Remarkable lyrics: Running up that Hill, by Kate Bush 🇬🇧

For many born after 1990, Kate Bush may have remained an unfamiliar name—until her 1985 hit Running Up That Hill surged back into the spotlight nearly four decades later. Featured in a pivotal 2022 episode of Netflix’s Stranger Things, the song found new life and climbed the charts again, reintroducing Bush’s singular artistry to a new generation. This unexpected resurgence brought global attention back to an artist whose most recent original album, 50 Words for Snow, had been released in 2011.

Running Up That Hill, the lead single from Hounds of Love (1985), showcases Bush’s theatrical, emotionally charged vocal style set against a driving, synth-heavy pulse. The result is a song that feels both eerie and urgent, powerful and vulnerable—utterly unmistakable in its uniqueness. No one but Kate Bush could have written it.

The lyrics are enigmatic and open to interpretation. Bush herself has said that the song explores the fundamental misunderstandings between men and women, and imagines a world in which they could “swap places” to foster deeper empathy. This exchange, however, can only be achieved through “a deal with God”—a phrase that gave the song its original title before the record company suggested changing it to avoid controversy in more religiously conservative markets.

Even with Bush’s explanation, the song retains a compelling ambiguity. Its aura of mystery invites listeners to project their own meanings onto it.

The opening lines feel like a bold, almost provocative invitation:

It doesn’t hurt me
Do you wanna feel how it feels?

Presumably spoken by a woman (Bush has never suggested a same-sex reading), these lines may be an attempt to reassure her lover: being a woman is not synonymous with pain. What “doesn’t hurt” could refer to menstruation, breasts, sex, or—more broadly—the female experience of living in the world. Initially, then, the offer to “swap places” may not stem from a desire for understanding, but from a wish to comfort, to say: I’m okay—don’t be afraid of what I am.

Do you wanna know, know that it doesn’t hurt me?
Do you wanna hear about the deal that I’m making?

Though the swap is hypothetical, the tone here becomes almost devotional, as if the speaker is bargaining directly with God. There’s something Faustian about the “deal”—Bush herself once considered framing the song as a pact with the devil. This dark, incantatory edge adds a mystical, witch-like quality, reminiscent of other songs in her catalogue that flirt with the supernatural (Wuthering Heights, Hammer Horror, Coffee Homeground, Waking the Witch).

The pre-chorus sounds like both a love call and a plea, as the speaker is reminding her lover of their romantic pact:

You
It’s you and me

The chorus, too, is striking in its duality. The first half is clear:

And if I only could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places

The second half, though, is more cryptic:

Be runnin’ up that road
Be runnin’ up that hill
Be runnin’ up that building

Is the speaker that, if she were given the physical abilities of a man (a supposedly physically stronger one), she would be able to move and travel more freely? That her desire to explore the world would be unhindered? Is she referring to the freedom and power men often enjoy in society? There is something slightly comical about this representation of an active man’s life being about running here and there, but the image of “runnin’ up that building” might symbolize climbing the social or corporate ladder, with office buildings as a metaphor for male-dominated hierarchies.

In the second verse, the emotional stakes rise. The relationship now appears painful, even if she acknowledges that her lover doesn’t have evil intentions:

You don’t wanna hurt me
But see how deep the bullet lies

The “bullet” may refer to the lasting impact of hurtful words, or more generally, the ache that intense love may plant in our hearts. 

The speaker admits that she, too, may cause harm:

Unaware I’m tearin’ you asunder
Oh, there is thunder in our hearts

This, she recognizes, is because they are both highly passionate people, whose emotions, in their intensity, may become confused and destructive. And indeed, in such a passionate relationship (let’s not forget that passion comes from the verb pati which means “to suffer” in Latin), love and hatred can be two sides of the same coin: 

Is there so much hate for the ones we love?

She seeks reassurance that her lover cares for her as much as she does, and also that her interpretations and emotional reactions to their arguments and misunderstandings are just as valid as his:

Oh, tell me, we both matter, don’t we?

A subtle shift in the next pre-chorus changes its tone:

…It’s you and me
Won’t be unhappy

Is this a promise? A plea? Self-reassurance? The ambiguity adds a desperate urgency.

The bridge introduces a note of transgression and tenderness:

Oh, come on, baby
Oh, come on, darlin’
Let me steal this moment from you now

The word “steal” emphasizes the forbidden or radical nature of what she desires—yet the gesture is one of intimacy, not selfishness. Like stealing a kiss, it is an act of love. She softens her request with affectionate terms:

Oh, come on, angel
Let’s exchange the experience

In the song’s final repetitions, as the chorus crescendos and the relentless rhythm propels us forward, Bush seems to vanish into the horizon—carrying with her this wild, poetic, revolutionary idea: that a man and a woman might truly switch places. The beat never hasn’t relented for a second, and by the end, our own hearts are racing as if we had followed her, hand in hand, through the stretches and meanders of her crazy, poetic imagination.