FEATURE:
Snowed in At Wheeler Street
Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow at Fifteen
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AT the time…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in promotional shot for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow
of writing this feature (13th September, 2026), 50 Words for Snow is Kate Bush’s most recent studio album. She has not announced anything to follow it. That came out on 21st November, 2011. I am looking to its fifteenth anniversary. I am going to end with a few features where Bush’s albums are ranked. I feel 50 Words for Snow is underrated. Maybe not in her top five, I feel it does get placed too low. Whereas others from her have had more and shorter songs, 50 Words for Snow has seven longer tracks. People not as willing to invest time in songs that ask for more time to unfold and unfurl. More akin to Classical or Jazz pieces, I do think that there is something epic and immersive to be discovered. Even if a couple of the tracks did not get a load of critical love – such as Snowed in At Wheeler Street and 50 Words for Snow -, I do think that the album is magnificent. I am going to come to some interviews before getting to some reviews. The first of two interviews from 2011 I want to cover off is for the U.S. publication, HuffPost:
“Mike Ragogna: Kate Bush, wow. How are you?
Kate Bush: I'm doing great, Mike. Thanks for having me.
MR: I already said, "Wow," right? Okay, getting to your new album 50 Words For Snow, can you tell us a little bit about what inspired it?
KB: Well, I guess originally, I thought I would try to make a kind of wintry album, then it quickly became all about snow as I began writing.
MR: And lyrically, it's like the songs emulate the complexity and uniqueness of each snowflake.
KB: Yeah. It's so fascinating to think about how each snowflake is completely individual -- there are millions and millions of them but each one is so unique. I think snow is so evocative and has such a powerful atmosphere. Here in the UK, we don't really get much snow, and I suppose that's why it's such a precious thing to us. What I was trying to do is create an atmosphere that was run throughout the album that somehow felt like there was a kind of snowy landscape, you know?
MR: Absolutely, especially with songs like "Lake Tahoe."
KB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't think that that one is specifically all about snow, but I like to think that the atmosphere is still running from that first track.
MR: Could you go into some background on "Misty"?
KB: The thing about that song, aside from having sort of unusual subject matter, is that it's a very long song -- it's the longest song on the album. I think it runs about 14 minutes. It wasn't even that I set out to write a song that long, but I was trying to explore the idea of working with longer song structures and moving away from the more traditional form. I wanted to be able to tell the story through a much longer piece of time and so I was able to go through various elements of the story and, hopefully, make the song build. The subject matter is sort of just about a girl who builds a snowman, and later the snowman comes to visit her in her bedroom.
MR: As snowmen often do.
KB: Well, I don't know about that unless people just keep quiet about it. (laughs)
MR: Would you say that this album is maybe a continuation of the approaches you began with the albums Red Shoes and Sensual World?
KB: Yeah, I guess so. For me, each album is a sort of an evolving process; it's quite a natural progression to move from one album to the next. So, yes, there are a lot of connections with all of the albums. I guess the main thing is that I've started exploring much longer song structures on this album. I would say that that's what makes this one a little different than previous albums.
MR: Kate, you now have so much experience through your music and working in the industry, is there any advice that you'd like to pass on to new artists?
KB: Well, I think it's a really tough world for new artists. If you believe in what you do and you really want to be in music, just stick at it. It's always a learning process. Enjoy it because I think making music is a privilege, really. In an ideal world, it should also always be fun. As much as possible, make it fun.
MR: Speaking of beautiful voices, the album includes a track called "Snowed In At Wheeler Street" with Sir Elton John, right? What was it like working with him?
KB: It was fantastic. He is one of my great musical heroes, and when I wrote the song, I very much had him in mind and hoped that he would be interested enough to come and sing on the song. At the risk of sounding corny, it was like a dream come true having him come into the studio and sing so beautifully. I think his performance on the song is so fantastic; it's so emotive. I love him singing in that lower key. I really couldn't have been happier with what he brought to the track.
MR: It really is fantastic. His Elton John album is one of my favorites.
KB: I guess I love that album, but my very favorite album of his was Madman Across The Water. But I love everything Elton does”.
