Music / Aerial

"We become panoramic."

Aerial, released in 2005 through EMI in the UK and Columbia Records in the US, is the eighth studio album by English art pop musician Kate Bush. Released twelve years after The Red Shoes, the album's release was the culmination of nine years of on-and-off production. During that time, she started devoting herself more to looking after her family and especially her first son, Albert "Bertie" McIntosh, born in 1998 (his father, Bandit guitarist Dan McIntosh, had previously been a session musician on The Red Shoes). Having previously shunned the idea of motherhood, raising Bertie provided a new sense of creative vigor for Bush, who featured him as a guest vocalist on the album and dedicated an eponymous track to him.

Aerial is the first (and, to date, only) double album in Bush's studio discography. Following in the footsteps of her 1985 megahit Hounds of Love, it is a Distinct Double Album that combines a standard collection of songs on the first disc, A Sea of Honey, and a unified suite on the second, A Sky of Honey. The former centers around introspective ruminations on topics such as love, family, life, death, and the legacy of stardom through both real and fictional figures that Bush considered relevant to her life, while the latter details a series of events that the suite's narrator both witnesses and takes part in over the course of a single 24-hour period.

Upon release, Aerial was a commercial success in the UK, peaking at No. 3 on the albums chart and being certified platinum both there and in Canada; it would also be certified gold in Finland, France, Ireland, Germany, and Poland. In the US, it would peak at a more modest No. 48. Despite its success, Bush would refrain from releasing new material for another six years, choosing to continue raising Bertie during that time, later integrating his creative work into her own.

Aerial was supported by one single: "King of the Mountain".

Tracklist:

A Sea of Honey

1. "King of the Mountain" (4:53)
2. "π" (6:09)
3. "Bertie" (4:18)
4. "Mrs. Bartolozzi" (5:58)
5. "How to Be Invisible" (5:32)
6. "Joanni" (4:56)
7. "A Coral Room" (6:12)

A Sky of Honey^note retitled "An Endless Sky of Honey" and sequenced as a single 42:00 track on the 2010 reissue

1. "Prelude" (1:26)
2. "Prologue" (5:42)
3. "An Architect's Dream" (4:50)
4. "The Painter's Link" (1:35)
5. "Sunset" (5:58)
6. "Aerial Tal" (1:01)
7. "Somewhere in Between" (5:00)
8. "Nocturn" (8:34)
9. "Aerial" (7:52)

Oh, little spider, climbing out of a broken trope:

