God, Pain and Love in the Music of Nick Cave

Roland Boer
University of Newcastle

Abstract

Nick Cave has asserted that all his songs are love songs. Rather than follow his own guidelines for interpreting his work in terms of biblical influences from the Song of Solomon and the Psalms, I suggest a fourfold schema. It operates in terms of the presence and absence of both God and pain. There are very few of the secular soppy songs (no pain, no God) that are standard fare for much pop music and the ones Cave does offer are not very good. A few more appear in the painlessly divine songs (no pain, with God), which are the songs that opened Cave’s work out to wider audiences. However, the vast majority are either painfully secular songs (with pain, no God) or the brutally divine ones (both pain and God are present). I explore these in more detail, since here we find complex overlaps between God, pain and women.

[1] My topic is the love songs of Nick Cave, who remains one of the most original and arresting of alternative musicians in last three decades. Cave, front man for bands such as The Birthday Party and—more famously—the Bad Seeds, has woven together music, poetry and performances that draw heavily upon the Bible and yet creatively reinterpret that text.¹ So also with the love song, which is not only one of the basic genres of Cave’s writing but also finds inspiration in the Bible. For most people, a mention of Cave’s love song evokes the soft and rather melodious songs of the 1990s and early 2000s—”Into My Arms,” the “Ship Song” and “Where the Wild Roses Grow” are perhaps the best known of these. They were also the songs that gave Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds a much wider audience, for the ex-punk rocker had finally given away the clashing music and harsh lyrics for the piano and harmony. It may, then, come as a surprise to find out that Nick Cave has been writing love songs ever since he began writing in his teens (i.e., for almost four decades). There are a rather large number of them; Cave says that at a rough count he has written over 200, which is more than the official releases of all the songs he has written.² And they cover all the phases through which Cave has moved with his music—some evoke the first awakening of love and its passion, others the sadness of parting, yet others pain and revenge and anger and sheer brutality.

[2] How are we to make sense of such a range of love songs? I wish to argue that two factors are crucial to the way that the love song comes together in Cave’s music: God and pain (whether inflicted or received). Before I do so, however, we need to deal with a couple of reflections on the love song by Cave himself. As ever, he tries to direct the interpretation of his own material. As I have at length elsewhere, Cave is not the best interpreter of his own work.³ For example, Cave states in a lecture on the love song in 1999, “The Song of Solomon, perhaps the greatest Love Song ever written, had a massive impact on me”. He followed this up with: “The Song of Solomon is an extraordinary Love Song but it was the remarkable series of love song/poems known as the Psalms that truly held me … In many ways these songs became the blueprint for many of my more sadistic love songs.”⁴

[3] All of this may seem promising. We could distinguish between the “Solomon Songs,” which focus on the love merely between Cave and a woman (the Song of Solomon does not contain a reference to God), and the “Psalm Songs,” which include God and pain. Unfortunately it is not so straightforward, for the combinations of pain and God in Cave’s love song are far more complex. Cave has given me the key terms—God, pain and the love song with a heavy reliance on the Bible—but he is not as clear as he might be about them.

[4] Rather than engage in a pseudo detective hunt, where I conjure up a conclusion after deft sifting through the evidence and a flash of insight, let me lay out my position here and then explain it in some detail. The two terms of pain and God appear in a pattern of presence and absence, for a song may include or exclude pain and it may do the same with God. In other words, we have four logical possibilities: with pain and without God; with pain and with God; without pain and without God; without pain and with God. As I set out to explore the contours of each type, I begin with some general comments only to move on and focus on a representative example.

[5] My whole analysis actually fits within a diagram, a version of the Aristotelian square of logical opposites that was later appropriated by Greimas for linguistic analysis and Jameson in order to map out the ideological limits of a cultural product.⁵ It has four points.

-pain ← → -God

+pain ← → +God

Each of the relations, horizontal and diagonal, give us the categories of Cave’s love song: -pain, -God; -pain, +God; +pain, -God; +pain, +God.

