Kate Bush released 50 Words for Snow in the UK on November 21, 2011, through her own Fish People label. Her tenth studio album contained seven songs across roughly 65 minutes, with snow connecting stories about strange encounters, fleeting lives and lovers separated by time. It followed Director’s Cut, her 2011 reworking of earlier material, and was her first album of new songs since Aerial in 2005.
Bush described the songs as separate stories connected by snow. In a 2011 interview with The Quietus, she explained that she wanted the opening three tracks to have enough room for their narratives to develop. She had moved into the project straight after finishing Director’s Cut, still absorbed in studio work and enjoying the chance to write from scratch.
The lead single, “Wild Man,” paired Bush with Andy Fairweather Low for a Himalayan expedition with an unusual purpose. When the travelers find the Yeti’s footprints, they erase them to protect the creature from people who would hunt it. A short film made by Brandt Animation accompanied a roughly two-and-a-half-minute segment of the song, extending the album’s storytelling into animation.
The longer songs required a different approach in the studio. In an October 2011 conversation with Jamie Cullum, published by Music Feeds, Bush explained that she had recorded the long piano performances in single takes without a click track. Steve Gadd then added drums to the existing piano and voice, following her changes in timing. She had first worked with him on Director’s Cut and wanted that partnership to continue. Several tracks already excited her with just piano and drums, before the other instruments were added. “Misty,” her story of a woman’s encounter with a snowman, ran 13 minutes and 32 seconds.
Those stories also depended on finding the right voices. Bush wrote the opening “Snowflake” specifically for her son Albert McIntosh, known as Bertie. As she explained to Cullum, his high voice would change as he grew older, making it a fitting match for the short life of a falling snowflake. Mother and son share the song, giving its journey toward the ground a human connection.
For “Snowed In at Wheeler Street,” she cast someone whose playing had helped inspire her own songwriting. Bush told The Quietus that she wrote the duet with Elton John in mind. His piano playing had made a particular impression when she was starting out. Their characters are two souls who keep finding each other in different historical periods, only to be separated again. The duet gives both singers a role in the same struggle to stay together.
Stephen Fry had a different kind of part to play on the title track. Bush supplied a vocabulary that mixed recognizable descriptions of snow with her own inventions, and Fry read it aloud. She told The Independent in 2011 that she had initially come up with too many phrases and wanted more newly coined words. The writing continued until about 10 minutes before he arrived. Their work together centered on the character and tone of his reading. She said that “the softer he said them, the more beautiful they became.”
In 2012, 50 Words for Snow won the Pop Music award at the South Bank Sky Arts Awards.
