FEATURE:
Out from the Cold
Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow at Thirteen
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I will publish two features…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in promotional shot for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow
marking thirteen years of Kate Bush’s latest studio album, 50 Words for Snow. Until very recently, many people would have thought that was her last album. Very little sign that she was thinking of coming back. No real intent regarding doing anything new. The more time that passes, the more unlikely it was we would get anything. On Friday, 25th October, we heard an interview where Kate Bush spoke with Emma Barnett for BBC Radio 4’s Today. Bush was speaking about the animated video for Little Shrew (Snowflake). It was designed to raise money for War Child by brining to focus the atrocities of war affecting children. Bush particularly impacted by the violence in Ukraine. When she was being interviewed, Bush also revealed that she was keen to do something new. She had many ideas and there was this palpable sense that a new album was on her mind. Of course, as she announced she had ideas, it is more than likely she is already recording the album rather than thinking of ideas. You can get 50 Words for Snow (Polar Edition). That album is out on 15th November. I hope that people who are fans of Kate Bush fans appreciate and listen to 50 Words for Snow. Not discussed as much as many of her studio albums. I really love Bush’s 2011 release. On 21st November, 2011, we were treated to the second album from Kate Bush that year – Director’s Cut was released in May. 50 Words for Snow received hugely positive reviews. In fact, it was rated as highly as 2005’s Aerial. Rather than having an album with ten, eleven or twelves tracks that last between three to five minutes, these were longer tracks. Allowing the music to unfold. In this first anniversary feature, I am going to get to an interview with Bush from 2011 and reviews for the album. Like with other albums I have marked recently, the second feature will explore the songs more.
It is interesting looking at 50 Words for Snow now realising that Bush will bless us with her eleventh studio album very soon. If not next year than the year after. Though you feel next year will be the one. I think that 50 Words for Snow should be viewed more highly. When it comes to Kate Bush album rankings, I guess 50 Words for Snow ranks average. Bafflingly, Rough Trade placed the album tenth when they ranked her albums last year. This blog ranked it in seventh. NME placed the album sixth in 2019. SPIN placed the album eighth in 2022. In the same year, The Pink News put 50 Words for Snow eight too. So it averages in about eighth or ninth position out of ten. That is quite a shock to me! I am glad an album like The Red Shoes, often seen as her weakest album, does better. I think 50 Words for Snow is among her best and most important works. After some retrospection and revision for Director’s Cut, this was Bush’s first completely new album after Aerial. A totally different sound and direction, 50 Words for Snow has so many moods. You fall into songs. The recent Little Shrew (Snowflake) video offered a new take on that song. Originally written to showcase her son, Bertie, on vocals, it opens 50 Words for Snow. I think it would be wonderful if there were animations for all seven tracks on the album. It seems like this complete piece that could be made into a short film. Tantalising if Kate Bush performed the entire album live one day. She did perform Among Angels as part of 2014’s Before the Dawn residency. Thirteen years after its release, it is still amazing hearing songs like Misty and Lake Tahoe unfold. The brilliance of Bush’s compositions and productions. Songs that flow, expand and create their own worlds.
If some think the album has a few weaker songs – some highlight the title track and Snowed in at Wheeler Street -, I do think the entire album should be given another chance. In terms of streaming numbers, the seven tracks on 50 Words for Snow does not have huge figures. Over four million for Snowflake, though the remaining six tracks haven’t done as well. I want to bring in some reviews to show that critics did react positively to the album. I will start with extracts from an interview with Kate Bush from 2011. An interview I have sourced before, The Quietus chatted with Bush about her new album. John Doran was tasked with asking the questions. I would urge people to read the entire interview:
“Kate Bush’s abilities as a songwriter just get better and better with age. The keen eye that saw a couple’s sex life writ large in their entwining clothes drying on a line in the breeze on ‘Mrs. Bartolozzi’ (Aerial) is at evidently hard at work on every song here. She sees the erotic poetic potential in places other song writers wouldn’t dare look for it. ‘Misty’ is the story of a love affair or one night stand between a snowman and a girl and she has no problem taking this to its soggy but bittersweet conclusion. She inspires a powerful performance out of Elton John on ‘Snowed In At Wheeler Street’, as the pair play disembodied lovers, trying to be together for all time despite corporeal disaster constantly wrenching them apart.
Kate Bush: I’m sorry I’m late phoning but I’ve been caught up in another interview that went on for much longer than it should have.
That’s fine. That’s not a problem.
KB: How are you?
I’m great thanks, how are you?
KB: [indecisively] I’m good… [decisively] Yeah! I’m good thanks!
I’ve got a five-month-old boy, he’s my first child so sleep’s at something of a premium. I say this to everyone at the moment because I’m half asleep.
KB: Awwwww!