Secular Soppy Songs: No Pain, No God

[6] I begin with the type of song that we hear streaming out of the radio at all times of the day or night: the secular songs of love, where “love” really means lust, sex and infatuation. This is where Cave differs very sharply from your garden variety love song. After running through more than three decades of music, I was able to find only four of these secular soppy songs,⁶ and three of them come from the unimpressive album, Nocturama.⁷

[7] Let me focus on one of them, “Rock of Gibraltar” from the aforesaid album. It really is a good example of the syrupy pieces that bands continue to spout forth as if they have discovered something jaw-droppingly new. In short, it is a good example of a bad song.

“Rock of Gibraltar” opens with:

⁸

And yes, “falter” will soon rhyme with “Gibraltar,” as will “alter” and “altar.” This is simply bad poetry. The music is equally as bad: cheesy is the only way to describe it. Or it is until we realize that the whole song is tongue-in-cheek. It is as if to say, “you want a sugar-coated loved song, well here!” On more than one occasion Cave has admitted that the critics have given the song a hard time, so much so that he feels sorry for the song. Bad songs, we might argue, need to be nurtured and encouraged, since too many people are ready to tear them to pieces. Even the little kick at the end of the song that tries to undo the naïve affirmations of steadfastness, loyalty and love somehow fails:

⁹

[8] Sadly, this effort at a twist, where the eternal affirmations of love stumble at their first hurdle, does not quite work. The reason is that it does not snap the mood of the song, which finishes the way it began without any noticeable change. It is fortunate there are only four of these secular soppy songs. It will come as no surprise that the presence of three of them on Nocturama did not help the album’s appeal. It will also come as no surprise that none of these songs helped Cave break into the big time.

Painlessly Divine: No Pain, With God

[9] By contrast, the songs that did win over large audiences are what we might call the painlessly divine songs—those flushed with the passion, longing and life-changing moment of first love and the presence of God in some fashion or other. Now, Cave is quite clear that this is a very Christian God, albeit outside the church and any conventional institution. He reads his Bible often and you can see it infuse his song-writing over many years.¹⁰

[10] Before I focus on the hit track “Into My Arms” as a paradigmatic example, a few comments on the songs as a group are in order. Larger than the previous group, it is still small in number.¹¹ The music varies, running from the driving “Hard on For Love” (basically a horny song that uses biblical images for a good rollicking bonk), through the thumping “Get Ready for Love” (really a raucous hymn) and the jiggling “Supernaturally,” to the softer and more crooning remainder—”Into My Arms,” “Brompton Oratory,” “There Is a Kingdom” and “Gates to the Garden.” It is this last group that has really appealed to a wider audience.

[11] So it is with “Into My Arms.” This is a simple piano and (very light) base guitar song with Cave’s voice as the only other presence. A careful listen or three brings out another curious feature: the words almost seem to be sung in slow motion. Each one is very carefully articulated, so much so that my stone-deaf father would be able to understand. This feature is characteristic of many of these painlessly divine songs—the music is understated and minimal, the words are sung slowly and pushed up in the mix so that there is no mistake about what they mean.¹²

[12] The song itself turns on a theological paradox. Cave calls on the interventionist God in whom he does not believe to do precisely that, intervene. Mark 9:24 lurks in the background here: “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” Even though the song begins with a disavowal—”I don’t believe in an interventionist God”—and even though he asks this God not to intervene should he believe in such a God—”if I did I would kneel down and ask Him / Not to intervene when it came to you”—eventually he gives in. If such a God did have to intervene, then the least he could do would be to direct the woman in question into his arms. We follow a similar path on two occasions. While the first is with the interventionist God, the second is with angels, in which a disbelief in angels gives way to a prayer that the angels protect and, of course, guide his lover into his arms.

