Nick Cave on Pain, Joy and the Process of Creating His New Album with the Bad Seeds

“Once upon a time there was a wild god who was darting, through all his memory where he was buried, there was rape and pillage in the retirement village.” Is there anyone else who could have written that lyric if not Nick Cave?

It’s the title song Wild Goda euphoric masterpiece of sound and drama from Cave and the Bad Seeds. The band’s follow-up album to 2019’s Ghost (written and recorded after the tragic death of his fifteen-year-old son Arthur, who fell from a cliff) and 2021 Carnage (by Cave and his songwriting partner Warren Ellis).

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Cave spoke from a London hotel room about grief, joy and, plot spoiler, Leonard Cohen’s underwear.

Listening Wild God It made me think of the movie The Green Mileadaptation of Stephen King’s novel. A character has the ability to heal people, but it weakens him.

I know the movie. I imagine him sucking flies into himself.

Yes, and your album has such a painful, healing, uplifting emotionality that I wonder if it took a toll on you to make it. Does the process impoverish you in any way?

Generally speaking, the way you describe the record is true, in the sense that it’s joyful. I have an idea of ​​what joy is. Joy is not happiness – Wild God it’s not exactly a happy record. Joy for me has a certain understanding of loss and suffering. Joy is the momentary leaps we make that lift us above our default position of loss and suffering. This record is very similar.

But you write about intense themes. Do they influence you while you create or on stage?

What I sing about, even if it’s serious, doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how I feel. That goes for performing on stage, too. Just because the songs are sad sometimes doesn’t mean I’m in pain when I sing them. I’m mostly caught up in the beauty of the moment, I hope.

The Bad Seeds have a bigger role on this album than they did on 2016. Skeleton Tree and 2019 GhostWas it a conscious decision?

It was incredible to see the Bad Seeds pulled back. To have songs that you can dig into is really incredible. I feel like they’ve been kind of retired for the last two records.

At what stage of the process is it decided how much of the band will be used?

In the end, in a certain sense, something like this happens Skeleton Treefor example, the Bad Seeds didn’t play much. And that was because of the nature of the record and what I was going through at the time. It was so raw and dark and tragic. I think the band felt like there was no room for them on that record. They didn’t feel like there was anything to add and they didn’t want to take anything away. In a different way, I think Ghost was so fragile that the songs couldn’t carry the weight of the Bad Seeds, so the band just took a step back. But Wild God It requires a whole band, a full band.

You chose Dave Fridmann, often associated with the Flaming Lips, to mix the album. Why didn’t you and your writing partner, Warren Ellis, mix it?

I just thought we needed someone else to do the sound. It was a risk we took. I love those Flaming Lips records, but Dave was also recommended to me by Chris Martin from Coldplay. Dave changed the sound of the record completely. Or at least he mixed it in a way that we wouldn’t have done, which was by squashing all the strings and the choir and compressing it into this very immediate feeling of pure emotion. We were really excited and impressed by what he did.

Those two previous Bad Seed records were influenced by the accidental death of your son Arthur in 2015. After that, could you ever have imagined making such a joyful new album?

You mean, could I ever be happy? Is that what you’re really asking?

Yes.

The wonderful truth of grief is that you can finally experience joy and happiness in a way you never knew. I learned that, but it’s not something you can understand right away, in the early days. I just took it as it came.

I attended your solo concert at Convocation Hall in Toronto in 2019, which was part of a tour where the audience would ask you questions between songs. Did that format help you get through the pain?

It was such a strange thing to want to do, especially in the circumstances I was in. To get up on stage and say, “Hey, is there anything you want to ask me?” I think my wife, Susie, was very worried about me. But I got something out of it. I got more evidence that most people are suffering and that we all are going through things like this, or will eventually. It was very powerful.

The Toronto audience seemed more interested in sharing their pain with you. What was going on? Was it empathy?

I would say compassion. I know empathetic people. When I talk about things, I see the pain in their faces, they absorb it. Maybe this is what man in The Green Mile represented – a sort of acute form of empathy.

The song Frogs in the new album he has lyrics about frogs jumping toward God, amazed by love and pain, and ecstatic to be back in the water. Is it self-referential?

I’m talking about human nature in general, but yeah, I’m talking about myself. For all the great drama in my songs, I write about ordinary things. I just have a way of expressing that kind of thing. That song is basically about me and my wife walking home from church in the rain. There’s a sense of ecstasy with these frogs jumping around with their arms and legs outstretched. That’s what the song is: a momentary burst of joy that’s bounded by a desolate beginning and a desolate end.

What is the title song of the album about?

Wild God it’s essentially about an old man moving through his memory and the world and looking for someone to believe in him. It’s literally God looking for his disciples, who he feels have abandoned him. Then the song opens up to the whole world rejoicing in this abandoned character. Ultimately, these songs are about moving from one thing to another, moving from one state to another state.

Is there a message in the album?

It’s very much set in the present moment. If it says anything, it’s that we should be attentive to the present moment and the inherent beauty and joy of the world and the people in it, rather than nervously fretting about some kind of better life in the future. We need to enjoy the present laughter, as Shakespeare calls it.

Was it difficult to write the lyrics?

Extremely. It’s always like that. You don’t know what you’re writing and you don’t know if what you’re writing has any value. You don’t even know what you’re writing about. You know nothing, essentially.

Talking about writing AlleluiaLeonard Cohen recalled sitting on the floor of a hotel room, wearing only his underwear, banging his head on the floor in frustration. Is that you?

I’ve heard three stories of random people meeting Leonard Cohen, and he’s always in his underwear. But, no, I don’t write that way. He’s an extremely thoughtful songwriter: you feel like every line has been crafted and thought out. I’m not really like that. The way creators create is really interesting. In a way, it’s like handing your work over to the gods. Also, I would say, at the risk of being hanged from a lamppost next time I come to Canada, that one could argue that some of Leonard’s songs could have been changed.

Speaking of gods, some might argue the same thing as the Bible.

[Laughs] Yeah, well, some might say that. Usually it’s people who haven’t read it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.