On a solo tour last year, Nick Cave suddenly became self-aware. He built his career performing with bands — the Birthday Party, Grinderman, the Bad Seeds — but here he was with only a piano and Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood supporting him. As they worked their way through nearly two dozen songs every night, Cave started thinking deeply about his songwriting.
“When I was singing these songs alone at the piano with just the bass — old songs, new songs, over 45 years of songwriting — they spoke their original intent,” he says, thoughtfully choosing his words on a call. “It was interesting to see that my preoccupations, even though the songs are in different lyrical styles, are essentially the same and always have been the same. They revolve around the ideas of transcendence and loss. One song after another concerns loss in a personal or universal way.”
On Wild God, his latest album with the Bad Seeds, the songs’ themes remain the same but more comforting. On the record’s shimmery, slow-building “Joy,” Cave uncharacteristically sings, “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.” Even though his voice sounds broken, it’s a profound moment given the loss that he has experienced. In the past decade, two sons — Arthur Cave and Jethro Lazenby — have died alongside his mother, Dawn, and his dear friend and onetime creative partner, Anita Lane.
His last three albums — the Bad Seeds’ 2016 album, Skeleton Tree, 2019’s devastating Ghosteen, and his 2021 collaboration with his longtime musical partner, Warren Ellis, Carnage — have each addressed his mounting grief in unique ways. He has also written about the way he feels rearranged on a human level following these losses in open letters to his fans via his Red Hand Files newsletter and in a 2022 book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, which contained an extended interview with his co-writer, Seán O’Hagan.
Wild God is different. It’s not cheery in a TikTok pop-song way, but it is more optimistic — in a Nick Cave way. He pleads for understanding “in the Sunday rain” on “Frogs,” an undulating art-rock number that recalls late-Sixties Scott Walker and Jimmy Webb’s songwriting while still sounding like himself. His band plays in happier-sounding major keys on the album’s first two songs, “Song of the Lake” and “Wild God,” as he sings about leaving the dark, old past behind. And he wails and hollers on the mesmeric “Conversion” as a gospel choir joins him singing, “I was touched by the spirit, touched by the flame,” as he sounds like he’s becoming something brighter himself. Even a song like “Long Dark Night” ends gently as if a new day were starting. It’s impossible to come out of listening to an album like this feeling like the person you were before.
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“The default setting for these new songs is the same as they have always been, which is about loss and an understanding of that,” he explains. “But the joyful nature of these songs leaps beyond that. Joy is an emotion that understands the nature of loss.”
Now he’s witnessing the effects of his new mindset at work. The Bad Seeds kicked off a European tour last month and have been performing every song on the new album in addition to fan favorites at arena gigs. Cave says the reception fans have given the songs has floored him. (The band will embark on a North American tour in the spring.)
“These particular songs lend themselves to the live experience in a way that some of the other records we’ve done — or maybe the past three records — haven’t,” he says on a long call from somewhere in Germany, where he was cruising along the autobahn to his next gig. “When they’re supposed to hit, they really hit home. You can see it on the people’s faces.”
Do the Wild God songs feel different to you now that you’ve been performing them live?
The new stuff sounds awesome. It’s like the songs hadn’t arrived yet on the record, but they do when they get onstage, and these songs are just epic, like gloriously grandiose in a way that only the Bad Seeds can do. It’s incredibly emotional. It’s quite something for us to arrive at this point so early on in a tour. Usually it takes a few gigs to sort of work stuff out, but this is really encouraging.
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You’ve described Wild God’s track list as a series of “conversions.” What conversion do you see happening in the audience when you play the songs?
Yeah, what I mean by that word is changing from one thing to another, from one state to another. Most of the songs on that record move from one place up to another higher level within the song, and that translates very well in a live setting. It’s really beautiful to watch a truly emotional experience happen on the faces of the audience that are looking at it. It’s very moving.
The song “Conversion” is my favorite on the record. It picks up when the choir starts quickly singing, “touched by the spirit, touched by the spirit.”
Yeah, it really kicks off. That song is more overtly religious than some of the other ones, but it certainly has an evangelical spirit about it in the best possible way.
You featured a gospel choir on your Abattoir Blues album 20 years ago. How is it different this time?
On the Abattoir Blues record, it’s more traditionally gospel — or it’s that slightly queasy relationship between Black gospel and white rock & roll, which I actually don’t particularly like. We just felt that it would work well back then. I do listen to a lot of gospel, but in its purest state.
What do you mean?
Well, gospel choirs. I’ve been to Pentecostal churches, so it’s religious music, although that’s not the kind of church I would attend normally other than to listen to the music.
How do you feel you used gospel music differently this time?
We tried not to make it gospel. We had lots of discussions with the singers, who are Black and sing in gospel choirs, to make the singing dependent on the song, both “low church,” let’s say, or evangelical and high church choral. So the singers are more embedded inside the music as emotional surges.
On “Conversion,” there is a more traditional gospel call-and-response thing going on in the second half — “Touched by the spirit, touched by the flame” — but we subvert that, too. It’s entirely improvised, and there’s a call-and-shout response that’s extraordinarily chaotic.
Is the song about an epiphany you experienced?
It tells the story in a fable-like way of something that happened to my wife that blew my mind — but she asked me not to speak about it, to keep some things private.
Fair enough. Does your wife help you craft lyrics?
No. She helps me with other things, but no one goes near the lyrics.
