FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow
Bringing the Remarkable 2011 Album to the Stage or Screen
___________
I will do another feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
about 50 Words for Snow before its tenth anniversary on 21st November. I have done a couple of general features about the album, in addition to song-specific features. In other pieces, I have remarked how there are Kate Bush albums that have not been brought to the stage. In 2014, when she performed her Before the Dawn residency, she performed one song from 50 Words for Snow. Among Angels was sung as an encore. The other six tracks on the album have not been committed to the stage. I am going to give my thoughts regarding the album and why it would be great to bring it to the stage or screen. Aerial was explored during Before the Dawn, as was Hounds of Love. Even though Bush herself feels 50 Words for Snow is not a conceptual album, there is the theme of snow; the songs could hang together in a very interesting and arresting way. I want to source a review of the album and an interview Bush gave around the time. When they approached 50 Words for Snow, The Guardian were impressed by how the album really does get under the skin:
“But in one sense, these peculiarities aren't really that peculiar, given that this is an album by Bush. She has form in releasing Christmas records, thanks to 1980's December Will Be Magic Again, on which she imagined herself falling softly from the sky on a winter's evening. She does it again here on opener Snowflake, although anyone looking for evidence of her artistic development might note that 30 years ago she employed her bug-eyed Heeeath-CLIFF! voice and plonking lyrical references to Bing Crosby and "old St Nicholas up the chimney" to conjure the requisite sense of wonder. Today, she gets there far more successfully using only a gently insistent piano figure, soft flurries of strings and percussion and the voice of her son Bertie.
Meanwhile, Fry's is merely the latest unlikely guest appearance – Bush has previously employed Lenny Henry, Rolf Harris (twice) and the late animal imitator Percy Edwards, the latter to make sheep noises on the title track of 1982's The Dreaming. Equally, Fairweather Low is not the first person called upon to pretend to be someone else on a Bush album, although she usually takes that upon herself, doing impersonations to prove the point: Elvis on Aerial's King of the Mountain, a gorblimey bank robber on There Goes a Tenner. Finally, in song at least, Bush has always displayed a remarkably omnivorous sexual appetite: long before the Yeti and old Snow Balls showed up, her lustful gaze had variously fixed on Adolf Hitler, a baby and Harry Houdini.
No, the really peculiar thing is that 50 Words for Snow is the second album in little over six months from a woman who took six years to make its predecessor and 12 to make the one before that. If it's perhaps stretching it to say you can tell it's been made quickly – no one is ever going to call an album that features Lake Tahoe's operatic duet between a tenor and a counter-tenor a rough-and-ready lo-fi experience – it certainly feels more intuitive than, say, Aerial, on which a lot of time and effort had clearly been expended in the pursuit of effortlessness. For all the subtle beauty of the orchestrations, there's an organic, live feel, the sense of musicians huddled together in a room, not something that's happened on a Bush album before.
That aside, 50 Words for Snow is extraordinary business as usual for Bush, meaning it's packed with the kind of ideas you can't imagine anyone else in rock having. Taking notions that look entirely daft on paper and rendering them into astonishing music is very much Bush's signature move. There's something utterly inscrutable and unknowable about how she does it that has nothing to do with her famous aversion to publicity. Better not to worry, to just listen to an album that, like the weather it celebrates, gets under your skin and into your bones”.
It took Bush about a year to make the album. That was quite quick for her. She also released Director’s Cut in 2011. It was an amazingly busy time for her! Bush really wanted 50 Words for Snow out before the end of 2011, as it was a winter album and it would not have sounded right in the spring or summer. Even though 50 Words for Snow was put together quicker than usual for Bush, the music is very rich and complex. I think that it is one of her most beautiful and nuanced albums – where one can get so much from each song every time they listen. I am going to give my thoughts regarding the wider and bigger potential for 50 Words for Snow. In promotion of the album, The Quietus spoke with Kate Bush. This is an interview I have sourced before. It is one that I like a lot. There are a few parts of John Doran’s chat that I want to revisit:
“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.
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]”.
One can tell how proud Kate Bush was of 50 Words for Snow. She was pretty generous with interviews, and she discussed the album with quite a few people. It is one of her best and, despite the fact it contains seven tracks, the album runs at over one hour (the album spawned two singles: Wild Man, and a double A-side 10″ vinyl release of Lake Tahoe/Among Angels). You are definitely getting value for money!
We will celebrate the tenth anniversary of 50 Words for Snow in November. Maybe Bush will announce a new album before that comes. Who knows! Like Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave, there is so much story and a great arc to 50 Words for Snow. Although The Ninth Wave is a single story with different songs representing stages and chapters, things are a bit looser with 50 Words for Snow. Lake Tahoe reminds me of some of the songs on The Ninth Wave in terms of its story and resonance. The Kate Bush Encyclopaedia produced an article where Bush talked about the song:
“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? (John Doran, 'A Demon In The Drift: Kate Bush Interviewed'. The Quietus, 2011)”.
Misty is a song that details a tryst between a woman and a snowman. It is tender and childlike but it is also sexual and original. Seeing that on the screen or a stage production would be amazing. A definite story and narrative could be constructed to link the songs. Wild Man is about a Yeti/Abominable Snowman. It is an empathetic look at a creature of mystery.
Snowed in at Wheeler Street (a duet with Elton John) is two lovers that keep meeting through history in different settings. The title track is a fascinating list of made-up words for snow. Among Angels, whilst not related to snow, is a great closing track. There are some great stories and lyrics through the album that would go together brilliantly in the form of a live show or filmed piece. With some wonderful musicians joining Bush through the album - Dan McIntosh – guitar; Del Palmer – bass guitar and bells; Danny Thompson – double bass; John Giblin – bass guitar and Steve Gadd – drums -, 50 Words for Snow is such a fantastic and rewarding listening experience! Michael Wood and Stefan Roberts, Albert McIntosh, Andy Fairweather-Low, Elton John and Stephen Fry feature as vocalists on 50 Words for Snow. One listens to the song and imagines these beautiful, strange and wintery scenes. Maybe it would be too far-fetched to imagine Kate Bush performing the album in full. I would still love to see it come to the stage in some form. More likely, there could be something like Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman. I feel Misty is partly inspired by The Snowman. There is a computer-generated video for the song. There is a nice animated section for Wild Man, in addition to an animation for Lake Tahoe - all look different to one another. It would be great for all seven tracks to be newly-animated and reimagined, perhaps - or have a single look, whether filmed or animated (where there is more of a story and a protagonist(s). It makes me think about the album’s tracks and how, perhaps over a one-hour episode, there could be this story where all the tracks are played out. I am not sure whether there would be narration or any exposition. As The Snowman was released in 1982, maybe something similar to it forty years down the line (next year) would be great. One of short film’s directors, Jimmy T. Murakami, directed the video for Kate Bush 2005 single, King of the Mountain. Almost ten years after its release, it would be such a treat to see 50 Words for Snow…
FULLY brought to life.