It’s a strange thing to look back to the release of Ghosteen on October 4th 2019 with anything other than stilted wonder. A beautiful, wounded record, it would come to suit the times, overshadowed by the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic that saw, death, dislocation and loneliness become a global concern that would ironically bring humanity a little closer. Ghosteen remains one of my favourite releases by Nick Cave, it’s a singular and enduring achievement that stands out among the Bad Seeds discography. It is that rare beast, a record that sounds like no other, moving beyond a simple expression of heartbreak and sadness, it persists in a fraught realm of mystic fate and magical thinking, becoming both a monument and a reckoning with loss which, as Nick says himself, is a necessary, even vital aspect of life, though no less difficult for it. For me, Ghosteen represents that difficult juncture at which the before slips into after, and still, we go on.
This chapter is an extract from the close of my last book, Darker With The Dawn, I’m posting it here on my blog in recognition of what the album meant to me at the time of its release, and what it stands for today, in the light of everything that has happened since.
In 2019 Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds would return with their new album Ghosteen. The album was released three years after Skeleton Tree to almost universal acclaim. Cave would move away from the private abyss of doubt and sadness that had come to overshadow his last record—although turning back toward the still raw sensations of loss—Ghosteen would become an openhearted reckoning with grief, and life beyond it.[Cover image: Danny Schwarz]
Ghosteen lays bare its hurt but is also rich with visions of seemingly divine experience, as Cave realizes a kind of ghost Eden offering escap- ism but also a confrontation with death. Rather than an operation of mourning, the reality of the record is more complex. Moving beyond the factuality of loss Cave overrides the daydreaming nightmare of Skeleton Tree and anchors us back to the living present. Gradually, Cave embraces his pain toward an affirmation of faith and a new openness toward postlife states, bound to feeling and memory, from which the recent past crashes into the future to realize a burning and brilliant present, bearing witness in the light of an open wound.
Cave would choose to make Ghosteen a double album, stating, “the songs on the first part are the children” while “the songs on the second part are the parents.” Where part I is built more from verse-chorus structured songs, part II is built around two longer tracks joined by a short spoken-word piece, highlighting the shift from acts in memoriam to the emotional aftermath of grief. There is a cyclical aspect to the two parts of the record as when children later become parents themselves. Cave acknowledges the lost and those who are left behind to mourn and remember them. Though Andrew Dominik would also note that within this the album remains a hymn to the enduring power of love, particularly for Cave’s wife, Susie: “Every song is about her. She’s there through the whole thing. It’s like a gift to her. Arthur is there—but I think it’s for Susie.”
Ghosteen might seem sentimental, nostalgic even in its tone, a series of sad, slow songs that fade in and out of one another, but its patient unfurling sound can be misleading. Across the album Cave and Ellis temper emotional fragility with sonic force and a firm artistic resolve, at different times shocking and confrontational.3 As Cave has explained Ghosteen’s power as a record is not wholly benevolent: the record’s pained beauty is in part about evoking the quiet threat of annihilating grief, which can sometimes prove overwhelming in its intensity. Overturning the perception that the album might contain a series of mournful bal- lads, the songs offer bursts of light—cutting through shade or burning away behind a veil of trees—a searing kind of truth at once warm and illuminating but also threatening blindness. The album’s unassuming, slow-burn instrumentation rewards patience, for example where the title track’s synth patterns “rise and fall in heartbeat time” like waves raking over the world anew.
Since “The Carny” (1986) and “The Mercy Seat” (1988) The Bad Seeds have always maintained an abrasive, industrial edge of musique concrète—using the raw physicality of beaten metal and broken-down instruments, a brutality of fact that returns in the raw electronica of Ghosteen. The song “Gun Thing” from The Proposition soundtrack uses similar muscular sonics, the gears and grind of human operations of the heart cut through with the squall of guitar noise and feedback, while “The Rider #2” present a sonic vision of mental chaos; the confusion between music and noise straddles the divided mind.