[13] I have focused on the paradoxical shifts in the song not out of some perverse pedantry but because they bring out a feature of Cave’s love songs to which I will return. That feature is the elision of faith with love. Or rather, it is the fusion of the love of and faith in a woman with the love of and faith in God. In short, as he falls in love/faith with the woman, he also falls in love/faith with God—at least as far as the song in concerned. So the first two verses begin with a denial—he doesn’t believe in an interventionist God or in angels—only to become a wary statement of faith—asking the interventionist God or the angels to guide the woman in question to Cave. The third verse then begins with, “And I believe in love / And I know that you do too.” From there the two of them walk on together along the tricky path of the future.

[14] This feature of Cave’s love songs is what I call Cave’s Trinity. No father, son and holy spirit; no, it is God, Cave and woman, with the outcome that God and the woman merge into one. This Trinity is extraordinarily conventional and yet at the same time touches on taboo. On the conventional side, it is by no means the first time woman has been connected with God. Worshipped, entreated and vilified, women have all too often been deified and demonized, treated as goddess and whore.¹³

[15] Yet the connection is also taboo. For a distinct sense of that taboo we need to turn to the very similar “Brompton Oratory” (it comes from the same softly personal album, The Boatman’s Call). Also slow and clearly articulated, the song has an almost ecclesiastical tempo to it—reverend, serious and a little ponderous. The bells and organ, set to a simple tempo, clearly produce a hymn-like feel to the song. The words too, at least at the beginning, may as well have come from a hymn:¹⁴

Up those stone steps I climb

Hail this joyful day’s return

Into its great shadowed vault I go

¹⁵

[16] Soon enough we come across a move similar to that of “Into My Arms”—the woman and God merge into one another. Or rather, it is Christ’s absence after his resurrection and ascension that Cave compares to the absence of the woman he loves. He wishes she would return just as Christ did—in the form of the Holy Spirit—to his loved ones at Pentecost. On it goes: it becomes impossible to discern whether “the beauty impossible to define … believe … endure” is Christ or the lover. Conventional enough, but the twist comes with the following lines:

The blood imparted in little sips

The smell of you still on my hands

¹⁶

[17] Coming forward to partake of the Eucharist, he smells the woman on his hands. Immediately all manner of images come to mind: are they vaginal fluids dried after some fingering? Have they been fucking just before he worships? Does the blood in little sips hint at menstrual fluid? The tactile sensuousness of the cup of wine merges with the physicality of sex, especially if we remember that a cup of wine is a metaphor for the vagina and its fluids—a metaphor that goes back to the Song of Songs. Here we touch on taboo. Given the church’s long history of desexualizing Jesus and God, any sensuous and sexual connection will raise an eyebrow or three. It is not for nothing that one heretical group after another has turned the experience of religious faith and ecstasy into a deeply sexual one—libertarian Gnostics, radical Anabaptists (as at the kingdom of Münster in 1534-5), mystics of various stripes and charismatics in our own day, or at least some of them.

[18] So far we have two small collections of love songs, one lot without pain or God (the secular soppy songs) and another without pain but with God (the painlessly divine ones). While the first group may not be his best, the second group at least introduces us to Cave’s Trinity with a sensuous twist. But that twist takes another turn when we introduce pain into the whole equation.

Painfully Secular: With Pain, No God

[19] The songs of painful love are by far the most common of Cave’s love songs. Indeed, the next two categories spill over with songs that Cave has been writing since his high school days. Following my earlier pattern I make some general comments before focussing on a paradigmatic song. But now there is an addition—the text of a talk Cave gave in 1999 called, without pretence, “The Love Song.” As I indicated earlier, I engage this piece with some suspicion.

[20] By pain I mean the sadness of love, the disappointment it brings, the anger and desire for revenge that the more passionate among us feel; in short, the sorrow of love. Here my concern is those songs that play with this full range of pain in the midst of love but that do so without any presence of God, any touch of the divine or any hint of theology. Musically the songs run across the complete range of what the Bad Seeds are capable (and that is a fair range).¹⁷ Here are the crooning love songs promising murder or perhaps pondering what to do with the body, those haunting songs that face grief and loss and see no way out, the raw and crashing post-punk pieces that express the rough edges of loss, the bluesy pieces that speak for themselves, the rocking tunes that soothe the ear, and the gleeful, upbeat songs that are the most sinister of the lot.

