There's this, a favourite purely because so many people think it's a regular love song. One of my weird sources of pleasure is listening to those awful "Our Tune" things on radio stations in the hope that someone will request something that sounds like a love song but really isn't. (So, "Every Breath You Take", "When a Man Loves a Woman" or pretty much anything by the Beautiful South.) This one comes up a lot.
And then, for the most abjectedly Anti-Love song I can think of, I reckon this wins. Proper loathing, not just of their partner, but of themselves, and anyone who ever dared root for them...
Perhaps a touch jaunty and upbeat to suit general forum tastes, but The Beths were a welcome discovery for me in early pandemic days, helping to take my mind off things whilst hinting, since they're New Zealand-based, at a possible return to normality some day.
Sticking this one in for falling out of love, or more specifically: the realisation that a relationship has been over for a while, much to the chagrin of the narrator.
I'll jump in with a few of my faves to start with.
Listening to some of her albums is a real trip as she's so creative and at times i'm sure is just having fun with it all. 'boringly' though my faves are generally when she strips it back and does some heartbreaking piano ballad type stuff.
i reckon my ultimate fave might be 'this woman's work'.
Written for the movie "She's having a baby", it's from the man's viewpoint while wife and child are in danger during childbirth.
later released as a single with this video:
Her first album (the kick inside) is for me still my all round fave. insane to think she wrote this when she was just a teenager.
Wuthering Heights and Man with a Child in his eyes are the big hits from that, but I think the title track is awesome (I also only recently realised it's literally about incest and suicide)
I also love this as a bit of a less famous one - Wow.
Not remotely original, but still my favourite. My wife loves Kate Bush - I guess I used to be slightly more ambivalent. Seeing her perform when she briefly emerged from hiding a couple of years ago made me realise she's absolutely the real deal though. This is the track I've always liked, even when I wasn't that sure of her. Like many of her songs there's a very specific meaning (it's about Wilhelm Reich, from the perspective of his son - and the seemingly weird video is a pretty straight recounting of their story) - but I prefer taking it in more abstract terms...