These more abrasive styles would later become suffused with equally striking and ambient sounds on Ghosteen. Advancing from their soundtrack work Ellis would highlight a growing roster of instruments: “We’ve opened out more into electronics, choral stuff. Nick adds a lot on vibes, harmonium, celeste. It’s allowed us this sort of freedom.”8 Equally there remains a profound a digital primitivism in Ellis’ use of synthe- sizers, with a sound more commonly associated with 1980s synth-pop pioneers, turning between featherlight trembling and monstrous expres- sions of volume, a process begun in Cave and Ellis’ soundtrack work that would bleed into Push the Sky Away: “I had a synthesizer that had been waiting around. I bought that in Japan in the early ’00s. I remember trying to get it on Grinderman and every time I tried to start up there was just this deafening silence or confusion. I didn’t know what I was doing with it either. When we did West Of Memphis, I just took that synthesizer to Nick’s house and he was like, ‘Where’s the violin?’ I was like, ‘I’m not playing the violin, I’m playing this.’”9 Repeating his studio performances onstage, Ellis rocks back and forth in his chair with the same intensity as his violin playing, pushing harder on the keys, waver- ing on pitch, adding a physical impact and lightness of touch in keeping with The Bad Seeds’ dynamics.
The metallic clang that introduces “Waiting for You” and “Galleon Ship” draw upon loops of sound constructed by Warren Ellis. Cave remembers the industrial groove that opens “Waiting for You” as being more visceral and aggressive, high in the mix and recurring throughout the song. On the advice of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, it was thought to be too jarring and counterproductive to the main melody of the song; it became merged with other layers, allowing the ballad atmosphere to breathe, letting Cave’s lyrics rise up, pure and distinct.
As if to offset the fierce undercurrent of noise at its heart, “Galleon Ship” begins with a handful of words softly spoken. Using a heavily processed vocal sample to introduce the song, Cave and Ellis chose to use these unknowable phrases to bury a feeling or sensation within a song already full of yearning and the revelation of learning to let go of something beautiful. I heard “you can run (look?) beyond / you can see it,” holding to my private interpretation of what that might mean; where music is not necessarily about the right answers but the feelings it brings out in you, this would be the song’s ability to encompass a powerful vision of loss but also in the same moment be willing to say goodbye to it.
In spite of its experimental arc the album remains rooted in a deeper sense of empathy. Cave expresses the conflicting sensations that mourn- ing demands, shot through with sudden rushes of memory; we are reminded of how grief can suddenly rise up out of nowhere, threatening to capsize us. Cave would argue that music finds a new life and meaning with each listener; once it is released into the world it becomes theirs. In this spirit Ghosteen becomes an offering toward what Cave calls our “universal selves,” encouraging the listener to reflect upon our common experiences of loss, while highlighting the fact there is no typical expe- rience of grief. Many listeners have noted that the intensely personal nature of the record made them feel uncomfortable, too close to Cave’s own life, but this is also the album’s great strength. Its power is in its ability to soothe and unsettle at the same time. In contrast to the more inward-looking black mirror of Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen presents a more empathetic connection with the listener. It manifests as a more vital and urgent record than as a continued lament of sadness; instead, it becomes a source of resilience, helping trace a path to live both alongside and within loss, an attempt to reconcile a rupture in time returning to life’s endless flow.