[21] However much one might admire the songs of brutal revenge, especially the ones that are just slightly tongue-in-cheek, the best examples are those with a lighter touch. They hint at rather than plot the demise of the ex-lover; they seem to express everlasting love knowing full well that it is a pipe-dream. One of the best examples is “The Ship Song” from The Good Son.¹⁸ The first impression, with its slow tempo, dominant piano and meaningfully sung words, is of a heartfelt love song. Coupled with the first lines, which then become the refrain throughout the song, we have an invitation to absolute and wholehearted commitment.

Come sail your ships around me

And burn your bridges down

We make a little history, baby

¹⁹

The song carries on in a similar vein, expressing the life-changing effects of love—”when I crawl into your arms / everything comes tumbling down”²⁰—or the desire to search further into that “little mystery” that is at the heart of the lover.

[22] This song is highly seductive, but the catch is that the song has its own less than pleasant secret. When played again and listened to more carefully, more than one person has been troubled by other parts of the song. There are the repeated words, “Come loose your dogs upon me.”²¹ One asked me: is it “doubts” or “dogs”? Another did not like the idea of dogs upon her at all. And then we find:

Your face has fallen sad now

For you know the time is nigh

When I must remove your wings

²²

[23] What is going on here? Is not the ideal of love supposed to be one of mutual respect and encouragement? Are we not supposed to enable the full freedom and flowering of our partner? No quite, suggests Cave. There is as much clipping of wings as growing them, a struggle for dominance and possession, fencing off and protection from potential rivals. Love is much like the struggle of master and slave in Hegel’s famous account—a desperate, unequal and shifting power struggle. This is exactly the point where Cave’s love songs become interesting. If we look more closely at the images we find hints of a violent and sadistic underside. The dogs are loosed, the wings removed, and even burning bridges down evokes a scorched-earth policy more characteristic of warfare than peace and love. This is nothing other than a touch of the sadistic torture and brutal death that recurs through Cave’s songs in myriad different ways. Indeed, most of Cave’s love songs mix up sorrow, pain and love in a unique fashion that is often fuelled by anger.

[24] Now, Cave has often been questioned about this element of his love songs. Equally often he has given a range of answers. One is that when he remembers what a former lover has done to him he becomes angry and gets it out of his system by writing a song. Partially true, perhaps, although we can hardly tell. Another is more systematic. It comes from his lecture on the love song, given at theAtelierhaus der Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna, on 25 September 1999.²³His main argument here is that true love songs cannot avoid an element of pain and deep sadness, of loss and longing. However, since the lecture is saturated with God and the Bible, I need to turn to the final category before discussing it further.

Brutally Divine: With Pain, With God

[25] In the songs of pain and divinity many of the loose ends come together.²⁴Here we find both pain and God, especially in a Christianity where the ultimate expression of God’s love comes through the excruciating pain and death of Christ on a cross. Musically the songs tend towards the softer side of Cave’s work, although one or two are still rough and raucous, especially “Sad Waters” from Your Funeral … My Trial and “Do You Love Me?” with their driving beat, as well as the sinister “Loverman” from Let Love In. Overall this group favours the slower lyrics, dominant piano and a sad, reflective and minor tone.²⁵

[26] However, rather than follow my custom thus far of immediately sinking into the detail of a representative song let me return to the lecture I mentioned a little earlier. The basic point of the lecture, with its delightful literary flourishes, is that a proper love song is one of deep, unrequited and sad longing.²⁶ The sugary love songs, such as those we considered in our first section, are actually Hate Songs. In order to support his argument he jumps around a number of topics and examples, all of them turning on sadness. So we find the desperate effort to fill the void left by his father’s death when the young Nick Cave was a teenager; the sense that he is completing and living out his father’s unfulfilled literary hopes; sadness and the theme of duende (the “eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art”); God and Jesus Christ; The Song of Solomon and the Psalms, especially Psalm 137 and Boney M’s popularizing of it; Kylie Minogue’s “Better the Devil You Know”; erotographomania (it does actually exist and means the uncontrollable urge to write love letters); an analysis of his own song “Far From Me” from The Boatman’s Call and then once again the search for God. Quite a mix, but it all comes back to support the argument that the love song is inherently a sad song.

