Back when I was a music journalist, I did a phone interview with Gavin Rossdale. This was circa 2005 so he was well past his halcyon days. You never know who you were gonna get when you do these phoners, which in all fairness were probably tedious for the interviewee. I always tried to do my homework and come up with questions that weren’t the same old thing they’d been asked a million times, but you could always tell when you were the 15th one of these they’d done that day. Some of them were fantastic (Henry Rollins was the coolest guy ever!), some were awful (David Byrne was a total uptight dick). Some were fantastically awful (Kanye West, I’m looking at you.) Most of them were forgettable.

Rossdale stands out for having made my “tools” list. While doing the interview, he was driving around Southern California with a buddy, shopping for real estate. He could barely be bothered to do the interview – he was way more interested in whatever houses they were looking at that day. Half our “conversation” was him talking to his buddy. Then he’d come back on the line for a second – “Huh? What was that again?” I’d re-ask the question and he’d spit out some perfunctory response, only to drift off mid-sentence to discuss the finer points of thermal windows or chimneys or whatever. Had to patch together a crappy story out from the scraps he threw my way. Excruciating.

That said, Glycerine, Machine Head, and Comedown are enjoyable tunes. Not sure I'd need much else from them. Back then, they seemed like another band that really really wished they were Nirvana.

It is actually astonishing how bad most of their lyrics are. Like, I don't think you could accidentally write lyrics that terrible. He has to be trying.

It is actually astonishing how bad most of their lyrics are. Like, I don't think you could accidentally write lyrics that terrible. He has to be trying.

So I just Googled some random Bush lyrics since I've never paid attention to them while listening to the songs.

Holy shit.

Holy.

Shit.

Everything's gone white

And everything's gray

Now you're here

Now you're away

I don't want this

Remember that

I'll never forget

Where you're at...

Wow.

it's like he's just stringing together a bunch of words that sound cool in sequence but have absolutely no coherent meaning

i always just wrote it off as stream of consciousness writing

When I was a kid, I used to think lyrics were the most important part of a song. I wouldn't listen to songs without lyrics. But I really loved those first two Bush albums because they finally revealed to me how little I care about lyrics. That whole time I'd been confusing my taste for melody as a love for lyrics. So, if nothing else, thanks Bush for writing blindingly terrible lyrics so that I could be a better listener and appreciate non-vocal music.