Alongside the Carnage album completed by Cave and Warren Ellis in 2021 when The Bad Seeds were kept in forced hiatus, Ghosteen suggests an extension of the new ground first broken by Push the Sky Away’s deconstruction of The Bad Seeds’ musical DNA with its use of “atmospheric, weightless sound.” Freed from the lock in of a straight rhythm section Cave noted the lightness of the music counterpointed by the direct intensity of the album’s lyrics, cutting and biting through to Cave’s inner feelings. This established a haunting template almost unrecognizable from the band who produced “From Her to Eternity” and “Tupelo,” but no less of a creative risk as an attempt to tame inner chaos—but slowed to a more considered and practiced form, as shocking and powerful as anything by August Strindberg or the highly contro- versial volte-face of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring. Keith Cameron would note the looped bass of the album’s closing track “Hollywood,” the returning ripples from Skeleton Tree that would continue to build into a coolly menacing groove toward its sweeping, monstrous transition, which Keith Cameron called “the album in 14-minute macrocosm.”
In a Quietus review of Ghosteen by, Patrick Clarke he notes the album’s projected “wonderland” in part expressed through the finely wrought, near saccharin album cover. Adapted from Breath of Life, a work by the artist Tom Dubois, influenced by his own Christianity, he draws upon the book of Genesis and the miracle of creation. His work depicts the Garden of Eden, made more fantastical by Cave, devoid of humans; it features an array of animals beatified as mythical creatures, with a lamb at its center. Together they embody the imaginative space of new possibilities. The artist states that he is trying to capture a moment of divine essence, a subtle magnificence in the whispered shout of glory, an aspect in which God can become manifest through nature and revelation.
At first sight the image presents a wilful haze glossing over deeper trauma, its warmth becomes an invitation to enter into the album with a certain naivete toward an openhearted suite of music and to allow for the power of imagination to stride over the brute reality of facts and assumptions. Offering a return to a kind of honest innocence, the album’s mode becomes the sincere expression of humanity’s capacity for joy in creative affirmation.
Cave alluded to the idea of the “ghosteen” itself as a “migrating spirit,” someone we have lost whose memory is alive inside of us, but also a kind of good ghost that seems to persist within and without our mortal human world, meeting with Cave’s description of the album as “a kind of free-floating conversation with the spirit world.” In the book Faith, Hope and Carnage Cave notes that it is both Arthur’s presence and his absence that dominates the atmosphere of Ghosteen, describing the need to accommodate something of this spirit into his life going forward, suggesting the album as a place in which a part of him would always reside as a kind of living memory.
Cave would refer to the priest and religious writer Cynthia Bourgeault, who talks about “the imaginal realm,” a place of impossibility between imagination and dream: “It is an ‘impossible realm’ where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Arthur lives there. Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of some- thing else, something other, something beyond.”
While Cave has been extremely candid talking about the album through interviews, in person and on the Red Hand Files, he would excuse himself from trying to too closely define the exact nature of the “ghosteen” relationship, for fear of damaging the inchoate idea or using the wrong words that might be easily confused. Beginning as something deeply personal for Cave, Ghosteen becomes a collection of songs that finds another specific meaning for the individual listener. There is an underlying tension between respectful distancing and our own interpretations, often mediated through memory, which evokes loss and grief but also occasionally warmth and joy, which adds to the power of the work.
Speaking in 2003 about the sudden loss of his father as his first expe- rience of death, Cave mentions that he sometimes felt his father to be “present” as an influence over his songwriting.20 Cave would vari- ously confirm or brush away the importance of this. Certainly, from the beginning of his challenging teacher and pupil relationship with his father, and the echo of his spirit, this could be seen, felt even, as the knowing hand on the shoulder, a larger-than-life figure casting a shadow equally approving and critical.
Across Ghosteen Cave’s lyrics repeatedly allude to the sensation of a spiritual closeness, particularly on “Ghosteen Speaks,” as if the absent person is standing right beside him. Cave takes the spatial interactions of being and knowing as feeling, an experience he would also note from the process of recording the album. Like being watched or “touched” by an invisible presence, feeling the electrified hum of another soul in some quiet communion with our own, where a spiritual form of body heat creates a charged metaphysical space, their quiet fire feeding us a strange, rare energy. It does not have to be supernatural, but it is hard to define beyond a sensual brush with spirituality, transcending the divides between reality and the imagination.
