FEATURE:
Chart Positions, Interviews…and What Comes Next…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a Creating 'Lake Tahoe’ shot in promtion of 50 Words for Snow in 2011
Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow at Eleven
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AS it turns eleven…
on 21st November, I wanted to do one more feature about Kate Bush’s most recent studio album, 50 Words for Snow. I have already done some features that are a bit more specific in terms of songs. I wanted to use this final one to be a bit more general and give an overview of the album. What I want to start out with is a snippet on an interview from The Quietus. There were some great print interviews with Bush around the release of 50 Words for Snow. What I shall move onto, and something that is quite irksome, is that there were some brilliant BBC radio interviews that were uploaded to YouTube and subsequently removed. Without the BBC putting them back on their site, many will never hear these brilliant chats! In terms of promotion, Bush was very generous with her time. After completing and releasing two albums in a year – the first, Director’s Cut, came out in May 2011 -, maybe she was glad to have got all that done. She desperately wanted 50 Words for Snow out in 2011, otherwise she would have waited until winter 2012 to put it out – as the album is very much wintery and would not suite a release at any other point of the year. Here are some exerts of the interview from The Quietus:
“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.
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”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay
There are a lot of interesting things about 50 Words for Snow. Whilst Bush has deployed themes and narratives through other albums, I don’t think she has specifically dedicated a whole album to a subject like snow. Across seven tracks, we get everything from a tryst with a snowman (Misty), Elton John playing Bush’s love who is separated from her through time in various scenes (Snowed in At Wheeler Street), a literal list of fifty words for snow (the title track), and a ghost who rises from a lake in the U.S. (Lake Tahoe). Aside from the final track, Among Angels, there is this snow-themed atmosphere, environment and world that Bush creates. Released in a chilly November in 2011, fans were stunned that Bush released her second album in a year! After almost clearing the snow and re-recording older tracks for Director’s Cut, she was free to plough ahead with fresh endeavour. No surprise that 50 Words for Snow was a chart success in the U.K. Not that any of her studio (or greatest hits/live albums) have charted outside of the top ten, but her tenth studio album got to five. As I have said with albums such as The Sensual World, you would have thought 50 Words for Snow would be embraced more heartily by other nations. To be fair, it reached ten in Netherlands, eight in Finland, and twelve in Switzerland. It also got to the top twenty in Belgium and Ireland. Other counties did not take to the album quite as hard as those I have mentioned. Not that this signals any sort of failure with the album. Quite the reverse! In fact, it is amazing to see that Bush’s music resonates so much and widely so many years after her debut.
The final part of the final feature for 50 Words for Snow ahead of its eleventh anniversary on 21st November. Sixty-five minutes of bliss, this is the current Kate Bush studio album. She released the live album of her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn, in 2016, but 50 Words for Snow is the latest studio album. I have raised the question many times, but it does provoke fans to ask when, if at all, we might get an eleventh studio album from our favourite artist. There has been activity in terms of Bush’s music being used on Stranger Things earlier this year. Because of the Netflix series, 2022 has actually been on her most successful and busiest. We have seen so many news features, and she even provided an interview to Woman’s Hour. Nobody knows for sure but, as 50 Words for Snow was such a phenomenal album right up there with her best week, of course there is huge appetite for more music! In terms of what it would sound like, one would not expect it to vary too much from 50 Words for Snow. It is not as though Kate Bush is going to go back years and give us an album similar to The Dreaming! I think, as much as anything, Kate Bush fans around the world wish her health and happiness in 2023! That said, it would be a wonderful treat if something, anything, were to come from her music-wise. With quite a few of her albums celebrating anniversaries this month, 50 Words for Snow’s eleventh on 21st is one of the most significant. Kate Bush has produced so many remarkable albums through the years. The sublime, dreamy, wonderous and hugely moving 50 Words for Snow is…
AS brilliant as you’d imagine.