished quite a rock and roll feel for the track.  Although this
song did undertake 2 different drafts and the aforementioned players
changed their arrangements dramatically this is unusual in most cases
for the songs.  That takes us to the second side where that in itself
had 2 or 3 drafts.

It was very different for me working conceptually across half an hour's
worth of music rather than 5 minutes optimum in a song and it was very
interesting but more demanding.  It was changed by anything you did to
one part of the concept.  Once the piece was in context with what was
happening before and after it, it would change it's nature dramatically
and it was important that the whole side kept a sense of flow and yet
kept the interest and kept building and ebbing in the right places.

This side is about someone who is in the water alone for the night.
"And Dream Of Sheep"is about them fighting sleep, they're very tired and
they've been in the water waiting for someone to come and get them and
it's starting to get dark and it doesn't look like anyone's coming and
they want to go to sleep.  They know that if they go to sleep in the
water they could turn over and drown so they're trying to keep awake but
they can't help it, they eventually fall asleep which takes us into the
second song.

The second song is called "Under Ice" and is the dream that the person
has.  They're skating on ice; it's a frozen river and it's very white
everywhere and they're all alone, there doesn't appear to be anyone else
there.  As they skate along they look down at the ice and they can see
something moving underneath.  As they skate along with the object that's
moving under the ice they come to a crack in the ice and as it moves
under the crack they see that it's themselves in the water drowning and
at that moment they wake up into the next song which is about friends
and memories who come to wake them up to stop them drowning.

As they wake up and surface they are coming out of the whole feeling of
deep subconsciousness.  One of the voices tells them there's someone
there to see them and here in the water is a witchfinder.  This is a
sort of nightmare they're having and this monster figure is basically
trying to drown them, trying to see if they're innocent or guilty and if
they drown then they're innocent.  If they don't drown they're guilty so
they'll be drowned anyway and it's the trial of this girl who's in the
water and all she wants to do is survive and keep her head above water.
This song was written through a guitarist -- Alan Murphy -- the track
would have had the wrong feel with a keyboard instrument.  All he had to
work to was the drum track and I tried to hum and point patterns out and
everything he came up with sounded great; we spent the day building up
the guitars and built vocals, Fairlight, sequencers over the top.
Thanks for that Al.

The next song is about how she wants to go home, that's really the thing
she wants most, just to be in the cosy atmosphere of her belongings all
around her and the security of those four walls and the firm ground and
being with the one that she loves.  She finds that she's there in spirit
and there's her loved one sitting in a chair by the fire, but she hadn't
conceived the idea that she wouldn't actually be there in real terms,
she's not real and although she can see her man, he can't see her, she
can't communicate with him in any way, it's more of a nightmare than
anything so far because this is the closest she's been to any kind of
comfort and yet it's the furthest away.

The next song is "Jig Of Life".  This is about the future self who comes
to her rescue basically -- she says look, I'm the next part of your life
and if I am going to survive and enjoy the things that I've enjoyed;
having my children, my happy home and my husband then you've got to keep
it together, you've got to stay alive, you musn't drown or I will drown
with you.  It's the future begging her, pleading with her to let her,
the future lady live.

The song after that is "Hello Earth" and is really the point where she's
so weak she relives the experience of the storm that took her into the
water.  Almost from a view looking down on the earth up in the heavens
watching the storm start to form that eventually took her and has put
her in this situation.

This track features orchestral arrangements by Michael Kaman.  It was
wonderful working with Michael, he's a very receptive person to work
with and the orchestral arrangements that he did for the tracks I felt
were very atmospheric.  It was wonderful for me to watch the layers of
this song go on one by one.  It initally had to be written with the
verses symbolizing the storm gradually building and the choruses having
a great sense of space and atmosphere and this I always hoped to be a
male choir.  When I first wrote "Hello Earth" I was very much inspired
by a male choir that I'd heard in Herzog's film "Nosferatu" and although
the versus are a very different piece of music, it was all designed
hopefully to eventually link into this male voice choir which would take
us to a very different place in the song.  They really are meant to
symbolize the great sense of loss, of weakness at reaching a point where
you can accept at last, everything can change.

This takes us into "Morning Fog" and "Morning Fog" is the symbol of
light and hope; it's the end of the side and if you ever have any
control over endings they should always, I fell, have some kind of light
in there.  This was originally written to a Linn drum machine and I
wrote, on the Fairlight, an instrumental piece of music using the sample
of an acoustic guitar.  I then later wrote the song on top of this
instrumental building up the voices in layers.  The piece I'd written on
the Fairlight was transcribed by Dave Lawson for an acoustic guitar
player and I felt that really one of the best people to play this was
John Williams, a superb classical guitarist and who I had met on a
couple occasions before when I was working at Abbey Road and it seemed
like the perfect opportunity to ask him if he'd like to play on the
track.  We added Del's fretless bass, Kevin on synth, built up the
backing vocals and Pad layered up "Appalachian" fiddles and Fujare.  We
kept the guide vocal as the master voice and mixed up the last track on
the album.

Many hours were spent on tiny vocal ideas that perhaps only last half a
minute, many hours went on lyrics -- one of the most difficult parts in
the process for me in that it's so time-consuming and so frustrating and
just always seems to take far too long for something that seems it
should come so naturally.  One of the difficult things about the lyrics
is when I initially write the song perhaps half of the lyrics come with
it but it's almost more difficult fitting in the other half to make it
match than to perhaps start from scratch where, for instance, you might
have just hummed the tune, or where in some cases, I wrote them as
instrumentals and then the tunes were written over the top of this.
Many times I ring up Paddy and ask him to come over to the studio
immediately, to bring in that string driven thing -- to hit that note
and let it float.

One of the most positive things is now having our own recording studio
where we can experiment freely and it's definitely one of the best
decisions I've made since I've ben recording albums.  We've put a lot of
hard work into this album so we've been waiting for it to be finished
and ready and I know you've been waiting and I hope that after this time
and after all the snippets of information we've been giving you that you
don't find it disappointing but that you enjoy it and that you enjoy
listening to it in different ways again and again.

This album could have never happend without some very special people --
many thanks to Julian Mendelsohn and especially Haydn Bendall and Brian
Tench who put a lot of hard work into this project, to *all* the
musicians who are a constant inspiration, to Ma who helps with every
little thing, to Paddy and Jay for all their inspiration and influences
and again to Del for all those moments we've captured on tape together.

		lots of love

		Kate
		 X X X