Cave employs various images of connection—and disunion—in his music focusing on love and loss, the combined sensation of holding and being held in return. On “Lime Tree Arbor” Cave takes the bride’s hand in his, and seals this connection with his other hand over them both, a twinned experience that presents the romantic allusion to being tied to someone by the invisible force of love. The song seems to harken back to Cave’s marriage to Viviane Carneiro in 1990 as the communion of love that offers protection and expresses deeper connection. Though the song is written after their divorce in 1996, the shadow of the boatman still lingers years later, a present tense memory of flesh and blood that wills him back to that past moment. On “Old Time” from Carnage Cave repeats the idea of this marriage pledge to his future wife Susie Bick, singing that he is only ever a few steps behind her.
Cave would also use the more symbolic language of the three Chris- tian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, with “hope” traditionally represented by an anchor. On “Waiting for You” Cave sings in the first verse “your body is an anchor / Never asked to be free” and in the second verse flips the object to “your soul is my anchor / I never asked to be freed,” an escape beyond the body that can be both a burden and the necessary form through which we directly connect with other people. On “Sun Forest” he offers a vision where “a spiral of children climbs up to the sun,” transcending the physical toward a place beyond pain, sad- ness, and uncertainty.
Looking back to the Skeleton Tree track “Girl in Amber” we stand alongside Cave watching “the girl” moving through a hallway, as if sink- ing with the slow time of memory. This transmutes into the image of Cave’s son having his shoes tied as he too leaves, dancing down the hall spinning out into an indefinable shape. Later on, “Bright Horses” Ellis’ sonorous backing vocals, filtering through delay and echo, become an ascending choral voice full of yearning, looking back to the same child of “Girl in Amber.” Cave sings the line “Your little blue-eyed boy,” reaching out toward the infinite mystery of loss heralded by an impossible wish that time can neither erase nor resolve. Cave added this deeply moving line into the song following his son’s death; it emphasizes the teaching of children as the role to which parents are beholden, an act of loving stewardship to guide them on their own path. The image of feet and shoes speaks to each emergent step in becoming the per- son they were meant to be. Following the through line from “Girl in Amber” Cave sounds out the fragile thread of remembrance that ties us to the reality of loss. Through his whispered voice and the brittle synths haunted by strings on “I Need You” he admits to the impossibility of trying to hold on to something without physical form, but nonetheless speaks to this familiar feeling.
Both Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen would draw behind them echoes of Brighton’s returning waves, rushing in and sliding off sifting pebbles into virgin territory to be erased again toward the next day. In the summer of 2017 Cave found himself rising just before dawn in the deep mood of the “blue hour,” venturing down to the sea while the rest of the world was still asleep. Cave would submerge himself until he was alone and loses his body in the water, held in the breath of tides closing the gap between the gravity of being and the weightlessness of forgetting, just being there.
From these brief moments of isolation Cave would connect the dreams of his sleep to daytime visions that would gradually feed into the songs of Ghosteen. After initial recording sessions at Retreat Studios in Brighton during the spring of 2018 Cave would travel to Malibu in September. During that time Susie Cave would note on her The Vampire’s Wife blog that she had come down with the flu and felt his absence more keenly: “Unfortunately, he is not here. He is in LA making a new record. Some of his songs reveal themselves at night in his fever dreams. They are his Fever Songs.” Alluding to the half-madness of broken sleep and emotional trauma, the album would bring Cave’s experiences into hyperreal focus.
Perhaps more than any previous Bad Seeds record, Ghosteen would become an extremely personal album for Cave to the extent that the songs were happening to him, where the recording process of studio work was suddenly uprooted into a place without maps, describing the album as existing in a separate plane all of its own: “It lived in the jubilant and hopeful beyond.” Cave and Ellis found themselves channeling sounds and feelings that arrived in the long days and far into the night at the isolated Woodshed recording studio near Malibu, owned by Coldplay singer Chris Martin.
