“The Big Sky” by Kate Bush

Kate Bush sent "The Big Sky" out in April 1986 as the fourth and last single from Hounds of Love, and it's a wide-open, wide-eyed thing: a song about the simple childhood pleasures most adults stop making time for, like whiling away an afternoon staring up while the clouds turn into shapes.

She wrote, produced and sang it herself, and the credits make an odd little tribe: Paddy Bush on didgeridoo, Youth on bass, Morris Pert on percussion and Del Palmer on handclaps, with Brian Tench mixing. The seven-inch carried a special single mix with a different intro, while the 12-inch stretched it into the Meteorological mix. Bush also directed the video, which drew a Best Female Video nomination at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.