So obviously looking at the artwork, the track listing, the title, and the lead single ‘Wild Man’ from your new album 50 Words For Snow, it’s pretty clear what the theme is. Now culturally snow is really interesting stuff. It can symbolise birth, purity, old age, death, sterility… I was wondering what it means to you.
KB: [laughs derisively] Well, I’ve never heard of it in terms of old age or death… [laughs] That’s quite an opening line. Well, I think it’s really magical stuff. It’s a very unusual, evocative substance and I had really great fun making this record because I love snow.
What are your memories of snow like from childhood? Was playing in the snow something you really looked forward to?
KB: Well… yeah. Do you know any children who don’t look forward to playing in the snow?
I know what you’re saying but there are some who like it more than others…
KB: …
Er…
KB: … Are you knackered?
Yeah.
KB: Have you been up all night?
Yeah, I have.
KB: [laughs uproariously and good naturedly] Well John do you like snow? Don’t you think snow is a thing of wonder and beauty?
I think that if I lived outside of London, maybe in the countryside where it doesn’t turn to a mixture of slush and hazardous black ice, I might like it more. Also, I’m very tall and for whatever reason I just fall over when it’s icy, I always have done. It’s very dangerous I think.
KB: [laughs] Are you a kind of glass half empty kind of guy?
My glass used to be completely dry. Now it’s half empty but I’m working on making it half full… No, I’m joking, of course I like snow, it’s simply marvelous stuff. But obviously there’s been a great thematic shift between Aerial and this album.
KB: Yeah.
So Aerial is full of images of clear skies, still water, warm days and it’s full of the bustle of family life and an easy domesticity. 50 Words For Snow is a similarly beautiful album but there is a chill to it – it lacks the warmth of its predecessor. I wondered if it represented another switch from an autobiographical to a narrative song writing approach?
KB: Yeah, I think it’s much more a kind of narrative story-telling piece. I think one of the things I was playing with on the first three tracks was trying to allow the song structure to evolve the story telling process itself; so that it’s not just squashed into three or four minutes, so I could just let the story unfold.
I’ve only heard the album today so I can’t say I’m completely aware of every nuance but I have picked out a few narrative strands. Would it be fair enough to say that it starts with a birth and ends with a death?
KB: No, not at all. Not to my mind anyway. It may start with a birth but it’s the birth of a snowflake which takes its journey from the clouds to the ground or to this person’s hand. But it’s not really a conceptual piece; it’s more that the songs are loosely held together with this thread of snow.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in promotional shot for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow
Fair play. Now some of your fans may have been dismayed to read that there were only seven songs on the album but they should be reassured at this point that the album is 65 minutes long, which makes for fairly long tracks. How long did it take you to write these songs and in the course of writing them did you discard a lot of material?
KB: This has been quite an easy record to make actually and it’s been quite a quick process. And it’s been a lot of fun to make because the process was uninterrupted. What was really nice for me was I did it straight off the back of Director’s Cut, which was a really intense record to make. When I finished it I went straight into making this so I was very much still in that focussed space; still in that kind of studio mentality. And also there was a sense of elation that suddenly I was working from scratch and writing songs from scratch and the freedom that comes with that.
Had you always wanted to do 50 Words For Snow or were you just on a roll after Director’s Cut?
KB: No, they were both records that I’d wanted to do for some time. But obviously I had to get Director’s Cut done before I could start this one… Well, I guess I could have waited until next year but this record had to come out at this time of year, it isn’t the sort of thing I could have put it out in the summer obviously.
Did the snow theme come from an epiphany or a particular grain or idea? Was there one particular day when you happened to be in the snow…
KB: No. I don’t think there was much snow going on through the writing of this… it was more to do with my memories of snow I suppose and the exploration of the images that come with it.
Now the cover art features a snowman kissing a girl and I was worried that her lips might get stuck to his. Do you know like when you’re young and you get your lips stuck to a lolly ice straight out of the freezer?
KB: [giggles]
And what about the carrot getting stuck in her eye? It’s a health and safety issue.
KB: Well she doesn’t look too worried does she?
Yeah, she looks like she’s quite into it to be honest. Well, this leads me onto a serious question. Sometimes when I listen to your albums I think of Angela Carter. Sure there may well be a fantastical, almost fairy tale piece of story-telling going on here but just out of reach there is a quite torrid, sexual undercurrent. I mean, I’m right to read this sexuality into this album aren’t I? I’m not just being a pervert.
KB: Well, I think in that particular song obviously there is a sexual encounter going on… you are referring to that song aren’t you?
Yeah, ‘Misty’, which has the reference to the girl’s affair with a snowman, the wet sheets, the idea of him melting in her hands and on her bed.
KB: Yeah. [massive pause] I’m sorry John, did you ask me a question? What was the question?”.
