Music

Big Boi Raves About Kate Bush’s ’50 Words for Snow’

Rapper hopes to collaborate with the artist on his next album

November 22, 2011

Click to listen to Kate Bush’s album ’50 Words for Snow’

Big Boi has been listening to Kate Bush‘s new album 50 Words for Snow for a couple weeks now – but he’s been a fan of the singer since middle school. “I was introduced to her music by my uncle, Russell – my favorite uncle,” he says. “What caught me the most was, first, the production and the voice of course, but also the different meanings behind the stories she was telling.”

Snow, Bush’s first album of new material since 2005’s Aerial, is a seven-track, hour-long, moody meditation on love (and of course, snow). “The album, to me, is just very somber and very chill,” he says. “Knowing her music and being a fan, it’s very, very deep Kate Bush for me. It’s concentrated. It’s raw emotion. It’s almost like a scene from her diary – she seems to be in love like a motherfucker. Really, really, really in love.”

Big Boi’s favorite song on the album, “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” clocks in at just over eight minutes long. “It’s like a story between her and the guy, how they were in love from the beginning of time, how they never want to let each other go,” he says.”It just really builds. I think it’s really deep. I dig it.”

“Snowflake” is another favorite. “It’s good ride music,” Big Boi explains. “It was the first song I heard when I first popped in the CD. I was on the expressway and just driving in circles and listening to it, because the songs are almost 10 minutes apiece and I didn’t want to get out of the car. So I played it a couple times and just rode around.”

But he’d like to take his fandom to a new level on Daddy Fat Sax, the follow-up to 2010’s Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty – and actually work with Bush. (He’s already brought Little Dragon and Phantogram into the studio with him, and has said that an Andre 3000 cameo is “very much possible.”) “I want her to co-produce something with me,” he says. “We’d produce a song and write it from scratch. I’d rather get in a room and not have a plan and just let it come organically – it’s not like I’ve got a song and I’ll just be like, ‘I want you to sing this part right here.'”