FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a publicity photo for 50 Words for Snow
Almost Like Going Back to the Start
___________
COME 22nd November…
it will be ten years since Kate Bush released her latest studio album, 50 Words for Snow. I am keen to highlight a couple of reviews for the album. It is one that I have grown to love even more than I did when it came out. When it arrived in 2011, I was unsure what sort of sound it would possess. Having heard Director’s Cut earlier that year (where Bush reworked songs from two of her previous albums, The Sensual World and The Red Shoes), I wondered if it might be similar in terms of production. 50 Words for Snow is a totally different experience. Bush had to do Director’s Cut to clear the path for new music. She was doing something retrospective but, unlike greatest hits packages, this was an artist who was revisiting songs she felt could have been recorded differently. A chance to have the original song sounding how they should have. 50 Words for Snow is a new phase. In an interview with John Wilson for BBC Radio 4’s Front Row in 2011, Bush was asked about this when promoting the album. I see similarities between her 2011 album and her 1978 debut, The Kick Inside. Thirty-two years after that album was released, Bush sort of returned to that sound and simplicity on 50 Words for Snow. Whilst The Kick Inside is much more about teenage lust and the sensual world of a young woman, 50 Words for Snow is (a record) where we hear an older woman.
There is a lot more than sex and love being discussed on The Kick Inside, though one feels this real sort of urge and curiosity spring from songs. On the 2011 album, there is still this same curiosity and passion. Whether it is the brief tryst of Misty – where the protagonist spends the night with a snowman, only for him to melt by the morning – or the search for a Yeti in Wild Man, here is a woman who is asking many of the same questions she did on her debut. What reminds me most of The Kick Inside on 50 Words for Snow is the instrumentation. Aerial (2005) had orchestration and, to me, it was pretty broad in terms of its sound and vision. At seven tracks, Bush kept things pretty simple. The tracks have longer to emerge and unfurl. She wanted these longer song structures so that she could tell a fuller story. That said, the piano is the central instrument. Though Steve Gadd’s drumming is key throughout, it is Kate Bush and her piano that is dominant. Not since The Kick Inside was there more of a simple and traditional band structure (drums, piano, guitar and bass). Some reviewers noted how there was this live band feel to 50 Words for Snow. Musicians playing together in a room, rather than it sounding like layers of instruments being assembled from various takes.
I am not sure whether the sound of 50 Words for Snow is going to be the sound going forward. It does seem that Director’s Cut, in its retrospection, was the start of a period of Bush, in some way, looking back. She remastered her studio albums in 2018. She also released a book of lyrics, How to Be Invisible, in 2018. Before the Dawn, her 2014 residency, was Bush performing songs from her older albums (though there was one track from 50 Words for Snow played). I will finish off with a couple of reviews for Kate Bush’s 2011 masterwork. Like The Kick Inside, there is so much packed into the album in terms of themes. One cannot define either album as being about a single thing. Both albums are ambitious and accomplished, though there are easily accessible too. This is what Pitchfork wrote in their review:
“On "Wild Man", the first single from Kate Bush's winterized 10th album, the singer tells of an expedition searching for the elusive Abominable Snowman. "They want to know you," she coos, "They will hunt you down, then they will kill you/ Run away, run away, run away." Of course, when it comes to modern popular figures-- who often court fame and adulation with an obsessiveness that can be fascinating or just plain sad-- Bush herself is something of a mythical beast. 50 Words for Snow is only her second album of original material in the last 17 years, and she hasn't performed a full concert since her groundbreaking and theatrical Tour of Life wrapped up its six-week run in 1979. So it's no surprise that she readily sympathizes with the misunderstood monster at the center of "Wild Man": "Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside/ You sound lonely."
50 Words for Snow is teeming with classic Bush-ian characterizations and stories-- fantasies, personifications, ghosts, mysteries, angels, immortals. As quoted in Graeme Thomson's thorough, thoughtful recent biography Under the Ivy, she explained her attraction to such songwriting: "[Songs] are just like a little story: you are in a situation, you are this character. This is what happens. End. That's what human beings want desperately. We all love being read stories, and none of us get it anymore." She's onto something; in our postmodern era, the idea of a tale can seem quaint and simple.