[27] All this is fascinating, more for what Cave does not say than for what he says. To be sure, here we find God all over the place, but all his comments about God, the Bible and Jesus boil down to the simple argument that the love song is prayer. So, he suggests that the love song sings God alive since God lives through the words of communication, that the love song is the sound of our efforts to rise above our earthly states and become God-like, that the song is the light of God “blasting through our wounds,” that the Song of Songs has influenced him with its rapturous love-metaphors, that the Psalms are the greatest love songs in the world, that the love song seeks to fill the silence between us and God, and that the love song serves God directly. As I said, it really is prayer, but that realisation begins to make some sense of what I called earlier Cave’s Trinity of woman, God and himself. Quite simply the love song as prayer is addressed to God as much as it is addressed to the woman.

[28] But there is something missing here? The hint comes in the following: “Though the Long Song comes in many guises—songs of exultation and praise, songs of rage and despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss—they all address God.”²⁷ And it is far more explicit when he suggests that the Psalms are “bathed in bloody-minded violence,” that they “became the blueprint for many of my more sadistic love songs.”²⁸ Despite these references, there is no sustained discussion of a type of love song that is quite prevalent: the one that plans, celebrates, mourns and reflects on the murder of a lover. When he does discuss a particular song in detail, it is not one of the songs of murder and mayhem. No, he prefers to focus on Psalm 137, a song of exile and loss “by the waters of Babylon,” or his own song “Far From Me” (from The Boatman’s Call) where he can indulge in one of his favourite pastimes—autobiography.

[29] So let me consider one of these more violent songs, “Nobody’s Baby Now” from Let Love In.²⁹ What we find here, as with “Idiot Prayer,” is that pain can take two forms. One is pain suffered. Much easier to write about, especially since it is about oneself, Cave stays with this easier topic in his lecture. The love song is thus about loss, sadness and longing. But the other form is pain inflicted. It may be in anger or revenge, but the pain is inflicted on the (ex-) lover. In other words, love is not merely about one’s own sadness and longing; it is also about violence inflicted on another.

[30] In “Nobody’s Baby Now” the violence is not immediately obvious. What is obvious is the opening invocation of Cave’s Trinity: “I’ve searched the holy books / I tried to unravel the mystery of Jesus Christ, the saviour.” To no avail it seems, including the search through the poets and analysts and books on human behaviour. To all appearances, here we have a song of loss and grief and a desperate effort to understand what happened to this love affair. He cannot get it out of his life, it seems, for “she lives in my blood and skin.” But then we begin to get a few hints, ambiguous lines that may be read in two ways. So we hear the words, “Her winter lips as cold as stone” as well as “But there are some things love won’t allow.” Cold lips may well be an attitude, a posture in love, but they may also be those of a cold corpse buried beneath a tomb-stone. And then we want to ask, what precisely is it that love won’t allow? All of which becomes much more sinister with these lines:

This is her dress that I loved best

With the blue quilted violets across the breast

And these are my many letters

Torn to pieces by her long-fingered hand

I was her cruel-hearted man

And though I’ve tried to lay her ghost down

³⁰

[31] Again, the scene may well be one of a lonely soul left with a few relics of his departed object of love. But how has she departed? One gets the strong impression of an obsessive lover fingering what is left after a crime of passion. And the reason it feels that way is the barely repressed violence. The letters are torn to pieces, he was a cruel-hearted man, violets are flowers are flowers that grow upon graves, and he desperately wishes to get her ghost to settle down. The genius of the song is that all this remains understated, hinted at but never quite said.