No? How do you navigate marital issues like preserving the story behind “Conversion” then?
There is a gentle tension between Susie and me when it comes to my publicness about things and her deeply private nature. I find a lot of personal benefit and solace in being very transparent and open about personal matters. And Susie is essentially a hermit. She’s an extremely private person.
That must have been difficult in the past few years as you’ve experienced the same grief.
Yeah. I mean, it’s not easy for her in a way because, in these matters, everyone has their own way. But we support each other in the way we go about things. It’s just that Susie’s relationship to grief is more subterranean. She is very helpful to other grieving people in a quiet way.
Your song “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” is a tribute to Anita Lane, your onetime romantic and creative partner. How did she give you a different perspective on the world?
She was a very special person. A lot of bands came out of art schools in the Melbourne scene at that time, as did Anita, but Anita was by far the most talented of us all. She was a better painter, a better drawer, a much more original thinker. She was much more unorthodox in her views. She was just this radiant flame that we loved and circled around, and she had a massive influence on the way I saw things personally. We would write a lot of lyrics together, draw together, and paint together, and we were very entangled in that way.
The song ends with a recording of her talking about how you wrote “From Her to Eternity.” It’s surprising to hear her giggle as she describes one of your scariest songs.
Yeah. She describes sitting in bed and imagining these people in the room above us and all of that sort of stuff. She was amazing.
You began work on Wild God on New Year’s Day of 2023. Did you choose that date symbolically?
No. A month before, my manager said the most horrifying sentence he can say to me: “It’s time to make another record.” And I’m like, “Oh, fuck.” So I set a date. I thought, “Well, I’ll get Christmas out of the way and then start.” So I started on the First of January, by which I mean I sat down at my desk with a new notebook with nothing in it and began to piece together in a very tentative manner the idea of a new record, which I’d spent no time whatsoever thinking about.
You hadn’t been writing songs already?
I work project to project. Between records, I don’t have song ideas whatsoever. I just sit down at a desk and do the work.
Colin Greenwood has said your music revolves around your words. Does songwriting begin with the lyrics?
Yeah. It always begins with the words. It took me three months to get an idea of what this record was going to be about, how I feel about things, and how I was positioned in the world at that given time. Then I ring up Warren and say, “Look, I’ve got these words. Let’s write some music.” And we spend three days improvising music, and I’m just singing these ideas on top of that music, and often those three days are where we get most of the stuff, weirdly enough.
The music on “Frogs” feels different for you. You have kind of a Jimmy Webb thing going on.
Yeah, you should hear that live. It’s so massive. It’s truly ecstatic, and in my head at least — I don’t know if anyone else sees this — it’s got a late-period Elvis feel. There’s a sort of grandiosity about it that’s overwhelming and extremely moving in the way I find latter Elvis to be.
Why do you like late-period Elvis so much?
I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve never seen any other concerts where someone is suffering so much onstage and at the same time creating such transcendent music. You see this especially at the Vegas concerts. It’s this combination of a man that’s living out some kind of hell onstage, to some degree, but creating the most blissful music. To me, that epitomizes the religious experience to some degree. And he was doing two concerts a day — a matinee show and a dinner show, week in, week out.
If you watch what he’s going through onstage, it’s quite extraordinary. People just don’t bring that stuff with them onstage normally. Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know.
Do you feel like you’ve ever approximated that transcendence onstage yourself?
What I do is to bring something that I feel is genuine to me. You may not like it, but it’s authentic, and it attempts to move towards some kind of meaning beyond entertainment.
You’ve mentioned the word “transcendence” a couple of times today. What do you mean by that?
I use the word transcendent because the word I want to use is “religious,” but I’m worried that word will scare everyone off. I think that the religious nature of those songs becomes more explicit onstage in a redemptive way. “Joy,” for example, feels like it’s leaping up beyond the idea of a sad song into something completely different to a redemptive, ecstatic, joyful song to use that complex little word “joy.”
These songs feel truly transcendent. I’m starting to hate that word, though; they feel religious in nature. I think I’m happier to use that word in Britain than I am in America because religion is much more political in America and that’s something that I recoil from. I find using that word a little bit uncomfortable, but there is this genuine redemptive feeling to some of these songs.
Are there any younger artists who strike you as making transcendent music like you’ve described?
Not really, but I just don’t listen to a lot of new music. I don’t go scouring record shops to try and find things. I’m not sure I listen to a lot of music, actually. I should listen to more.
Why don’t you listen to much music?
I enjoy it when I do, but I just find it impossible to play music and work at the same time. And I find very little time to sit down and actually listen to music as it should be listened to.
What do you play when you do listen to music?
Anything that doesn’t have words: jazz, ambient, or choral music. I can work if I have non-lyrical music on.
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You mention Kris Kristofferson, who died this week, in “Frogs” with a nod to “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” What did his music mean to you?
I love Kris Kristofferson, always have. “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is one of the greatest songs of spiritual collapse ever written.
Overall, “Frogs,” is very uplifting. So is “Joy,” where you’re singing, “We’ve all had too much sorrow/Now is the time for joy.” Do you see that as the album’s theme?
The thing about our records is that they’re just little emerging adventures in improvisation. Most of the vocals are the first and only time I’ve sung those songs. “Joy” is entirely a first take without even understanding the music to some degree; it’s just this series of declarations over the top of this ever rising instrumental force. You find out what these songs can reveal onstage, and if they’re good songs, they continue to reveal themselves to you onstage.