Over a fortnight they built dense loops and repetitive piano patterns and synth structures without the formal demands of Bad Seeds band structure making them freer to move into ever more experimental, abstract directions. They sidestepped guitars, then added and removed drums after they grounded the songs with too much gravity, as Cave and Ellis discover a falsetto lightness in their voices, continuing the minimalist reduction of Push the Sky Away. Ellis said, “It felt like there was something—or someone—else directing it.” Cave too has spoken of a sense of cosmic radiation charging the record with a second life all of its own. Cave is often afraid to speak to it, as if a spell might be broken.
Ellis would find himself caught in the continuing cycle of music steadily unfurling into the shapes of songs: “I’d get the mixes at four in the morning and I’d just listen to them in my pajamas on the veranda and sort of pass out, hearing these little ideas that went on to somewhere else.” The open-ended creative process became an invitation to more magical thinking, to supplant the ego and overcome the fixed thinking of more rigid song structures. Ghosteen presents an in-between state in which Cave and Ellis continued to take bolder steps outside of their creative comfort zones, to stand aside and simply let the music appear through them. Ellis remembered, “For me, it’s the only time I’ve felt that if there was every anything else in the room, it was on that record. There was something going on making that record, the two weeks making it in Malibu. They were the two best weeks of my life.”
Cave’s lyrics would embrace vivid fever dreams and stark visions that Cave had experienced as lived memories: burning forests, dancing horses, sunlight glancing off a beach’s watery edge, halfway between drowning and rising, elsewhere everyday images turned into symbols of departure—the wildness of sun and stars as exit wounds all watched over by the pale grace of the moon.
Strange signs appeared in the hills—spare embers drifted in from houses, trees, or burning corpses appearing like the fireflies that float in and out through Ghosteen—bodies atomized as mistral light turning to ash. What began as little fires soon swept into a natural disaster, each tree went up like a ninety-foot stick of kindling—the imminent danger would seem distant but always edging closer. In November 2018, a forest fire tore through the area around Malibu, destroying the residential annex of the studio where Cave and Ellis had been staying just two weeks earlier recording Ghosteen. Ellis referred to his and Cave’s performance of their fifteen years of collected soundtrack work front- ing a one-hundred-piece orchestra and forty-person choir at the Sydney Opera House in 2019 that took place during the bush fires that ripped through the eastern coast of Australia: “It was apocalyptic. Sirens going off. Smoke everywhere. Everyone in masks. Your instincts said ‘run.’” They would play sections of music alongside projected images from the 2009 post-apocalyptic nocturne, The Road: “it looked like the world outside. It was bizarre.” This would soon be followed by the global COVID-19 outbreak, from fire to plague, the weight of biblical themes brought to bear against the world.
There is a heavy air of inevitability to Ghosteen with both Cave and Ellis describing the songs as “arriving” more than they were consciously created. Peter Watts too noted the eerie prescience in Cave’s lyrics, particularly across Ghosteen. Where Cave’s songs are generally full of fatal- ism, leaning on apocalyptic readings of the Bible, the imagery of fleeing animals, rushing winds, the flight of birds away from the fierce heat of reddening skies seemed to confirm the album as some kind of augury for the coming disaster, a prediction of the future visible in natural phenomena. Ghosteen too would appear like a premonition that could only be fully understood once the album was completed.
“Bright Horses” carries the imagery of fire toward a transcendental power, shuffling between layers of religious certainty through to “Hollywood,” the first fires burning like a bloodred dusk across the skyline long through the night and into the following days. Director Andrew Dominik, present throughout the Malibu Ghosteen sessions, noted the “prophetic” quality in the new songs, seemingly loaded with metaphorical inquiry. It became harder to differentiate between allusions to fate and the gravity of the real. In 2021 Ellis told the Observer, “It felt like the record I had always wanted to make.” Though he feared it might also be a kind of peak, an ending to his creative relationship with Cave. For Ellis Ghosteen seemed to mark an almost overwhelming point of departure that would continue into the future: “I’ll never get an overview of Ghosteen. But I know where it lives.”
