“Running Up That Hill” with its Freaky Friday body swap premise is a transhuman relationship counselor’s wet dream. The song invites one partner to switch rolls with the other. "Let’s exchange the experience,” Bush sings. The lyrics are beautiful, and trippy, and supremely ripe for personal interpretation thanks to her references to God, bullets, and hearts filled with Thor-like thunder.
Personal interpretation goes a long way with certain songs. I remember at nineteen getting caught up in an innocent lovers spat with my then boyfriend in his crappy VW Scirocco when “Don’t Give Up” popped up on the radio and we almost had to pull over we were tearing up so hard. Who knew a song about economic hardship and redundancy during Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministry would rattle a pair of Western New Yorkers to the point of having to consider whether or not to flip on the hazard lights. But truly, how is one to keep their emotional “cool” when listening to a song as tender as “Don’t Give Up” is? There’s an adrift quality to it, it’s like a breakup song, only not with a person, but with the world. That’s some heavy shit, and heavy shit’s fairly on brand for Bush.
Since Stranger Things, the singer put out a statement thanking young fans of the show for giving the song a new lease of life. At 63 it must be wild getting shuffled back into the game—as economically corrupt as it is, given that recording artists are being paid less for song streams than they are with radio plays. It makes me wonder if this is the time in Bush’s career when she has more in common with the meaning behind her “Don’t Give Up” collaboration than ever; living in this new world where the rules of the economy have changed and vulnerability creeps in.
Still, as a longtime fan of Bush’s work, it’s comforting to know she hasn’t given up her grip on the zeitgeist. Just ask the UK’s Boris Johnson (yeah, that Boris Johnson), who as little as two years ago, when the question was raised in an interview about the five most influential women in his life, he knocked Thatcher off the list in favor of the woman who had us running up that hill with her.
