Mother Stands For Comfort

This song is about a mother's willingness to protect her child at all costs. Bush explained in a 1985 interview: "It's about a mother and her strong maternal, protective instincts, but it's dealing with a son who's committed a bad crime. And to her, her instincts overrule what's right or wrong. I think that's what's interesting - it's how some mothers will actually overrule their sense of morality because they love their son or their child so much."

Bush wrote this song on a Fairlight CMI synthesizer, which is the primary instrument. Her songs explore the depths of human emotion, so you might figure that an electronic device wouldn't be suitable, but she found it opened up a new range of possibilities. "Quite often I find synthetic sounds create a coldness, and if the track is lonely or sad or dark, sometimes you want that kind of coldness, that machine-like coldness which is very specific," she explained in a 1992 radio documentary. "With acoustic instruments you get a very warm, human presence and something that's intimate and really there. Something that breathes, not this kind of dead, cold machine, and I feel that both are very useful depending on what you want to say." Bush added: "The personality that sings this track is very unfeeling in a way, and the cold qualities of synths and machines were appropriate here. There are many different kinds of love, and the track's really talking about the love of a mother, and in this case she's the mother of a murderer. She's prepared to protect her son against anything, so it's suggesting that the son is using the mother as much as the mother is protecting him. It's a bit of a strange subject matter isn't it?"

"Mother Stands For Comfort" is part of Kate Bush's landmark fifth album, Hounds Of Love. Like her previous album, The Dreaming, she produced it herself, which gave her an exceptional level of control.