Leave It Open
The first song to have a demo completed for The Dreaming (“Sat In Your Lap” was initially released as a standalone single), “Leave It Open” introduces much of the album’s ambition and cadences. Another treatise on the nature of thought and repression, Bush develops and inverts her previous metaphysical ideas about the world, presenting it as a frightening and hostile sphere yet treating interaction with it as an inevitability, and even a relationship where a person’s interiority can have input. As the refrain stipulates with a degree of bellicosity, “harm is in us, but power to arm.” In “Leave It Open,” Bush creates an ethos of wondrous fear, where allowing the self to become a vessel for something Other is an act of submissive reclamation of human potential.
Let’s start counterintuitively (in the spirit of The Dreaming) with the coda of “Leave It Open”, which sees Bush proffering a rare, aphoristic thesis statement in the form of a repetitive double-backmasked chant: “we let the weirdness in.” Amusingly, upon release this was Bush’s most controversial coda, with listeners calling into Bush’s television and radio interviews attempting to guess what distorted words Bush is singing (“we paint the penguins pink” is the best one). “We let the weirdness in” sounds unlikely — it’s disjointed, with abstractions and syntactic ambiguity. As my friend Rohanne points out on the brilliant Kate Bush podcast Strange Phenomena, The Dreaming sees Bush shifting from writing character narratives to reorienting her songwriting around concepts and abstractions. What is “the weirdness?” And how are we letting it in? “Leave It Open” concludes on a note of imprecision and unknowability. But the song also begins there — the verses and refrains are similarly disjointed in their grammar: “with my ego in my gut/my babbling mouth would wash it up.” The clauses are unclear in their relationship to their object and subject, phrasing abstractions in a way that suggests they’re corporeal stimuli. “Wide eyes would clean and dust/things that decay, things that rust” suggests bodily fluidity. The aversion to coherent speech and language is almost Burroughsian: language is a virus, and can only be allowed through in a broken, primal form, taking after a rhythm track. The Dreaming’s incipient nucleus of uncertainty creeps forth.
Moreso than “Sat In Your Lap,” “Leave It Open” emphasizes a theme that pervades The Dreaming in its exploration of madness as a feminist liberation. It sees Bush unharnessing herself from the tyranny of rational thought and conventional speech in favor of “letting the weirdness in.” An infusion takes place, with the song mostly looking at forms of opening and closing (“my door was never locked/until one day a trigger come cocking”). “Leave It Open” describes physically allowing unknowable things into one’s mind and body. Bush’s vocals are an entourage of different voices, with her lead vocal a tremulous inhalation (“watched it weeping/but I made it stay”), and her B.V.’s a series of childlike, high-soprano shouts (“but now I’ve started learning how!”).…
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