On an album that seems haunted by the imagery of fire as an illuminating, destructive, and sometimes cleansing holy light Cave’s visions on Ghosteen seem to chime with Cormac McCarthy’s two expressions of fire divided across the endings in two of the most well-known film adaptations of his books. In The Road (2009) fire is at first the sudden sign of destruction glimpsed through a window that introduces the story’s state of apocalypse. Later it becomes a bright, healing sense of righteousness and hope in a crooked embittered world.
In No Country for Old Men, older police officer facing retirement Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, feels powerless to assert the law and stem the tide of meaningless deaths. He thinks back to travelers moving across the Old West, with one horse rider going on ahead cradling a ball of glowing embers, the heart of a fire, ready to establish a place of warmth and safety when the group made camp—he becomes the light for everyone to follow. In The Road, good people are seen to be “carrying the fire”—doing the best they can to stay on the right side of a moral code that no longer seems to apply. The fire survives as a metaphor for the regenerative power of undy- ing hope and goodness. After the death of his father on a gray beach “the boy” character asks a stranger if he is one of the good guys; as much as he can be, he invites the boy to join him and his family. The idea of fire as light, call it a faith or hope, is a feeling more powerful than the reality that surrounds it; it is something to dream on and to believe in.
At the beginning of the title track “Ghosteen” Cave chants of the beauty in love, trying to remind himself that good things still exist in world, then swiftly undercuts this sentiment, whispering “no, no, no”—so small a word but too easy an answer—struggling to convince himself in the perdurance of better things. On “Brompton Oratory” he would find himself literally floored, sitting upon the stone steps, overwhelmed by the inchoate sensation of a beauty beyond words, expressing the con- joined wonder between spirituality and romance, so great it overwhelms his own brittle sense of belief.
Performing with The Bad Seeds at the All Points East festival at Lon- don’s Victoria Park in the summer of 2022, Cave plays “I Need You” solo on the piano. In full voice for the entire show, he seems to falter in repeating the song’s final mantra, “just breathe,” as the words seem to fall away from him collapsing into the expression of both love and loss. The crowd takes up the chant alongside him, drawing the song back toward life; it is a singular and powerful moment shared between artist and audience.
Speaking in 2017, a year after the release of Skeleton Tree Cave would admit to the toxic force of loss: “The whole grief thing, there’s nothing good about it whatsoever. People will tell you other things, but it’s like a fucking disease. A contagion that not only affects you but everybody around you.”44 This perspective would be dramatically altered in the coming years. By the time of Ghosteen Cave would argue the album was ultimately a positive record, not an indulgence of “grief porn.” Among its sometimes-unforgiving examinations of the aftermath of loss, it is steeped in the necessary rediscovery of joy; by refusing to look away or to suppress our feelings this confrontation allows for a new beginning. Cave intimates toward a sense of wonder in the creative act, a form of giving back to life, even if it means disruption and confrontation— rather than a return to more of the same—putting the comfortable at unease and comforting the disturbed.
Looking beyond the abstractions of beauty and truth, Cave’s response to the first Red Hand Files question in 2018 would make the case for hope in a seemingly hopeless world: “In an artist’s case (and perhaps it is the same for everybody) I would say it is a sense of wonder. Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder. Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. So how do we return to our lives—to the awe of existence—and reclaim a sense of wonder?”
Though Cave often takes a hard real-world view of pain he warns against negativity and cynicism. Instead hope becomes armor to do what we can to counteract cruelty and ignorance. Music can make people better, improve and enrich our lives, even if the music is dark, challenging, or haunting, wherever it engages us through feeling it remains powerful, with its own unique aliveness.