I will finish with a couple of reviews. For anyone who has a particular view of the album or has overlooked it, I think that it is necessary to reconsider. There are a lot of hugely glowing reviews. Drowned in Sound awarded 50 Words for Snow 9 out of 10:
“So yeah: maybe when Kate Bush said the 12 year gap between The Red Shoes and Aerial was down to her wanting to work on being a mum for a while – and not because she’d had a mental breakdown/become morbidly obese/was a dope fiend/sundy other conspiracy theories that flew around – she was, y’know, telling the truth. Here, six years after Aerial and just six months after Director’s Cut comes 50 Words for Snow. It’s Bush’s third album since 2005, which technically puts her up on The Strokes, The Shins or Modest Mouse.
And jolly spectacular it is too, which is never a guarantee: Aerial was a masterpiece; The Red Shoes, The Sensual World and the diversionary Director’s Cut were not. Bush has always been best at her most focussed, and here she delves monomaniacally into snow and the winter – its mythology, its romance, its darkness, its rhythmic frenzy and glacial creep. 50 Words for Snow is artic and hoare frost and robin red breast, sleepy snowscapes and death on the mountain, drifts in the Home Counties and gales through Alaska.
But it is mostly, I think, a record about how the fleeting elusiveness of snow mirrors that of love; and if I’m off the mark there, then certainly as a work of music one can view it as a sort of frozen negative to Aerial’s A Sky of Honey, the transcendent 42 minute suite about a summer’s day that took up the album’s second half. Whatever the case, 50 Words...demands to be listened to as a whole: the days of Bush as a singles-orientated artist are long gone on a long, sometimes difficult record on which the shortest track clocks in at a shade under seven minutes.
The first three songs clock in at over half an hour and comprise the starkest, most difficult and in some ways most beautiful passage of music in Bush’s career. Based on minimal, faltering piano and great yawning chasms of silence, these tracks mirror the eerie calm of soft, implacable snowfall and winter's dark. On the opening ‘Snowflake’ she shares vocal duties with her young son Albert, whose pure falsetto blends into her lower register. Vaguely suggestive of carol singing, his tones are also clear and elemental, without the shackles of adult emotion as he keens “I am ice and dust and light. I am sky and here.” over his mother’s spare, hard keys. ‘Lake Tahoe’ is the real challenge here: a crawling ghost story about a drowned woman, gilded with cold choral washes, its diamond keys crystallize into being a note at a time. Its 11 minutes are roughly as far away from ‘Babooshka’ as it’s possible to get. Yet as Steve Gadd’s soft, jazzy drums gather in pace and intricacy, life and movement enters this crepsular musical tundra, the album’s low key opening sequence swelling to a soft crescendo with final part ‘Misty’. A bleakly sensual love story that, er, appears to be about a doomed affair with a snowman, it’s somewhat reminiscent of Spirit of Eden-era Talk Talk as its 13-minute expanse periodically blooms into gorgeously tangled blossoms of bucolic guitar.
Single ‘Wild Man’ sees a shift in gear – springy, exotic electronics, a sprightlier pace and a sense of playfulness as a husky-voiced Bush trades the last song’s impossible man for another as she dreams about the possibility of a yeti. Describing a Kate Bush track without making it sound silly can be rather trying – this is a woman whose past triumphs include several songs featuring Rolf Harris – but I guess ‘Wild Man’ works as lush, sensual dream of the possibility of the things that might existing outside humdrum human experience. It’s not just about the yeti, but the impossibly exotic place names she mutters in her verbal quest for the creature – “Kangchenjunga… Metoh-Kangmi… Lhakpa-La… Dipu Marak… Darjeeling… Tengboche… Qinghai… Himachal Pradesh” – and the vertiginously thrilling change of gear as heavily distorted guest Andy Fairweather Low roars a near indecipherable chorus. It’s also about Bush’s formidable production skills, her precise, nagging synths and total mastery of studio as instrument.
Those synths imbue ‘Snowed in at Wheeler Street’ with a sense of frazzled foreboding that negates the potential cheesiness of Elton John’s throaty turn on a duet that casts him and Bush as a pair of lovers spread across time, doomed to separate at key points in history, wishing that could return to one mundane, snow bound day spent together. And a bed of electronics whip up a quietly hypnotic tumult on the astonishing title song. Here – and again Kate Bush songs can be a job to not make sound ridiculous – Bush counts to 50 in a hushed monotone as Stephen Fry (oh yes) recites a list of names for snow, real and imagined: “blackbird braille… stella tundra… vanilla swarm… avalanche”, occasionally punctured by an eerily muted chorus in which Bush frenzied urges him to continue the list. On the one hand, it continues ‘Wild Man’s revelry in the intoxicating power of human language. On the other, it’s the album’s least human track, its churning, chiming electronics and alien words mirroring the quiet chaos and leaden intensity of a snowstorm, its final minutes a headlong descent into oblivion and whiteout. It is astonishing, immense, bizarre and perfectly realized: only Kate Bush could conceive of this song, and nobody else will make anything like it again.
