Nick Cave
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Born in Australia in 1957 but more recently a resident of London, England, Nick Cave has for many years written emotive songs of life, love, death and the yearning for each of these elements of humanity.
Early works, first with The Birthday Party and later with current band The Bad Seeds were angry, vitriolic lambasts kicking out at anything that happened to enrage Cave, which in those days was most things. These songs were still presented in an extremely lyrical and intellectual manner however which is possibly what affords them their power and charm.
The Mercy Seat (from the Tender Prey album) is a fine example of this period of Cave's writing. It is presented as a first person account of a murderer dying on an electric chair. The best version can be heard on the Live Seeds album. As performed live the song starts slowly with a few simple piano chords and builds to an apocalyptic crescendo as the current is cranked up with the protagonist, who regards himself as "nearly wholly innocent", turning to religion as salvation for the crimes that it is implied a malevolent God suggested he perpetrate in the first place. The comparison between this violent death on a wooden chair and Jesus' peaceful occupation as a carpenter is a particularly moving juxtaposition bringing into focus man's ability to corrupt and defile the most beautiful things - a common theme in Cave's work.
Cave's last album to deal almost exclusively with violence and death was 1996's Murder Ballads from which the two beautiful duets Henry Lee and Where the Wild Roses Grow were performed with PJ Harvey and Kylie Minogue respectively. These two songs afforded Cave his most commercial success to date, even picking up airplay on MTV, something with which one gets the impression Cave himself has never been entirely comfortable with. The selection of fellow antipodean Kylie to play the part of Elisa Day in Where the Wild Roses Grow might seem an odd one - but it is required of the singer to play the part of a beautiful, innocent woman of almost child like naivety, and in such a roll she excels. It's testament to the sway Cave holds in the music community that he managed to get her to sing the lines "The last thing I heard was a muttered word as he stood smiling above me with a rock in his fist" and to be "murdered in song", however.
The two most recent Nick Cave albums (The Boatman's Call and No More Shall We Part) have focused more on the love song - which is not to say they are happy, cheery works. In his recent lecture The Secret Life of the Love Song, Cave suggests that a love song can "never be happy" as it must always "embrace the potential for pain". He states that "the Love Song is the sound of our endeavours to be God-like" and that it is "the noise of sorrow itself".
The Boatman's Call, the most personal album Cave has ever written certainly has plenty of sorrow in it's 12 musically sparse tracks. The melancholy practically drips from the CD is it is placed in the player - but it's not at all depressing. Today Cave has the ability along with emotional stablemates such as Leonard Cohen to bare the very darkest recesses of his soul and make it an uplifting experience for the listener. Tracks such as (Are You) The One that I've Been Looking For, Green Eyes and West Country Girl chart the freshly discovered waters of Cave's failed romances, the latter undoubtedly being about former Cave collaborator and lady who's no stranger to the art of melancholy herself, PJ Harvey.
Newest album No More Shall We Part begins in much the same vein with the simple guitar and piano of the first single As I Sat Sadly By Her Side, but soon becomes more musically complex. It uses folk singer sisters Kate and Anna McGarrigle to great effect, especially during the beautiful end section of Hallelujia. This album even ventures back to angrier times for songs such as Oh My Lord which really sees the Bad Seeds let rip once more while Cave has a go at his detractors who claim that he's gone a bit "soft" of late. The album also features gems such as God is in the House - a wonderful sideswipe at the sterility of small town life that takes matters to ridiculous but logical conclusions: "...we have a tiny little force but we need them of course for the kittens in the trees..." and "...we've bred all our kittens white so you can see them in the night...". But this sort of ridiculous lyric is not unique in Cave's work and especially not on this particular album. It's the lyrical cartwheels he turns with his oh-so-easy mix of sublime, mundane, ridiculous, dramatic, tragic and comic imagery that makes his music so moving.