I do want to bring in an interview I have included in other features. John Doran chatted with Kate Bush for The Quietus to discuss the wonderful 50 Words for Snow. They republished the interview in 2014 to coincide with Kate Bush’s residency, Before the Dawn, coming to the Eventim Apollo in London. I do think that 50 Words for Snow is a lot finer and applaud-worthy than it is given credit for:
“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.
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.
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.
The song ‘Lake Tahoe’ has the feel of Michael Nyman about it to me, now I don’t know if that’s the fact it has the choirboys Stefan Roberts and Michael Wood, and maybe it’s reminding me of ‘Miserere’ from The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover or not… But anyway, why Lake Tahoe?
KB: It was because a friend told me about the story that goes with Lake Tahoe so it had to be set there. Apparently people occasionally see a woman who fell into the lake in the Victorian era who rises up and then disappears again. It is an incredibly cold lake so the idea, as I understand it, is that she fell in and is still kind of preserved. Do you know what I mean?
I love the way out of the fifty words that you come up with for snow, without a bit of digging round I wouldn’t have been able to tell you which words were real, which were made up, which were partially true and which were obscure, archaic or foreign. I know that the whole idea of Eskimos having 50 words for snow is false but at the same time I do know that the Sami people of Lapland do actually have hundreds of words for snow. But from your point of view where did the idea for such a beautiful and weird song come from?
KB: Well, I’m really pleased you like it. Years ago I think I must have heard this idea that there were 50 words for snow in this, ah, Eskimo Land! And I just thought it was such a great idea to have so many words about one thing. It is a myth – although, as you say it may hold true in a different language – but it was just a play on the idea, that if they had that many words for snow, did we? If you start actually thinking about snow in all of its forms you can imagine that there are an awful lot of words about it. Just in our immediate language we have words like hail, slush, sleet, settling… So this was a way to try and take it into a more imaginative world. And I really wanted Stephen to read this because I wanted to have someone who had an incredibly beautiful voice but also someone with a real sense of authority when he said things. So the idea was that the words would get progressively more silly really but even when they were silly there was this idea that they would have been important, to still carry weight. And I really, really wanted him to do it and it was fantastic that he could do it”.
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
A couple of reviews to cover off for 50 Words for Snow. Beats Per Minute provided plenty of depth and admiration for the wonderous 50 Words for Snow. Fifteen years after its release and I am still fascinated by it. Kate Bush released Director’s Cut in May 2011 and then this new album several months later. Director’s Cut was her re-recording songs from The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993). Two very different projects with different dynamics and musicians, it would have been a task balancing the two:
“Kate Bush’s greatest gift has always been her ability to balance high-concept storytelling with songwriting virtuosity deftly enough that each is compelling completely independent of the other. Her 30-plus-year career boasts a signature hit based on an Emily Bronte novel, a side-long song cycle about drowning, songs from the vantage points of a fetus and of Harry Houdini’s wife, and a disc-long meditation on sunset s —but you don’t need to know any of that for Bush’s music to be affecting. Her music augments her theatrical conceits but is utterly unencumbered by them.
If this were anyone else, the revelation that the British singer’s tenth studio album, 50 Words for Snow contains a 13-minute erotic ode to a snowman would be the indulgence to end all indulgences. But if there’s one thing Kate Bush isn’t, it’s ordinary. There isn’t another singer on the planet that could sell “Misty.” But as she’s aged, her voice has acquired a warmth and depth that makes lines like “His snowy white arms surround me, so cold next to me / I can feel him melting in my hand” not only palatable, but elegant.
