I am haunted by Kate Bush’s album ’50 Words For Snow’ and I find myself returning to it again and again. Each song is touched by her very particular genius. It is an album written around the theme of snow. But just like snow itself, under its pure and simplistic surface lies a hidden and deceptive depth. It is a record full of absence but so beautifully is this absence expressed that it becomes a kind of consolation, an album about impermanence that will ironically leave a permanent mark – or should I say, imprint.
In the opener ‘Snowflake’, she writes the song from its shifting, dancing perspective as it falls to earth: ‘I am ice and dust and light. I am sky…’ Sung beautifully by her son, she then answers: ‘The world is so loud. Keep falling and I’ll find you.’
Or in ‘Misty’, a story of a (predictably brief) love affair between a woman and a snowman: ‘He lies down beside me. / So cold next to me.’
My particular favourite is ‘Snowed in at Wheeler Street’. A song that seems to sum up our constant dilemma in the face of time: ‘I’d live that day over and over but the world won’t stop turning.’
Kate Bush’s albums are as longed for as snow at Christmas – as rare and as magical. I draw back the curtain to find the winter, yes, but no snow… So, I step back into my room and suddenly, here it is…
