Songfacts®:

• "Leave It Open" finds Kate Bush singing about how human beings are like receptive vessels, opening and closing ourselves down at different times. She explained in a fan newsletter:
  
  "Like cups, we are filled up and emptied with feelings, emotions - vessels breathing in, breathing out. This song is about being open and shut to stimuli at the right times. Often we have closed minds and open mouths when perhaps we should have open minds and shut mouths."
• The song closes with a line Bush sings backwards: "We let the weirdness in."
• "Leave It Open" explodes at the climax with thunderous gated drums. Kate Bush told engineer Nick Launay that she wanted the drums to sound like cannons firing at them from across a valley.
  
  "We got corrugated iron from a building site and put it around the kit," Launay remembered to Mojo magazine. "We were making loops and just experimenting madly. I think the word 'Wow' was used a lot. It was like being in a toy shop."
• Scotsman Jimmy Bain, who'd played in Rainbow and with Phil Lynott, played bass on this track, "Sat In Your Lap," and "Get Out of My House." Bush literally came across him in the corridor at the studio.
  
  "He said he was a bass player, so she invited him to play," drummer Preston Heyman recalled to Uncut magazine. "We were in the canteen and he said, 'What have I got myself into?' We said not to worry, Kate would guide him through it and it worked great. She chose people by their vibes. She loves people. It was like a family of misfits."
• Kate Bush sang a section of "Leave It Open" backwards, then her team reversed it on the tape so it played the right way but heavily distorted. "When I first met Kate, her father had this tape machine that could play backwards," guitarist Brian Bath told Uncut. "She used it to learn how to sing backwards. I'd never come across that before. It was a brilliant idea. She was already interested in the potential of machines to distort sound."