But Bush continues to infuse her narratives with a beguiling complexity while retaining some old-school directness. Because while most of this album's songs can be easily summarized-- "Snowflake" chronicles the journey of a piece of snow falling to the ground; "Lake Tahoe" tells of a watery spirit searching for her dog; "Misty" is the one about the woman who sleeps with a lusty snowman (!)-- they contain wondrous multitudes thanks to the singer's still-expressive voice and knack for uncanny arrangements. And mood. There's an appealing creepiness that runs through this album, one that recalls the atmospheric and conceptual back half of her 1985 masterpiece Hounds of Love. Indeed, when considering this singular artist in 2011, it's difficult to think of worthy points of reference aside from Bush herself; her onetime art-rock compatriots David Bowie and Peter Gabriel are currently MIA and in rehash mode, respectively. And while current acts including Florence and the Machine are heavily inspired by Bush's early career and spiritual preoccupations, none are quite able to match their idol's particular brand of heart-on-sleeve mysticism. In an interview earlier this year, the 53-year-old Bush told me she doesn't listen to much new music, and after listening to the stunningly subtle and understated sounds on Snow, it's easy to believe her”.
I have enjoyed reading the reviews for 50 Words for Snow, as there is so much love and affection for Bush’s ten studio album. This is what AllMusic noted in their review:
“Kate Bush's 50 Words for Snow follows Director's Cut, a dramatically reworked collection of catalog material, by six months. This set is all new, her first such venture since 2005's Aerial. The are only seven songs here, but the album clocks in at an hour. Despite the length of the songs, and perhaps because of them, it is easily the most spacious, sparsely recorded offering in her catalog. Its most prominent sounds are Bush's voice, her acoustic piano, and Steve Gadd's gorgeous drumming -- though other instruments appear (as do some minimal classical orchestrations). With songs centered on winter, 50 Words for Snow engages the natural world and myth -- both Eastern and Western -- and fantasy. It is abstract, without being the least bit difficult to embrace. It commences with "Snowflake," with lead vocals handled by her son Bertie. Bush's piano, crystalline and shimmering in the lower middle register, establishes a harmonic pattern to carry the narrative: the journey of a snowflake from the heavens to a single human being's hand, and in its refrain (sung by Bush), the equal anticipation of the receiver. "Lake Tahoe" features choir singers Luke Roberts and Michael Wood in a Michael Nyman-esque arrangement, introducing Bush's slippery vocal as it relates the tale of a female who drowned in the icy lake and whose spirit now haunts it. Bush's piano and Gadd's kit are the only instruments. "Misty," the set's longest -- and strangest -- cut, is about a woman's very physical amorous tryst with, bizarrely, a snowman. Despite its unlikely premise, the grain of longing expressed in Bush's voice -- with bassist Danny Thompson underscoring it -- is convincing. Her jazz piano touches on Vince Guaraldi in its vamp. The subject is so possessed by the object of her desire, the morning's soaked but empty sheets propel her to a window ledge to seek her melted lover in the winter landscape.
"Wild Man," introduced by the sounds of whipping winds, is one of two uptempo tracks here, an electronically pulse-driven, synth-swept paean to the Tibetan Kangchenjunga Demon, or "Yeti." Assisted by the voice of Andy Fairweather Low, its protagonist relates fragments of expedition legends and alleged encounters with the elusive creature. Her subject possesses the gift of wildness itself; she seeks to protect it from the death wish of a world which, through its ignorance, fears it. On "Snowed in at Wheeler Street," Bush is joined in duet by Elton John. Together they deliver a compelling tale of would-be lovers encountering one other in various (re)incarnations through time, only to miss connection at the moment of, or just previous to, contact. Tasteful, elastic electronics and Gadd's tom-toms add texture and drama to the frustration in the singers' voices, creating twinned senses: of urgency and frustration. The title track -- the other uptempo number -- is orchestrated by loops, guitars, basses, and organic rhythms that push the irrepressible Stephen Fry to narrate 50 words associated with snow in various languages, urgently prodded by Bush. Whether it works as a "song" is an open question. The album closes with "Among Angels," a skeletal ballad populated only by Bush's syncopated piano and voice. 50 Words for Snow is such a strange pop record, it's all but impossible to find peers. While it shares sheer ambition with Scott Walker's The Drift and PJ Harvey's Let England Shake, it sounds like neither; Bush's album is equally startling because its will toward the mysterious and elliptical is balanced by its beguiling accessibility”.
On its tenth anniversary on 22nd November, I will listen to 50 Words for Snow in full. It is a remarkable album that reminds me so much of The Kick Inside. Not that Bush was trying to revisit the past or reset the clock. She has stripped back the instruments but, rather than that leading to a sparser album, there is a fullness and atmosphere that is wonderous. The Kick Inside has a live feel. I can close my eyes and get the sense of musicians being in the room together playing a single take together. Who knows what the future holds for Kate Bush. If there are more albums like 50 Words for Snow, then we will all…
BE so much richer.