• Accidental Art: "The Painter's Link" sees the title character's painting unintentionally transform into a beautiful sunset when it gets caught in a rainstorm.
• Album Title Drop: The word "aerial" appears exactly twice in the album, both times at the end of "Nocturn" — on an album filled with images of sky, flight and birdsong, the lyrics describe "light climbing up the aerial," referring to the rising sun shining upon the aerial on the roof of a house.
• Animal Motifs: Birds play a key role throughout the album, symbolizing peace and innocence; the album cover in fact is a waveform of a blackbird's song made to appear like a mountain range in the water. Images of birds (and a man in a swan headdress) additionally appear throughout the liner notes during the A Sky of Honey section.
• Arc Words: The line "a sea of honey, a sky of honey" reoccurs throughout the album's second disc. Not only is the phrase mentioned word-for-word in "Sunset", "Aerial Tal", and "Nocturn", but the cadence of it informs the pigeon coos in "Prelude". Then there's the fact that the album's two discs are titled A Sea of Honey and A Sky of Honey.
• Bilingual Bonus: The French lyrics in "Joanni" describe Joan of Arc's claims that she could communicate with the Saints in heaven, tying in with the song's general focus on her life and legacy.
• Bookends: The "King of the Mountain" music video begins and ends with Deliberately Monochrome pans through Elvis Presley's abandoned mansion.
• Brief Accent Imitation: "King of the Mountain" sees Bush adopt a slurred, swinging delivery style that mimics Elvis Presley's singing voice in the waning years of his life, tying in with the lyrics ruminating on his life and legacy.
• Call-Back:
  • The Distinct Double Album approach here mirrors that of Hounds of Love two decades prior: collection of standalone tracks on the first half, unified suite on the second.
  • The ending of "Prologue" features the whale songs that previously bookended "Moving".
• Celebrity Is Overrated: "King of the Mountain" surmises that Elvis Presley came to realize this in the last years of his life, with the narrator claiming that it led him to fake his death as a means of escape.
• Cosmic Motifs: The album associates Bush's son, Bertie McIntosh, with the sun, not only for the sake of a pun, but also in the "beaming ray of light" sense; McIntosh even voices the sun on A Sky of Honey.
• Concept Video: The music video for "King of the Mountain" focuses on one of Elvis Presley's jumpsuits from The '70s coming to life and traveling around the world to seek him out, eventually reuniting with the elderly musician on a snowy mountaintop.
• Cover Drop: More like "interior gatefold art drop," but nevertheless: the last verse of "Mrs. Bartolozzi" describes the title character watching a shirt flutter in the wind, appearing to wave at her, matching the photograph that serves as the digisleeve's inner artwork (which is also partly depicted on the disc labels).
• Distinct Double Album: Taking after the Distinct Single Album approach of Hounds of Love, the first disc, A Sea of Honey, is a Concept Album about various figures (both real and fictitious) relevant to Bush's life, while the second, A Sky of Honey, is a Rock Opera about the events of a single 24-hour period.
• Elvis Lives: The general subject of "King of the Mountain", in which the narrator wonders whether or not Elvis faked his death to get away from the increasingly suffocating pressures of fame. This is accentuated by the music video, which includes Spinning Papers listing bizarre places where Elvis was supposedly spotted, before revealing at the end that he is indeed "out there somewhere, looking like a happy man, in the snow with Rosebud and King of the Mountain."
• Epic Rocking: "π", "A Coral Room", "Nocturn", and "Aerial" all surpass the six-minute mark; both "Mrs. Bartolozzi" and "Sunset" just barely fall short. Then there's the 2010 reissue, where the entire second disc is sequenced as one 42-minute track.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: "π" is a song about the number π.
• Fading into the Next Song:
  • "Bertie" hard-cuts into "Mrs. Bartolozzi".
  • "How to Be Invisible" fades into "Joanni".
  • Matching "The Ninth Wave" on Hounds of Love, every track on A Sky of Honey flows seamlessly into the next.
• Grief Song: "A Coral Room" is Bush's ode to her departed mother, who died shortly before the release of The Red Shoes.
• Lonely Piano Piece:
  • "Mrs. Bartolozzi" is carried mostly by Bush alone at a piano, with its lyrics and delivery reflecting a sense of weariness and ennui.
  • "A Coral Room" also sees Bush accompanied solely by piano, tying in with the lyrical themes reflecting on her mother's passing over a decade later.
• Longest Song Goes Last: Played with; A Sea of Honey ends with its longest piece, the 6:12 "A Coral Room", but the album as a whole makes its lengthiest track (the eight and a half minute "Nocturn") the penultimate one.
• Lucky Charms Title: The title for "π" is the Greek letter used as the titular number's mathematical symbol.
• Miniscule Rocking: "Prelude", "The Painter's Link", and "Aerial Tal" all fall considerably below the two-minute mark; the latter just barely surpasses one minute.
• Monochrome to Color: The "King of the Mountain" video starts in black and white as it pans through Elvis Presley's abandoned, dilapidated manor, then shifts to color as one of Presley's jumpsuits comes to life and starts searching for him; the video then shifts back to black and white as the scene fades back to the mansion.