As the album’s title would suggest, the rest of its songs keep with the winter theme, but not all of them are that idiosyncratic, at least content-wise. Out of Bush’s catalog, 50 Words for Snow is the album least beholden to traditional song structures. Its seven tracks are lengthy — the shortest clocks in at just under seven minutes — and she takes her time unfolding them. Many of these songs scarcely feature more than Bush and her piano. Her 12-year-old son, Bertie, the subject of a painfully mawkish tribute on her 2005 album Aerial, takes center stage on 50 Words’ opener, “Snowflake,” handling most of the vocals in a boyish soprano. The song is reflective of how most of the album is constructed. Bush’s songs here aren’t built around hooks, but around space and escalating tension. It isn’t until halfway through the eleven-minute runtime of “Lake Tahoe” that drummer Steve Gadd shows himself for the first time on the album
50 Words for Snow’s centerpiece is “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” an unlikely duet with Elton John. It’s a story of doomed lovers spread over many decades, and it plays out seemingly in real time, losing and regaining touch from the fall of Rome to 9/11 over a creeping, glacial synth backdrop. Bush and John have a natural chemistry, like two actors in an epic romance film. Both have voices that sound both lived-in and grown-into, far removed from their younger theatrics but no less dramatically alluring.
Most of 50 Words is an evolution of the understated, graceful aesthetic Bush introduced on Aerial, her first album after a 12-year layoff. But there are moments here in which the manic art-rock siren from the 1980s bubbles to the surface. “Wild Man,” the closest thing to a pop song on the album, features some rare rock muscle and the demented, double-tracked vocals that defined albums like The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. The title track, a blizzard of percolating percussion and synth, is built around guest Stephen Fry reciting, yes, fifty words for snow (highlights: “deamondi-pavlova,” “sorbetdeluge,” “bad for trains”), with Bush counting off. But when she occasionally interrupts to egg him on (“Come on, man, just 22 to go”), her voice reaches the demonic heights she occupied in a past life.
While Bush has been more prolific lately than she’s been since the mid-‘80s (50 Words for Snow is her second album of 2011, following Director’s Cut, a set of new reworkings of tracks from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes), her work is no less painstakingly constructed. These tracks are sparse but airtight, haunting but unrelentingly gorgeous, both logical successors to the stunning second half of Aerial and completely unlike anything she’s done. In other words, business as usual for one of the most singularly captivating and influential talents in rock history”.
I wanted to get to Pitchfork and what they had to say about 50 Words for Snow. There are going to be people who are fans of Kate Bush but might not have heard about this album. Or they feel it is not for them. It is one of her most rewarding releases. Everyone needs to hear this album in full:
“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.
The album's shortest song, the gorgeous closing piano ballad "Among Angels", clocks in at almost seven minutes. "Misty" rolls out its brilliant, funny, and bizarrely touching tale across nearly a quarter of an hour. It's not one second too long. During the 12-year gap between 1993's The Red Shoes and 2005's Aerial when she was raising her son Bertie, Bush gained a new level of compositional patience. She's now allowing her songs to breathe more than ever-- a fact reinforced by this year's Director's Cut, which found her classing-up and often stretching out songs from 1989's The Sensual World and The Red Shoes via re-recordings. So while "Misty" is an eyebrow-raiser about getting very intimate with a cold and white being with a "crooked mouth full of dead leaves," it hardly calls attention to its own eccentricities. Propelled by Bush's languid piano and the jazzy, pitter-pattering drums of veteran stick man (but relatively new Bush recruit) Steve Gadd, the song is about as appealingly grown-up as a song about having sex with a snowman can possibly be. In her early career, Bush sometimes let her zaniness get the better of her, highlighting her tales of sexual taboo and bizarre yarns with look-at-me musical accompaniment and videos. Those days are long gone. And her heightened sophistication works wonders here. So when the song's titular being is nowhere to be found the following morning-- "the sheets are soaking," she sings-- there is nothing gimmicky about her desperation: "Oh please, can you help me?/ He must be somewhere."
While much of 50 Words for Snow conjures a whited-out, dream-like state of disbelief, it's important to note that Bush does everything in her power to make all the shadowy phantoms here feel real. Her best music, this album included, has the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space-- not so much innocent as open to imagination-- that never gets old. "I have a theory that there are parts of our mental worlds that are still based around the age between five and eight, and we just kind of pretend to be grown-up," she recently told The Independent. "Our essence is there in a much more powerful way when we're children, and if you're lucky enough to... hang onto who you are, you do have that at your core for the rest of your life." Snow isn't a blissful retreat to simpler times, though. It's fraught with endings, loss, quiet-- adult things. This is more than pure fantasy. When faced with her unlikely guest on "Misty", Bush pinches herself: "Should be a dream, but I'm not sleepy”.