Nick Cave has produced eleven studio albums during his time with the Bad Seeds and has written one novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel. A complete collection of his lyrics from 1978 to 2001 has just been published. More information is available at www.nickcave.net
Early Years
Early works, first with The Birthday Party and later with current band The Bad Seeds were angry, vitriolic lambasts kicking out at anything that happened to enrage Cave, which in those days was most things. These songs were still presented in an extremely lyrical and intellectual manner however which is possibly what affords them their power and charm.
The Mercy Seat (from the Tender Prey album) is a fine example of this period of Cave's writing. It is presented as a first person account of a murderer dying on an electric chair. The best version can be heard on the Live Seeds album. As performed live the song starts slowly with a few simple piano chords and builds to an apocalyptic crescendo as the current is cranked up with the protagonist, who regards himself as "nearly wholly innocent", turning to religion as salvation for the crimes that it is implied a malevolent God suggested he perpetrate in the first place. The comparison between this violent death on a wooden chair and Jesus' peaceful occupation as a carpenter is a particularly moving juxtaposition bringing into focus man's ability to corrupt and defile the most beautiful things - a common theme in Cave's work.
Murder, he Wrote
Cave's last album to deal almost exclusively with violence and death was 1996's Murder Ballads from which the two beautiful duets Henry Lee and Where the Wild Roses Grow were performed with PJ Harvey and Kylie Minogue respectively. These two songs afforded Cave his most commercial success to date, even picking up airplay on MTV, something with which one gets the impression Cave himself has never been entirely comfortable with. The selection of fellow antipodean Kylie to play the part of Elisa Day in Where the Wild Roses Grow might seem an odd one - but it is required of the singer to play the part of a beautiful, innocent woman of almost child like naivety, and in such a roll she excels. It's testament to the sway Cave holds in the music community that he managed to get her to sing the lines "The last thing I heard was a muttered word as he stood smiling above me with a rock in his fist" and to be "murdered in song", however.
The Secret Life of the Love Song
The two most recent Nick Cave albums (The Boatman's Call and No More Shall We Part) have focused more on the love song - which is not to say they are happy, cheery works. In his recent lecture The Secret Life of the Love Song, Cave suggests that a love song can "never be happy" as it must always "embrace the potential for pain". He states that "the Love Song is the sound of our endeavours to be God-like" and that it is "the noise of sorrow itself".
The Boatman's Call, the most personal album Cave has ever written certainly has plenty of sorrow in it's 12 musically sparse tracks. The melancholy practically drips from the CD is it is placed in the player - but it's not at all depressing. Today Cave has the ability along with emotional stablemates such as Leonard Cohen to bare the very darkest recesses of his soul and make it an uplifting experience for the listener. Tracks such as (Are You) The One that I've Been Looking For, Green Eyes and West Country Girl chart the freshly discovered waters of Cave's failed romances, the latter undoubtedly being about former Cave collaborator and lady who's no stranger to the art of melancholy herself, PJ Harvey.
Newest album No More Shall We Part begins in much the same vein with the simple guitar and piano of the first single As I Sat Sadly By Her Side, but soon becomes more musically complex. It uses folk singer sisters Kate and Anna McGarrigle to great effect, especially during the beautiful end section of Hallelujia. This album even ventures back to angrier times for songs such as Oh My Lord which really sees the Bad Seeds let rip once more while Cave has a go at his detractors who claim that he's gone a bit "soft" of late. The album also features gems such as God is in the House - a wonderful sideswipe at the sterility of small town life that takes matters to ridiculous but logical conclusions: "...we have a tiny little force but we need them of course for the kittens in the trees..." and "...we've bred all our kittens white so you can see them in the night...". But this sort of ridiculous lyric is not unique in Cave's work and especially not on this particular album. It's the lyrical cartwheels he turns with his oh-so-easy mix of sublime, mundane, ridiculous, dramatic, tragic and comic imagery that makes his music so moving.
Nick Cave has produced eleven studio albums during his time with the Bad Seeds and has written one novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel. A complete collection of his lyrics from 1978 to 2001 has just been published. More information is available at www.nickcave.net
