Feel It
Feel It
Tour of Life (Stockholm)
Tour of Life (London)
12 of the 13 songs on The Kick Inside are firmly maximalist, baroque pop rock. Even the quieter piano ballads like “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” and “The Kick Inside” are accompanied by orchestras. The result is an album that, while not always assisted by its production, measures itself by a standard of heavily produced and instrumentation-based albums.
It’s long been remarked that Kate Bush’s primary instrument is her voice. Even when her melodies are idiosyncratic and sprawling and her albums’ productions demand an audience’s ear, listeners always talk about her voice first. Even an instrumental track like “Night Scented Stock” is guided by Bush’s vocals. Her most recent collection of new songs, 50 Words for Snow, takes a back-to-basics approach of voice-and-piano that Bush started her career with. While the Fairlight will guide Bush towards her best work, here’s hardly a more powerful duo in popular music than Bush and her piano.
“Feel It” is an exceedingly intimate affair, the only song on The Kick Inside to have no session musicians. It’s Bush alone at her piano, saying “no props this time, just hear me play.” “Feel It” is one of the more realist tracks on the album — rather than teaming with mysticism or high concepts, it has a fairly common down-to-earth situation: a one-night stand between two people who don’t know each other very well. “Well, it could be love/or it could be just lust/but it will be fun/it will be wonderful,” sings Bush. It’s a song of pure hedonism, consequence-free and absorbed in the moment.
Notable is how “Feel It” takes The Kick Inside’s approach of youthful attitudes to adult subjects to its zenith. Its tone is secretive, subtextually whispering “be quiet — this is a sacred moment.” It’s relatively low tempo, with the piano guiding the song in a lugubrious, creeping G minor (with unexpected appearances of F minor and B diminished), almost laughing anxiously with an upward turn on “a little nervous laughter.”
Bush equates sex with music, using phrases like “synchronizing rhythm” and “keep on a-tunin’ in.” She marries her skill at crafting melodies to her love of the sensuous with remarkable ease. It’s one of the stronger minor Bush tracks of the Seventies.