The Fog

Album: The Sensual World (1989)
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Songfacts®:

  • Featuring classical violinist Nigel Kennedy and some seagull imitations, this song is about trying to grow up. "Growing up for most people is just trying to stop escaping, looking at things inside yourself rather than outside," Bush told NME. "But I'm not sure if people ever grow up properly, it's a continual process, growing in a positive sense."
  • Kate's physician father contributed the spoken word dialogue. Doctor Bush is also an accomplished pianist.
  • Kate told Q magazine how the song relates to swimming. "I started with the idea of a relationship in deep water and thought I could parallel that with learning to swim, the moment of letting go,'' she said. "When my dad was teaching me to swim he'd hold both my hands, then say, 'Now, let go.' So I would. Then he'd take two paces back and say, 'Right, swim to me,' and I'd be, 'Oo-er, blub, blub, blerb...' But I thought it was such a beautiful image of the father and child, all wrapped up in the idea of really loving someone, but letting them go, because that's a part of real love, don't you think, the letting go?"
  • Like many of Kate's songs, this was crafted using the Fairlight CMI digital sampling synthesizer, but it wasn't quite capturing the sound she wanted so she enlisted film score composer Michael Kamen to add a live orchestra to the track.

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