On 21st November, it will be fifteen years since Kate Bush released an album. The longest gap between albums. I feel, unless she has announced once between the time I am writing this and sharing it, we will get one next year. I cannot imagine she will leave too much time after that before gracing us with new material. Until that amazing day comes, go and experience the grandeur and brilliance of 50 Words for Snow.
I am ending with a few words from people who rank her albums. Why they place 50 Words for Snow where they do. This is what Classic Rock wrote last year when reviewing of all of her albums: “This was universally hailed as another masterpiece. However, her 10th album’s long songs seem to have a lack of focus and a jazzy tendency to take forever to make their points. The atmosphere is wintry, gothic and achingly melancholy. There are few frills on the sparse, sad ballads, but the duet with an incongruous, trying-too-hard Elton John on Snowed In At Wheeler Street rewrites Top Of The City from The Red Shoes winningly. Then there’s Stephen Fry reciting the titular list of synonyms for snow on the centrepiece. Most positively, 2011 saw her back, still uncategorisable, still way out there”. Also last year, Classic Pop assessed each of her albums. This is what they wrote about 50 Words for Snow: “The unthinkable happened in November 2011 when, after waiting six years to release her previous album, Kate emerged as one of the year’s most prolific artists and unleashed a second LP, proving herself anything but predictable. Her first all-new material since 2005’s Aerial, the resulting 50 Words For Snow sees Bush adopt a similar approach to that album. While Aerial throbbed with birdsong and hazy summer vibes, its frosty counterpart’s wintry soundscapes conjure up as unorthodox a festive album as you’re likely to hear. The theme of snow is explored via narratives that draw from a wide range of subject matter – a ghostly figure that appears at night calling for her dog, Snowflake (Lake Tahoe), sex with a snowman (Misty) and time-travelling lovers ripped apart and reunited (Snowed In At Wheeler Street). The latter is a duet with Elton John, who joins Kate’s son Bertie, classical singers Stefan Roberts and Michael Wood and Stephen Fry as guest performers on the album...
Fry’s contribution, a recital of different words for snow on the title track is a pretentious misfire that is bordering on parody. The record was released to widespread acclaim and entered the UK’s album chart at No.5 in November 2011 and later saw Kate beat competition from Adele and PJ Harvey to win the Best Pop Album category at the South Bank Sky Arts Awards”. Looking to this 2013 article from Stereogum, they placed 50 Words for Snow fifth (out of ten): “Bush's 10th LP opens with "Snowflake," an evocative drift of nothingness. "The world is so loud," Bush sings — almost whispers — over a sparse, hollow bed of tom-toms and grand piano. It's the story of a snowflake's birth and descent to Earth, and the cascading arrangement brings that story to life. The rest of 50 Words for Snow follows a similar trajectory: Bush explores seven wintry themes (two eternally separated lovers in "Snowed in at Wheeler Street," the sad myth of the Yeti in "Wild Man"), as her band skitters quietly beneath — or drops out entirely, leaving only Bush's husky alto and keys in the foreground. There's no "Running Up That Hill" to reward your attentiveness — only more layers of snowy atmosphere”. Ending with MOJO and their ranking from earlier this year. They put 50 Words for Snow in ninth: “Re-energised by Director’s Cut, Bush worked furiously on her first LP of new songs since 2005’s Ariel, taking as its central motif the magic, beauty and danger of snow. But a Christmas album it was not, as lengthy, often sombre mediations spread out like black ice, with frost-bitten Elton John duet Snowed In At Wheeler Street a highlight. 15 years later, we’re still waiting for a follow-up”. A range of thoughts on Kate Bush’s most recent album. I think that it is a masterpiece, though perhaps not as esteemed as Hounds of Love, The Dreaming or Aerial. As its fifteenth anniversary is approaching, I urge everyone to…
LISTEN to this phenomenal album.