As the cooing over Director’s Cut demonstrated, even Bush on diversionary form is enough to tease gushy spurts of adjectives from the soberest of souls; hitting a true peak again, there is the temptation to drone on about how important she is, how she dwarfs most of her peers artistically, let alone the braying yahs and rahs of today who cite her as an influence. But let’s keep it in perspective: in the 26 years since Hounds of Love, Aerial and 50 Words for Snow have been her only truly fully realised albums. Kate Bush is more than fallible; but at peak she is incomparable”.
Before wrapping things up, DIY’s review saluted and celebrated a beautiful and brilliant album from one of music’s greatest songwriters and most original voices. The gulf between critical reaction in 2011 and the low position the album is usually afforded in various features is surprising. As the weather is starting to turn and the days seem shorter, 50 Words for Snow is a perfect accompaniment:
“While May’s ‘Directors Cut’ was a reworking of earlier material, ‘50 Words For Snow’ features seven all-new compositions. It is a concept album of sorts based around the theme of winter and snow, a theme Bush has wanted to cover for a long time, and there is definitely a pronounced wintry feeling to these subtle, delicate and at times desolate songs. For an artist who has a reputation for making theatrical, florid music ‘50 Words Of Snow’ features Bush showing her capacity for restraint and her supreme gift for making meticulously crafted beautiful music.
The album is very long, indeed at least two of the tracks are over ten minutes in length, but it never fails to captivate and is never dull. In much the same way as it is possible to stare enthralled at falling snow for hours the fragile songs here, despite their length, leave you engrossed.
Opening track ‘Snowflake’ sets the tone. A twinkling piano is the backing for a duet between Bush and her son Bertie which sees her playing the role of the mother protector shielding her son from the elements: “The world is so loud, keep falling, I’ll find you.” ‘Lake Tahoe’ sees Bush showing off her experimental side and features an operatic duet between Stefan Roberts and Michael Wood.
‘Misty’ is an incredibly sensual and heartfelt track featuring a powerfully soulful vocal. It seems to describe a passionate encounter with a snowman that has came to life before mysteriously departing, “I see his snowy white face but I’m not afraid / he lies down beside me / I can feel him melting in my hand.”
‘Wild Man’ is faster paced and is the only song here that could reasonably be considered a pop single, at least in Kate Bush’s fabulously strange definition of pop. The second half of the album takes a turn for the strange. Elton John pops up with a soulful stately vocal in ‘Snowed In At Wheeler Street’ his powerful voice a lovely contrast with Bush’s soft hushed tones. The title track is the highlight and possibly the most baffling piece of music to be heard all year. Stephen Fry is an unusual choice of guest as he intones 50 different synonyms for snow over a dense tribal backing. These terms for snow are mostly made up, and go from the beautiful (‘blackbird braille’), to the ridiculous (‘Boomerangablanca’). A lot of thought has clearly gone into these linguistic creations and a read of the lyric sheet is strongly recommended. It is an utterly bonkers piece but it encapsulates everything that is so unique and fascinating about Bush.
The great thing about Kate Bush is that you cannot imagine anyone else ever possibly making the music she does, and ‘50 Words For Snow’ is another impossibly beautiful and individually brilliant album. A perfect accompaniment to those long and dark wintry nights”.
You can buy the 2018 Remastered edition of 50 Words for Snow if you do not want to invest in the new Polar Edition. In 2011, when we knew a second studio album of that year was coming from Kate Bush, there was a mix of surprise and anticipation. Bush having to juggle the two. It must have been quite strange reworking older tracks for Director’s Cut and working on new and totally different songs for 50 Words for Snow. In interviews for Director’s Cut, Bush had to keep her cards close to her chest when asked about new music. She did reveal in one or two that a new album was coming but did not give much away in terms of what it would entail. After 2011, Bush engaged in various projects. Her lyrics book, reissuing her albums, the 2014 residency, and various other bits. Lots of looking back but very little glimmer that any new album would come. We were very fortunate that Bush shocked everyone by dropping the tantalising possibility of a new album very soon. Will it sound like 50 Words for Snow? Bush told Emma Barnett that she wants to make something different. That all of her albums are different. Perhaps a return to an album that has more tracks that are shorter than those on 50 Words for Snow. The use of Snowflake for a new video recontextualises the lyrics. One of the most stirring and touching songs on 50 Words for Snow, it is wonderful that she revisited it. It makes me also appreciate the original more. For the second anniversary feature, I am going to go more into some of the songs and take a different approach. Ahead of its thirteenth anniversary on 21st November, do spend some time with Kate Bush’s 2011 album. 50 Words for Snow is a stunning, immersive and brilliant…
ALBUM everyone should hear.