Kate Bush

She was the prodigy who honed her skills by playing an organ in a barn behind her parents' house, until she caught the attention of Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour, got signed to EMI at the age of 16, and the very next year rocketed to the top of the U.K. charts with her 1978 debut, the startlingly unique Wuthering Heights . . . Kate Bush remains one of pop's great individualists, whose complex and highly literary body of work never fails to thrill, mesmerize, and occasionally perplex. Her U.S. breakthrough came in 1985 with "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)," while the following year's duet with Peter Gabriel, "Don't Give Up," remains a collaborative landmark.

Our Bush primer begins here, and continues in Next Steps.

Your travels through the sonic wonderland of Kate Bush will lead to full enlightenment via these spellbinding tracks. The Dreaming (1982) — featuring "There Goes a Tenner," which lurches between the fairground bounce of an over-caffeinated brass band and lush atmospheric stretches of ambient electronic wash — was her first entirely self-produced album and features groundbreaking use of the Fairlight CMI polyphonic digital- sampling synthesizer. The project cost so much in recording fees that, for 1985's Hounds of Love, Bush built her own studio, allowing her the time to explore sonic possibilities at great length — check out the intricate production details on "The Big Sky."

Bush indulges her passion for the movies in Deep Cuts.

There's always been a strong cinematic element in Kate Bush's work — her 1993 album, The Red Shoes (featuring "Moments of Pleasure"), was inspired by the Michael Powell movie of the same name; with "Sam Lowry's 1st Dream/Brazil'" she joins composer Michael Kamen and the National Philharmonic Orchestra of London on the soundtrack to Terry Gilliam's Brazil; and early single "Hammer Horror" (1978) was a tribute of sorts to the celebrated fright-film company, on which she embellishes the chorus with lycanthropic growls. But if you really want the hairs on the back to your neck to stand up, drown in the sad, gorgeous piano ballad "A Coral Room" from 2005's Aerial.

She has a voice that carves effortlessly through three octaves, a wealth of obscure literary and cultural allusions (Wilhelm Reich in "Cloudbusting"; G. I. Gurdjieff in "Them Heavy People"), and a reputation for reclusive perfectionism befitting a true genius . . . welcome to the perfect storm of creativity we know and love as Kate Bush, who has always been something of an enigma — in 1978 she was the most photographed woman in Britain, but the next year she played her last full concert, during which she changed costume 17 times and appeared in an upholstered egg, long before Lady GaGa and her 2011 GRAMMY® stunt. These Essentials tap the cream of her output, including the hits from her 1978 debut, The Kick Inside, a bunch of standout tracks from her most successful album, Hounds of Love (1985), and a couple of fascinating soundtrack contributions.