A few years after the release of Skeleton Tree the doors and windows of Cave’s Brighton home would be locked and shuttered closed, white sheets cast over the furniture, as if the house were sleeping. It would remain a place in the mind where Cave would revisit sometimes, per- haps in the songs, finding himself there as if waking from a dream. Cave would take his family to the unquestioning ubiquity of LA, where a freak can exist in isolation, the stray wolves and circling of hyenas kept at the gates under their steady gaze. There was the fear that wonder might fade. He and Susie would travel back and forth to Brighton as Cave recorded parts of Ghosteen in London and at a nearby studio in Hove throughout 2018. They would sell the Brighton house in 2022, settling in a small secret house in London.
It seems fitting that “Push the Sky Away” continues to endure as a Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ song to say goodbye. Where Cave would sometimes pull one, fifty, or a hundred people onto the stage, joining hands, singing together united in a moment rising on the ascending elegy of the chorus line repeated like a mantra. Like “The Mercy Seat” before it, the song is often played at the end of every Bad Seeds show, revealing a point of closure and acceptance where nothing in life is ever fully resolved but that does not mean we should give up on it.
“Push the Sky Away” emerges fully formed, like a dream, its shin- ing chords chiming with the voices of Cave, his fellow Bad Seeds, and the school choir, that at once manages to sound like a haunting mantra and a gently consoling force of awakening. The rising music invokes at once the glimmering promise of Venus, given to the darkness and light of the morning and evening star, seen just before dawn and after sunset as the world edges into night. For his part, Warren Ellis remembers the song as the beginning of a new creative era that would continue through Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen: “I remember when we did the song ‘Push The Sky Away’ felt like it was throwing down a challenge. There was something about it that seemed to be very bold. The sound, what was going on with it, the whole thing. It felt like where to launch off from, and it always felt like there were three records in this.”
Speaking about the “Push the Sky Away” in 2013 Cave would explain, “We all have this feeling of the world folding in on us. Whether it’s environmental, the economy, nuclear or whatever, I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who’s walking around thinking things are okay. So, to me, there’s this idea that we need to carry on and do what we do. The song is optimistic in that respect. Of course, it’s impossible to push the sky away but we need to try.”
The French poet Yves Bonnefoy claims the horizon exists as a temptation, drawing us away from the here and now toward an imagined country—Bonnefoy calls it thearrierepays (translated imperfectly into English as the “hinterlands”). It becomes the promise of a better future withheld, caught at a distance beyond endless mutability we will likely never reach, but within the creative act of hope we can reimagine the boundaries of its possibility.
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ songs of life, love, and death often reveal us to be flawed, vulnerable beings, and though we are diminished by death, the opportunity of life gives us the chance to experience and create great things in works of art and acts of love and kindness. In doing so we escape the limits of our mortality, forever moving against the tides in the hope that each of us will find a new day beyond the horizon.
Where faces of the elder years, High souls absolved from grief and sin,
Leaning from out ancestral spheres Beckon the wounded spirit in.
—The Hour Of Twilight, George William Russell
Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death
This book uncovers the stories behind Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’
most well-known songs from “Tupelo,” “The Mercy Seat,” “Red Right Hand,”
“Stagger Lee,” and “Into My Arms,” to “Higgs Boson Blues” and beyond.
This book explores Nick Cave’s life in music, drawing upon his inspirations from
the Bible, Greek myth, and literature, as well as his enduring passion for gospel,
the blues, and progressive rock.
Adam Steiner reflects upon Cave’s journey from his Australian childhood to his struggles with drug addiction and young fascination with the nightmare landscapes of America’s Wild West and southern gothic, toward a reckoning with his own Christian spirituality. In a career spanning four decades, Cave’s songwriting has moved from the sinners and saints of murder ballads to piano-based songs of heartbreak, deconstructed garage rock, and ambient fever dreams. Steiner dives into the world of a complex songwriter who continues to speak to us of the light and shade of humanity.
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