Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)
Song Meaning

Kate Bush wrote the song about a man and a woman who love each other deeply but are held back by insecurity and fear of hurting one another, so the narrator wishes she could strike a deal with God to trade places with her partner and feel what it’s like to be them 1 3. Bush has said she originally conceived the swap as a Faustian bargain but chose God instead because “it’s so much more powerful” 1 3. The song reflects her belief that a man and a woman “can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman,” and that trading roles would leave both “very surprised” 1 3.

The meaning

At its core, “Running Up That Hill” is Kate Bush’s meditation on the gap between two people in love, specifically a man and a woman, who can never fully know what it’s like to be the other. She explained plainly: “It’s about a relationship between a man and a woman. They love each other very much, and the power of the relationship is something that gets in the way. It creates insecurities” 1. That insecurity, not a lack of love, is the wound the song is trying to treat.

The title itself started life as something else entirely. Bush has said the record was written as “Deal With God” and that, “for me it is still called ‘Deal With God,’ that was its title” 1 3. It was renamed only because label concerns arose that religious markets, Italy, France, Ireland, Australia, would refuse airplay over the word “God” 1. The “running up that hill / that road / that buildin’” imagery in the chorus works as a metaphor for the effort of closing an impossible emotional distance, made literal by lines like “I’d get him to swap our places.”

Why God rather than the devil? Bush considered a classic Faustian pact first, then rejected it: “I thought a deal with the devil, you know. And I thought, ‘well, no, why not a deal with God!’... it’s so much more powerful the whole idea of asking God to make a deal with you” 1 3. Asking God, rather than a devil, elevates the wish from a selfish trade into something closer to a plea for grace, matching the almost prayerful tone of the pre-chorus refrain “You / It’s you and me.”

The swap she imagines is explicitly gendered. Bush described the song’s premise directly: “a man and a woman, can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman. And if we could actually swap each other’s roles... I think we’d both be very surprised!” 1 3. Lines like “Do you wanna feel how it feels?” and “let’s exchange the experience” in the bridge dramatize exactly that proposed trade, framing empathy as something that could only be achieved through literally inhabiting the other person’s body and perspective.

Underneath the fantasy of role-swapping is real fear. Bush said the relationship depicted “leaves them very insecure and in fear of losing each other” 3, and elsewhere described the song’s motivation as guarding against accidental hurt: “Sometimes you can hurt somebody purely accidentally or be afraid to tell them something because you think they might be hurt when really they’ll understand... what that song is about is making a deal with God to let two people swap place so they’ll be able to see things from one another’s perspective” 4. That anxiety surfaces in verse two’s “see how deep the bullet lies” and “is there so much hate for the ones we love?”, lines that sit uneasily against the tenderness of “oh, come on, baby” in the bridge, capturing a couple who love each other but keep wounding one another through simple misunderstanding.

Last updated 2026-07-23