Throughout her career, icon Kate Bush has left a number of detailed soundscapes in her wake; something akin to miniature, exquisitely crafted snowglobes of emotion, if you will. Fittingly, then, Bush’s new album 50 Words for Snow finds the chanteuse singing hymns to not only the season, but to her entire career.

Jamie Cullum sits down with Kate Bush at her London home to talk to her about the album.

Listen: Kate Bush with Jamie Cullum – London, October 2011

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Intro

(Goes into ‘Snowflake’)

Jamie Callum: On ‘Snowflake’, which is the, it’s the opening track isn’t it? That’s the first track, yes.

Kate Bush: Yes.

JC: Umm, it’s a beautiful track and when I first heard it and the voice enters the song, I wasn’t sure whether it was yourself, or, just, obviously I realised eventually it was another guest singer and of course it’s your son Albert isn’t it?

KB: Yes.

JC: Singing with a real kind of precision, almost like a chorister. I know he appeared on the ‘Director’s Cut’ and you had processed the voice. How did you get him into the studio to do that, was that just something that came up one day, or did you have that as an idea all along?

KB: Yeah, well I think when I wrote the song it was something that I wrote specifically for him and for his voice, and I guess there was a very strong parallel in my mind between the idea of this transient little snowflake and the fact that Bertie at this point has, still has a really beautiful high, pure voice which soon he will lose because as he grows older his voice will start to come down in pitch, and I really wanted to try and write something that would really show off what a really beautiful voice he has, and there seems to be this sort of link between, you know, the brief time that his voice will be like this and the brevity of the snowflake and I think his performance on this is really powerful, and obviously I’m quite biased because I’m his mother, but it’s interesting how many people have reacted so powerfully to his performance, it’s, you know, I think it’s really something.

JC: It’s very powerful and I think it really does kind of set up this record as something, I don’t know, something a little different because also on the second track, ‘Lake Tahoe’, it begins with some guest voices as well, can you tell me about them?

KB: Well they’re just two friends of ours who just have very beautiful voices but quite unusual in that they sound quite sort of, I suppose a lot of people would think of early music, and I suppose I was trying to set up something that sounded a bit kind of haunting, so they would set up the narrative of the story and then my voice would come in to continue the narrative, and also I quite liked this idea of playing a bit with men who had high voices but my voice would be quite low. (Goes into ‘Lake Tahoe’)

JC: That was ‘Lake Tahoe’ the second track from Kate Bush’s new album ’50 Words For Snow’. Well there’s a lushness to it; to the piano and the orchestration, but also I think one of the other guiding, kind of through-lines for the album to me is actually Steve Gadd’s drums. You know, I love the way Steve Gadd plays on so many records. Was he always gonna be involved in the record did you think? Or was that a process that you’d tried out some different drummers, or did you always want Steve Gadd for this record?

KB: Yeah, yeah I did, and again because I’d worked with him for the first time on ‘Director’s Cut’, and I wanted to work with him for a long time but actually in a way I hadn’t quite had the courage to sort of ask him, and he’s just so brilliant, I love working with him so much. He’s a really great guy for a start, you know, somebody of his stature could really carry a lot of baggage and he’s just such a sweet person, really down to earth, and his interpretation of music is just so sophisticated and I’ve just loved working with him because, you know, there’s a real kind of chemistry that starts to click in and some of these tracks were not easy in terms of their structure and approach, for a start, you know, for a lot of them I’d put the piano down already and it was a-rhythmic and also one of the things I was trying to explore with this record very much so was to try and move into a much longer structure of songs so that I could actually let a storytelling process evolve over a much longer period of time so you know, you could kind of travel further in one story, and so it was quite difficult for some of the musicians to work to, and in a way particularly Steve because, you know, he was actually working with just the piano and a voice.

JC: And of course none of these things were recorded to a click track…

KB: That’s right.

JC: So he was coming into something which, as you say, was a-rhythmic.

KB: Yes…

JC: Wow.

KB: …and he was the next musician that came in so I put the, especially the long songs, I’d put those down in one take and, so, you know, hopefully there was a feel to them, but then of course Steve had to work on top of that trying to sort of tell where I was gonna, you know, be going next and it was, I think it was really a very exciting process and what was great was that quite a lot of those tracks just sounded so good with just piano and drums, and although obviously there were other elements that I wanted to add, already there was this very sort of interesting feel that was happening.

JC: Well it’s interesting you should say that ‘cause one of the things I wrote down in my notebook when I was listening to the album was ‘piano and drums’ and the third track on the album is called ‘Misty’, and I have to say that’s probably my favourite actually, the one I listen to the most.

KB: Oh!

JC: And it’s got Steve Gadd kind of bringing this, kind of groove to it, almost like a bluesy kind of, spiritual kind of feeling to it, to me.

KB: Oh, that’s interesting!

JC: It moves in a, it starts to move in a different way to the previous two tracks…

KB: You know, the idea with that track was that ‘cause it actually just sounded so good with just piano and drums, and I was trying to get almost a kind of Dave Brubeck kind of feel really, and then of course the song starts to move through these different phases and different shapes and it was I think that was possibly the most difficult track to do in terms of piano and then drums. But I’m really pleased with how it’s come out. It’s the longest track on the album as well. (Goes into ‘Misty’)

JC: That was the brilliant ‘Misty’ from the new Kate Bush album ’50 Words For Snow’, definitely my favourite track off the album. That song has a kind of, quite a strong rhythm to it even though Steve’s playing is so delicate; it still manages to have this kind of propulsive feel. Do you feel like your kind of relationship with rhythm has changed a lot over the years, ‘cause you’ve obviously, you’ve gone through stages where you obviously recorded with a band in a room, and then you were working more with programmed drums and, you know, now you’re kind of back to working with more acoustic kind of drums.

KB: Yeah.

JC: Do you feel like that has come full circle, or?

KB: I suppose I like to think that each album is really different from the one before. That’s really important to me ‘cause I don’t want to feel like I’m making the same record all the time. I want it to be just a completely new challenge I suppose, and so I guess it’s just the way that this happened with this record because it was so piano based and because I knew I really wanted to work with Steve, and it was really a matter of getting those two elements down first. Well certainly with, you know, a lot of the tracks, it’s just kind of how it happened, I don’t know if it was particularly thought through before hand really.

JC: So did it feel like a totally different process making this album, to say, making an album like ‘Hounds Of Love’, where you’re more focussed on perhaps creating, kind of, rhythms and almost ‘tracks’ as it were?

KB: I think it’s different each time, which again is kind of what I want because then I’m learning and I’m being pushed somewhere which I think is something that I kind of need really, and I really enjoy; that’s part of the buzz I guess, and I think ‘Hounds Of Love’ was… that was an interesting album to make because I’d just come out of ‘The Dreaming’, which was my first proper self production, and that was a really difficult album to make and it was in kind of two pieces where you had, of course when I made that it was for a vinyl record, not for CD, so you had one side which was just tracks and the other side which was conceptual. So it was really my first go at working conceptually, and then that kind of happened again with ‘Aerial’, I went for a conceptual piece on one of the discs, as opposed to one of the sides, and I think for me it is this evolving process that is actually, kind of in my head, it is going somewhere, its just a little bit, sort of, you know, a broken up process, but to me this feels like a natural evolvement really, you know, it’s not conceptual, and yet there is this sort of connection between the tracks, and you know, I was really pleased with the way it kind of,