Hollywood ? Like a mysterious heroine emerging from the mists of the moors, Kate Bush has returned from self-imposed exile. When her album “Aerial” comes out Tuesday, the English singer will end a public silence of 12 years, an interval that has only burnished her mystique and her reputation as pop music’s ultimate recluse.

But according to Bush, there was nothing mysterious about it.

“After the last record, I thought I would take a year out, and the year became a bit longer than a year,” Bush, 48, said recently. “More or less since I was 17 I’d just gone straight from making records into promotion and back into making records again, and I think I just got to a point where I didn’t want to do that for a while.

“It was really great, and I think it was really good for me on so many levels. … I kind of hung out with some friends and had time to do things that I hadn’t for a long time. I moved a couple of times, moved my studio, had a child,” she said, referring to her 7-year-old son with her partner, guitarist Danny MacIntosh.

And she made her eighth album, a two-compact disc set brimming with Bush signifiers: plush production, a sweeping musical mix of symphonic, electronic, exotic and Renaissance, and always that tremulous, dramatic, soaring voice.

The songs on the first disc include a pulsating ode to Elvis called “King of the Mountain” and an enigmatic meditation on a washing machine. Disc two is a unified song cycle, inspired by the songbirds Bush treasures, that traces a day from afternoon to dawn.

That return to the concept-album ideal is typical of Bush’s proudly anachronistic worldview.

“I think there’s very much a short attention span that’s happening with a lot of people now,” the singer said. “With the whole iTunes and fast-forward buttons, it’s almost like the art form of an album is starting to become less important.”

Bush’s independent spirit has made her an influential artist ever since she made her mark as a teenage prodigy in the late 1970s. A genre unto herself, she’s regarded as a primary source for most distinctive female singer-songwriters, and she also has picked up accolades from less likely artists, including R&B singer Maxwell and ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon.

But Bush keeps her distance. She has toured only once – in 1979 – and doesn’t hobnob in pop music circles, leaving herself subject to myth-weaving and speculation that she’s an agoraphobic given to nervous breakdowns.

“Sometimes it’s very frustrating that I’m portrayed in such a strange way, when people who go on television and eat live insects and spend three weeks up a tree with a camera stuck up their nose are considered normal,” she said. “I’m sorry, but from where I sit, I’m the normal person.”