Nick Cave Talks Joy, Los Angeles and ‘Wild God’

As a general rule, Nick Cave advises against “tying the life story” strictly to the records a musician releases. Songwriters are storytellers, after all, and few have shown as much interest in ancient themes and dramas – justice, violence, sex, betrayal, redemption – as Cave has in the nearly half-century since he emerged from his native Australia, first with his band The Birthday Party and then with the Bad Seeds.

Yet Cave, 66, acknowledges that his work in recent years has mirrored “almost exactly” the events of his real life, namely the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, in an accidental fall from a cliff near the family home in Brighton, England, in 2015. Albums like the following year’s “Skeleton Tree” and especially 2019’s spectral “Ghosteen” “follow a journey through grief,” Cave says, “because that’s just what happened to me.” In 2022, the singer lost a second son when Jethro, 31, was found dead of unspecified causes.

“Wild God,” Cave’s new album with the Bad Seeds, “is grounded in a fundamental understanding of the suffering we go through as human beings,” he says. “But it’s also a joyous record”: a vibrant set of muscular, poetic rock songs that showcase the sympathetic interplay between Cave and his backing band (which here includes Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood). Cave called from New York to talk about the LP, his attraction to the church, and the illusory promise of his own sex appeal.

You and your wife, Susie, moved from Brighton to Los Angeles for a while after your son Arthur died. I understand your need for a change of scenery. Why Los Angeles?
I’ve always loved America, it’s the country I love the most, in a way. But for a long time I didn’t really understand Los Angeles, I couldn’t understand the geography. Susie always loved that city, so we spent our holidays there, and finally we decided to leave Brighton, where we were very sad, and go somewhere bright and sunny.

Where in town did you land?
In the Hollywood Hills, off Outpost Drive. I had a very different time in Los Angeles because I had a lot of creative friends who were all eager to hang out and bounce ideas off each other. The sculptor and painter Thomas Houseago had a huge studio in Frogtown, and I used to go there and hang out. There were also actors and filmmakers—I won’t go into detail—who we would meet on Saturday or Sunday nights at different people’s houses to eat together and just talk about things. I really enjoyed those evenings.

Has your time here shaped your thinking about wealth or success?
I come from Australia, where they put their heads too high and cut them off at the neck. There’s an ambitious side to LA that I like. Maybe it’s because I’m a successful person (Laughs).

You talk about the joy you found in “Wild God.” Did the search for that joy ever feel like you were betraying your son?
This is a huge trap that grieving people fall into. I don’t believe in it at all. I think that when things like this happen to us – and it’s something that most of us go through in one way or another – I think it’s imperative that we move toward whatever happiness we can find, if only to influence the condition of those who have died. My biggest worry, as strange as it may sound, was my worry for my son, wherever he was – the feeling that he might feel the pain that his death had caused his parents and other family members. So I felt on some level that this was a good thing. For the one who made us look for a way of approaching the world that would have meaning and joy.

I recently spoke to Jack Antonoffwho told me that his band’s latest album Bleachers is the first that doesn’t deal with the loss of his little sister when he was a child. For years, he believed that everything that went wrong in his life was somehow connected to that tragedy. Does that make sense to you?
It makes sense, but I don’t see it the same way. The terrible things don’t really happen to you after you lose a child. You can lose another child, that’s the terrible thing. But the world has done the worst. I saw it with my wife. She had this company, The Vampire’s Wife, that made these extremely beautiful dresses, born out of her despair (after Arthur’s death). And that company went bankrupt a few months ago. It should affect Susie terribly, but on some level she’s kind of immune to it. We’re just hardened by grief.

Are you more resilient than you ever thought?
I would say hardened – slightly different from tough.

It is clear that losing children affected Your job. Has having children changed that?
Yes. The idea of ​​childhood is a common thread in a lot of my songs, from songs about our inability to protect our children, like “O Children,” to something like “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry,” which I wrote while I was rocking my newborn son to sleep. These are monumental things that expand the potential of the heart.

In addition to the Bad Seeds’ playing, the new album features quite a bit of choral singing.
I spend a lot of time in church, partly because the music there is extraordinary. Church music, plainchant, big choirs – it’s all extremely beautiful, and I wanted to try to capture some of that in this album.