[32] What we have is a song of barely repressed anger and violence that mingles with the longing and loss. But it is also a song of deep hatred of a specific but unnamed woman—a hatred that borders on misogyny. Much of the violence in Cave’s songs is directed at women; or rather, his love songs are rather conventionally about women and so when they give voice to pain inflicted on someone else, that person is invariably the woman in question. Now, Cave has been questioned about this inherent tendency from time to time and his answer varies. Sometimes, as I mentioned earlier, he suggests it is due to a burning anger at a past lover, so he sits down and writes a song about it. At other times he points to his morbid fascination with murders and the details of serial killers. At yet other moments he admits it may be because he went to a private boys’ school, so women have become a mystery and threat.³¹ And, as we saw earlier, he also blames the Bible and its violence. But he tends to skip the connection between violence, murders of passion and serial killers on the one hand and the sense of sad longing that is essential to the love song on the other.

[33] The easy option here would be to take Cave to task for an implicit misogyny and dismiss his work on some ethical ground or other. Apart from being profoundly suspicious of ethics, I would suggest that the much more difficult option is to suggest that, just like sadness, loss and longing, anger and bitter hatred are actually part of love. Cave directs his anger at former women lovers, but it may just as well be directed at men, given one’s sexual predilections. For love is also a power struggle; a contest between two or more people who attempt to better one another. In love we find surveillance and suspicion, jealousy and anger, breakouts and guilt, curtailment and efforts at change, put downs and mockery—in short, various levels of emotional and intellectual violence. I would suggest that Cave brings out this difficult truth.

[34] One last question: what has all this got to do with the other side of the equation, namely God? This section is, after all, about God and pain. Here we come across another strange omission: for all Cave’s talk of the Bible, the rage of God and soft call of Jesus, the love songs in the Song of Solomon and the Psalms, bringing God to existence through song for where “two or more are gathered in my name, there I am also”—for all this and more, Cave rarely if ever refers to the suffering and death of Jesus. This absence is very strange. The story of the cross is, at least according to conventional representations, a story of divine love and pain, of redemption and violence—God loved the world so much that he gave his only son to die for it. Both themes are the centre of Cave’s love songs as well. But so are the less savoury aspects. In the cross we also find the sadistic violence of love, child abuse, redemption through pain and the loving detail of an execution-style murder.

[35] Cave’s triad has taken a rawer turn, much like a lot of his music. It refers not merely to the pain of loss and longing suffered in the love of God and/or a woman. More importantly it also refers to the pain inflicted, the angry and sadistic violence of love. In a sense Cave’s search has been for this difficult truth, namely that redemption may in fact come through this brutal and unwholesome side of love. Cave’s Trinity embodies both erotic play and painful love.

References

Boer, Roland. “Gates to the Garden: Nick Cave Og Bibelteksternes Efterliv (Gates to the Garden: The Afterlives of Nick Cave).” Fønix (Denmark) 29, 3-4 (2005): 31-47.

———. “Under the Influence? The Bible, Culture and Nick Cave.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 12 (2006). http://www.usask.ca/relst/

jrpc/art12-nickcave.html .

———. “Some Routine Atrocity, or, Letting the Curse of God Roar: Nick Cave and Apocalyptic.” Apocalypse and Popular Music. Ed. John Walliss. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, in press.

———. “Jesus of the Moon: Nick Cave’s Christology.” The Bible In/And Popular Culture: A Creative Encounter. Eds. Elaine Wainwright and Philip Culbertson. Atlanta: SBL Publications, in press.

Cave, Nick. Abattoir Blues/the Lyre of Orpheus: Mute Records, 2004.

———. The Boatman's Call: Mute Records, 1997.

———. Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!: Mute Records, 2008.

———. From Her to Eternity: Mute Records, 1984.

———. The Good Son: Mute Records, 1990.

———. Henry's Dream: Mute Records, 1992.

———. “Interview From ‘Revue’.” Revue, 13 August 2006 1994.

