I first encountered Kate Bush when I was about 17. I was part of the dance program at my school, and our teacher, the much beloved Mr. M., had the most sophisticated taste in music. Sinéad O’Connor, Ani DiFranco, Imogen Heap, and Meshell Ndegeocello scored our warm-ups and across-the-floors, the throbbing bassline of “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night)” rattling the studio’s chandelier; and at our annual dance concert, a two-night-only affair at a theatre on the Upper West Side, a crowd of sixth graders would twirl around to Bulgarian folk music and Sigur Rós. If I’d joined the company in a bid to belong—to disappear into a synchronized corps—its soundtrack had, over time, yielded an equal and opposite reaction. Without a doubt, my developing taste for alternative-Euro-art-rock was only making me more weird.

Kate Bush, who celebrates her 61st birthday today, was another one of Mr. M.’s beguiling muses; he’d named a piece in one of our concerts after a song on Hounds of Love, the English singer-songwriter’s fifth studio album, and choreographed another to 1993’s “The Red Shoes,” her propulsive paean to the Powell and Pressburger classic. When, during one rehearsal, he switched on the stirring piano ballad “This Woman’s Work,” from 1989, I recognized the song right away (I knew the cover by Maxwell), but not the voice.

A bit of digging eventually led me to The Kick Inside, Kate Bush’s auspicious 1978 debut and, after a few listens, one of my favorite things I’d ever heard. Released when she was only 19, the record sowed the seeds of a career both intensely inspired and utterly authentic; one that would transcend the boundaries of genre—and the conventions of popular songwriting—to assemble a body of work unashamed of its off-kilter genius. Today, she counts among her fans artists as varied as St. Vincent, Charli XCX, and Big Boi (who has expounded the virtues of “Running Up That Hill” at length).

It all began with her smash-hit single, 1977’s “Wuthering Heights,” which takes as its subjects Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff of the eponymous Emily Brontë novel. “Heathcliff,” the infectious chorus goes, “It's me, I’m Cathy, I've come home, I’m—so co-o-o-old / Let me in through your wind-o-o-ow.” (Over a decade later, Bush would revisit Anglo-Irish literature in “The Sensual World,” using bits of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses.) From the outset, Bush determined that the strength of her imagination—paired with an iron-clad resolve to see it through—would be central to her art. Although inspired by a TV adaptation (namely, the moment in the 1967 miniseries when Heathcliff is visited by Catherine’s ghost), Kate Bush didn’t sit down to write “Wuthering Heights” until she’d read the entire book. “I needed to get the mood properly,” she explained to Denis Tuohy in 1978.