Rock musicians use the term “gospel choir” quite interchangeably. Is that how you would describe the singers in the song “Frogs”?
I was actually trying to get the choir on that particular song to sing as white as possible, even though there were about 20 black people, because I wanted to have a sort of heavenly, high-church vibe — whereas something like “Conversion” is much more black gospel. But I didn’t want to hire two choirs (Laughs). There’s kind of an uneasy relationship between gospel music and rock music that I don’t really like. It can be really corny. So the way we went about recording “Conversion” was to do a kind of call-and-response thing that was completely chaotic and a little out of tune, just to put some frenzy into the whole thing.

Do you find a certain nourishment in church music?
Sure. In fact, listening to this stuff does your soul good. But I find great comfort in going to church for all sorts of reasons, not just for the music. It’s probably one of the only places left where we can express our various sadnesses and feel them fully and safely.

At the end of “Frogs,” the narrator describes meeting Kris Kristofferson one Sunday morning, which obviously recalls his “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.”
It’s one of the greatest songs of spiritual disillusionment. “Frogs” is sort of framed by examples of spiritual breakdown, with the murder of Cain and Abel at the beginning and Kristofferson’s song at the end.

I guess you’ve loved “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” for decades.
Yeah, I listened to a lot of country music growing up in Australia. It’s funny, I had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world, but from the age of 10 I would watch “The Johnny Cash Show,” which was on Australian television on Saturdays. He was one of the musicians that I really got obsessively attached to because I saw him as a kind of outlaw, a bit of an evil guy.

Cash did a great “Sunday Mornin’.” So did Willie Nelson.
He’s got an amazing voice, Willie, he can make any song his own. He did an incredible version of Coldplay’s “The Scientist”, it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard.

You specify on the lyric sheet of the new album that “O Wow O Wow (How wonderful she is)” is for Anita Lane, the first member of Bad Seeds who passed away in 2021. Did you plan to write a song about her?
No, I don’t think so. I just happened to find a few lines, and there was a joy in it that reminded me of Anita, so I sort of wrote about that. As I was writing at the piano, my wife walked by and said, “Oh, what a beautiful song. Who is it about?” And I thought, “Not you this time, darling.” In the Melbourne art and music scene, Anita was this bright, radiant, flamboyant, laughing creature that we black, drug-addicted men sort of revolved around. That’s what I wanted to capture in a way: the simple joy of being in Anita’s orbit.

The first lines say: “She gets up before her panties / I can confirm that God really does exist.”
Not bad.

Would Anita have liked this image?
She would have loved that. But, listen, everybody likes a song written about them. I wrote a song called “Scum” about a journalist, a terribly personal song about his private life and everything else. He still claims to this day that it’s his favorite song.

How essential is your appearance to your art? Would it work the same way?
If I were a fat bald guy in cargo shorts? I don’t know. I’m not going to name names, that would be mean, but there are a lot of people like that who are awesome.

Okay, but what does sex appeal bring you as an artist?
Are you saying that if I wasn’t tall, thin and had hair, I couldn’t afford some of the sh-t I do without? That it’s some kind of privilege? Actually, I don’t feel that way. I have all sorts of weird neuroses about my appearance.

Is this true?
Ask my wife about that.

What’s the funniest song you’ve ever written?
That’s a tough question, not because there are hardly any, but because there are so many. That’s one of the most confusing things: like Leonard Cohen, my songs are considered depressive when many of them are written explicitly as comedy songs. I don’t know if “No P— Blues” is the funniest song I’ve ever written, but it’s pretty funny.

You talked about how much it meant to you that Johnny Cash covered “The Mercy SeatHave you thought about who else you would like to hear sing one of your songs?
A lot of people cover my songs, and some of them talk to me because those are the people I listened to when I was a kid. So for Johnny Cash to do it, to meet him and sing with him, that was a gift that can’t be taken away from me. But I don’t sit there and think, “I hope Taylor Swift covers my song.” Even though, well, I wouldn’t mind. I just put it out there. Maybe it’ll manifest somehow.