———. Kicking against the Pricks: Mute Records, 1986.

———. King Ink Ii. London: Black Spring, 1997.

———. Let Love In: Mute Records, 1994.

———. “The Love Song.” Another Magazine 7 (2004): 397-400.

———. Murder Ballads: Mute Records, 1996.

———. No More Shall We Part: Mute Records, 2001.

———. Nocturama: Mute Records, 2003.

———. The Secret Life of the Love Song & the Flesh Made Word: Two Lectures by Nick Cave: Mute Records, 2000.

———. Tender Prey: Mute Records, 1988.

———. Your Funeral ... My Trial: Mute Records, 1986.

Fabretti, Claudio. “Nick Cave: The Bad Seed of Rock.” Onda Rock 2005.

Greimas, A. J. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Jameson, Fredric. “Foreword.” A.J. Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, pp. vi-xxxii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Lacan, Jacques. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Vol. 20: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

Notes

Since I have provided details of Cave’s background and history elsewhere, as well as exploring the idiosyncrasies of his reinterpretations of Christian doctrines, I will not repeat those treatments here. For detail on Cave’s background and the nature of his music, see Boer 2005, 2006. As far as reinterpretations of themes such as Christology and apocalyptic, see Boer, SBL, in press and Boer, Sheffield Phoenix, in press.
In light of this number, the cynic may well point out that The Bad Seeds are really no different from any other band: the posturing, the drugs, the search for authenticity and the love songs. The large number of love songs merely reinforces how mainstream Cave really is. Since nearly all bands deal in the language and poetry of love, The Bad Seeds are not unique by any stretch.
See Boer, “Gates to the Garden“ and “Under the Influence?“
Nick Cave, “The Love Song,“ Another Magazine 7 (2004): 398.
See Greimas, 1987; Jameson 1987.
They are: “Rock of Gibraltar,“ “She Passed By My Window,“ “Babe I’m On Fire“ (Nick Cave, Nocturama (Mute Records, 2003); “Babe You Turn Me On,“ (Nick Cave, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (Mute Records, 2004)).
Cave, Nocturama.
Ibid.
Ibid.
See my extended discussion of the role of the Bible in Cave’s artistic production in Boer 2005, 2006.
There are eight: “Hard on for Love“ (from Nick Cave, Your Funeral ... My Trial(Mute Records, 1986)); “Mercy“ (from Nick Cave, Tender Prey (Mute Records, 1988)); “Into My Arms,“ “Brompton Oratory,“ “There Is a Kingdom“ (from Nick Cave, Murder Ballads (Mute Records, 1996)); “Gates to the Garden“ (from Nick Cave, No More Shall We Part (Mute Records, 2001)); “Get Ready For Love,“ “Supernaturally“ (from Cave, Abattoir Blues/the Lyre of Orpheus.).
On The Boatman’s Call this becomes a problem, at least for an old rocker like me. One after another these slow, personal songs tumble from the album so that one is left longing for a good piece of rock.
At this point I could pursue a distinctly psychoanalytic path (having done so on many occasions), beginning with Lacan’s provocative suggestion that, like God, “woman“ does not exist. In other words, neither God nor woman can be represented, for they both belong to that inaccessible yet vital realm of the Real. See Lacan 1998.
Given the number of songs with the lyrical feel of hymns, an unexplored dimension of Cave’s music would have to be the long history of church music. To “Brompton Oratory“ should be added “There is a Kingdom“ (from The Boatman’s Call).
Cave, The Boatman’s Call (Mute Records, 1997).
Ibid.
