Kate Bush

She was a teenager with a record deal before most people had heard her name, and she has spent every decade since refusing to do the obvious thing. Kate Bush arrived in 1978 with “Wuthering Heights,” a debut single so strange and so completely hers that it went straight to No. 1, then kept widening the gap between herself and everyone else. She took control early: writing, producing, building her own studio, choreographing her own videos when the form barely existed. Her records turned literature, dreams, machinery and the body into pop songs that sounded like nothing on the radio around them, and influenced a generation of artists who came after. She tours almost never and explains herself almost never, which only deepened the mythology. Then in 2022 a song she made at 27 found a vast new audience overnight, and the woman who had always done it her own way turned out to have been right to wait. Start with the one everybody rediscovered, then hear how little of it is what it seems.