Kate Bush: why I can't wait for her return

So the rumours are true. Kind of. We'll have to wait patiently – is there any other way to wait for a Kate Bush record? – for an album of new material, but the news that Bush will release Director's Cut on 16 May, an album of new versions of songs originally included on The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993), provides plenty to ponder.

Director's Cut is a typically atypical Bush curveball: risky and potentially exciting, but most of all surprising, because she has rarely spent much time raking over her past moves. There has been only one rather cursory greatest hits album in 33 years, reluctantly released in 1986 to capitalise on her commercial triumph, Hounds of Love. Deluxe editions of her albums, freshly scrubbed and featuring bonus discs of outtakes and rarities, have been notable by their absence.

For an artist as fully in control of her career as Bush, these are conscious creative choices. She once said: "I can't possibly think of old songs of mine because they're past now. And quite honestly I don't like them any more."

The Director's Cut might well suggest a softening in this attitude, but it's telling that in finally looking back she has chosen not to disinter but to reinvent; to build something new on the skeletons of her old songs.

Rather than The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, we might have expected Bush to revisit her earliest records. On her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart, she wasn't in control of the production process and the results often felt to her like a compromised, overly polite version of the sound she heard in her head.

However, since 1980's Never for Ever, and certainly by The Dreaming in 1982, she had been a driven, obsessive, autonomous presence in the studio, spending months and later years building self-contained musical worlds entirely to her own exacting specifications. Her back catalogue is generally agreed to be one of the finest and most carefully cultivated in pop, but it's not flawless, and the fact that of all her records she has chosen to revisit The Sensual World and The Red Shoes makes sense: the former has some fabulous songs but in places sounds oddly flat, while The Red Shoes is her most predictable album, recorded at a time of personal upheaval and which too often fails to soar. Bush has been critical of both.

Director's Cut will keep elements from some of the original recordings from these records while introducing new ones, though I have yet to see a tracklist. It will be fascinating to hear what she has chosen to change and add, and whether these will be radically revised interpretations or mere tweaks. Her voice, deeper and more resonant these days, will certainly be one point of difference, while production techniques have developed significantly since these albums were made.

Should we worry that this news is evidence of a songwriter in decline? I don't think so. Bush's last album Aerial, released a little more than five years ago, was evidence of a muse in rude if unhurried health, while we are told she is working on new material that will be released before too long.

If Director's Cut is perhaps anti-climactic for those waiting for new songs, here's one final thought that falls somewhere between sobering and thrilling: this release may be the closest we ever get to hearing Bush do something that most artists regard as routine, which is to reinvent and reappraise their songs by performing them onstage. She may have no desire to play live or be the dazzling visual presence she once was, but this is the first time since her tour in 1979 that Bush has made an effort to reinterpret and recontextualise her back catalogue. Not a tour of life, perhaps, but a significant reimagining nonetheless. Unusual, unexpected, a little bit strange, Director's Cut is a classic Bush move. I can't wait to hear it.

Graeme Thomson is author of Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush (Omnibus Press)