Here is the full list, at least in my assessment: “From Her to Eternity,“ “Wings off Flies“ and “The Moon is in the Gutter“ (from Nick Cave, From Her to Eternity (Mute Records, 1984)); “I’m Gonna Kill That Woman,“ “Sleeping Analeah,“ “Long Black Veil,“ “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,“ “The Carnival is Over“ (from Nick Cave, Kicking against the Pricks (Mute Records, 1986)); “Sad Waters,“ “Your Funeral … My Trial,“ “Stranger Than Kindness,“ “Jack’s Shadow,“ “She Fell Away,“ “Long Time Man“ (from Cave, Your Funeral ... My Trial); “Deanna,“ “Slowly Goes the Night“ (from Cave, Tender Prey); “Ship Song,“ “Lament,“ “The Witness Song,“ “Lucy“ (from Nick Cave, The Good Son(Mute Records, 1990)); “Brother, My Cup Is Empty,“ “John Finn’s Wife,“ “The Loom of the Land,“ “Jack the Ripper“ (from Nick Cave, Henry’s Dream (Mute Records, 1992)); “I Let Love In,“ “Thirsty Dog,“ “Ain’t Gonna Rain Anymore“ (from Nick Cave, Let Love In (Mute Records, 1994); “Henry Lee,“ “Lovely Creature,“ “Where the Wild Roses Grow“ (from Cave, Murder Ballads); “People Ain’t No Good,“ “Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere,“ “West Country Girl,“ “Black Hair,“ “Green Eyes“ (from Cave, The Boatman’s Call); “As I Sat Sadly By Her Side,“ “Love Letter,“ “Sweetheart Come,“ “The Sorrowful Wife,“ “We Came Along This Road“ (from Cave, No More Shall We Part); “Bring It On,“ “Dead Man in My Bed,“ “Still In Love,“ (from Cave, Nocturama); “Cannibal’s Hymn,“ “Hiding All Away,“ “Breathless,“ “Spell“ (from Cave,Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus); “Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)“ (from Nick Cave, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! (Mute Records, 2008)).
Cave, The Good Son.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Cave, “The Love Song.“ The collection of material on The Secret Life of the Love Song & the Flesh Made Word: Two Lectures by Nick Cave (Mute Records, 2000), contains both the lecture itself in audio form and another talk, “The Word Made Flesh,“ presented on BBC radio on 3 July 1999. The text of this second lecture may be found in Nick Cave, King Ink II (London: Black Spring, 1997). The CD also contains some interviews and tracks that add nothing to the printed lecture I use here. Cave has a knack of repeating himself again and again. But then he can’t resist an interview and interviewers have been asking him largely the same questions for a long time.
To complete my catalogue, here is the last group: “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well“ (from Cave, Kicking against the Pricks); “Sad Waters“ (from Cave,Your Funeral ... My Trial); “New Morning“ (from Cave, Tender Prey); “Foi Na Cruz,“ (from Cave, The Good Son.); “Straight to You,“ “Christina the Astonishing“ (from Cave, Henry’s Dream); “Do You Love Me,“ “Nobody’s Baby Now,“ “Loverman“ (from Cave, Let Love In); “I Do Love Her So (Lime Tree Arbour),“ “Are You the One I’ve Been Waiting For?,“ “Idiot Prayer,“ “Far From Me“ (from Cave, The Boatman’s Call ); “And No More Shall We Part,“ “Oh, My Lord,“ “Darker With the Day“ (from Cave, No More Shall We Part); “Hold on to Yourself,“ “Jesus and the Moon“ (from Cave, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!).
For the sake of my analysis I have restricted this group to those songs that explicitly mention God or the Bible in some way. It is of course entirely possible that all the songs of pain are also inspired by the brutal love of the Bible. In that sense the previous category becomes a subset of this one.
Cave’s own favourites are: “Sad Waters,“ “Black Hair,“ “I Let Love In,“ “Deanna,“ “From Her to Eternity,“ “Nobody’s Baby Now,“ “Into My Arms,“ “Lime Tree Arbour,“ “Lucy,“ and “Straight to You.“
Cave, “The Love Song“: 397; emphasis added.
Ibid: 398.
Cave, Let Love In.
Ibid.
Nick Cave, “Interview From ‘Revue’,“ Revue, 13 August 2006, 1994; see, for example Claudio Fabretti, “Nick Cave: The Bad Seed of Rock,“ Onda Rock2005.

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