• Multilingual Song: "Joanni" is mostly in English, but switches to French for the bridge and outro.
• Mundane Made Awesome: "π" enthusiastically details the process of memorizing as many digits of the titular irrational number as possible.
• Number Obsession: "π" is about a man who has "an obsessive nature and deep fascination for numbers," in particular seeking to memorize as many digits of the titular value as possible.
• One-Man Song: "King of the Mountain", about Elvis Presley, and "Bertie", an ode to Bush's son (who was seven when the album released).
• One-Woman Song: "Mrs. Bartolozzi", about a beleaguered maid (who, unusually for this trope, narrates the song), and "Joanni", about Joan of Arc.
• One-Word Title: Aerial (and by extension the Title Track), "π", "Bertie", "Joanni", "Prelude", "Prologue", "Sunset", and "Nocturn".
• Re-Cut:
  • The 2010 reissue and concurrent 2011 digital release re-sequence A Sky of Honey, a nine-track suite composed entirely of Siamese Twin Songs, as a single, 42-minute piece titled "An Endless Sky of Honey". A 2014 Japanese reissue and the 2018 remaster both revert to the nine-track configuration.
  • The 2018 remaster features rewritten lyrics for the spoken-word intro to "An Architect's Dream", concurrent with the replacement of disgraced Australian entertainer Rolf Harris with Bertie McIntosh.
    2005 version: Yes, I need to get that tone a little bit lighter there, maybe with some dark accents coming in from the side. Hmm... that's good.
    2018 version: If I can lighten the browns and the sand, and rub it right into where the sky's reaching down... So it's... like the edge of a mirror... But this blue needs to be darker, much darker... Maybe if I can just blend it a bit... Yes, that might do it... almost like that.
• Retraux: "Bertie" is written In the Style of music that was commonplace during the Italian Renaissance, and is performed on period-appropriate instruments to lend it greater authenticity.
• Scullery Maid: "Mrs. Bartolozzi" is narrated by one, who expresses a sense of exhaustion towards her situation.
• Shout-Out:
  • "King of the Mountain" ponders whether or not Elvis Presley is "in the snow with Rosebud," nodding back to the backstory of the title character in Citizen Kane and the twist that named the It Was His Sled trope. The final shot of the music video even replicates that of Citizen Kane, being a close-up of a snow-covered Rosebud in Elvis' abandoned mansion. invoked
  • "How to Be Invisible" is directly inspired by a book of the same name, written by J.J. Luna and published in 2000; the book details how to protect one's assets, identity, and personal life, which resonated with Bush (who got mildly annoyed when people instead mistook it for a nod to Radiohead's "How to Disappear Completely", also from 2000).
  • "A Coral Room" briefly quotes the chorus of the 1869 Joseph Winner song "Little Brown Jug".
  • A reproduction of Joseph Edward Southall's "Fishermen and Boat" appears in the liner notes between A Sea of Honey and A Sky of Honey, mirrored horizontally and edited to add "AERIAL" onto the boat.
• Siamese Twin Songs: All the tracks on A Sky of Honey are designed to flow into one another, to the extent where the 2010 double-CD reissue and the 2011 digital release sequence them all as a single 42-minute track, titled "An Endless Sky of Honey".
• Special Guest: A great deal of guest collaborators appear throughout the album.
  • 10cc alum and prior Bush collaborator Lol Creme sings backing vocals on "π" and "Nocturn".
  • Procol Harum frontman Gary Brooker sings backing vocals on "Sunset" and "Somewhere in Between", also playing Hammond organ on both the latter and "Nocturn".
  • German jazz double-bassist Eberhard Weber plays electric upright bass on "π" and "Prologue".
  • Fretwork co-founder Richard Campbell plays viol on "Bertie".
  • Weather Report drummer Peter Erskine plays drum parts on "Prologue", "An Architect's Dream", and "Nocturn".
  • Australian entertainer and prior Bush collaborator Rolf Harris voices the painter on "An Architect's Dream" and "The Painter's Link", also playing didgeridoo on the former. Following Harris' 2014 conviction for sexually assaulting minors, his vocals were replaced on the 2018 remaster by Bertie McIntosh.
  • Prolific composer and longtime Bush collaborator Michael Kamen provides string arrangements, played by the London Symphony Orchestra, throughout the album; it would be one of his final projects before his death in 2003.
• Spinning Paper: Throughout the music video for "King of the Mountain", newspaper front pages fly by the camera, first mourning Elvis Presley's death before listing various Elvis Lives claims such as "Sightings of Elvis in Yeti Colony".
• Spoken Word in Music: Bertie McIntosh voices the sun in "Prelude" and "Sunset", speaking his lines. Similarly, the painter's part in "An Architect's Dream" (voiced by Rolf Harris on the 2005 release and McIntosh in the 2018 remaster) is spoken, though he does get to sing on "The Painter's Link".
• Throw It In!: An in-universe example: the painter's efforts in "An Architect's Dream" seemingly end up for naught in "The Painter's Link", when a rainstorm arrives and washes away the artist's work. However, he manages to turn the resulting mess into a new painting, depicting a beautiful sunset.
• Title Track: It closes out the album.
• The X of Y: A Sea of Honey, A Sky of Honey, "King of the Mountain".

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