“Once upon a time a wild god zoomed, all through his memory in which he was entombed, it was rape and pillage in the retirement village.” Is there anyone else who could have written that lyric but Nick Cave?
It’s the title song of Wild God, a euphoric masterpiece of sound and drama from Cave and the Bad Seeds. The band’s album follows 2019′s Ghosteen (written and recorded after the tragic death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, who fell from a cliff) and 2021′s Carnage (by Cave and songwriting partner Warren Ellis).
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are releasing their new album Wild God at the end of August.Illustration by Ashley Floréal
Cave spoke from a London hotel room about grief, joy and, plot spoiler, Leonard Cohen’s underwear.
Listening to Wild God made me think of the film The Green Mile, the adaptation of the Stephen King novel. A character has the ability to heal people, but it weakens him to do so.
I know the film. I’m thinking of him sucking flies into himself.
Yes, and your album has such hurt and healing and uplifting emotionality, I’m wondering if it took a toll on you to make. Does the process deplete you in some way?
On a general level, the way you’re describing the record is true, in the sense that it is joyful. I have an idea of what joy is. Joy isn’t happiness – Wild God isn’t exactly a happy record. Joy for me has some understanding of loss and suffering. Joy is the momentary leaps we take that lift us beyond our default position of loss and suffering. This record is very much like that.
But you write about some intense themes. Does that affect you while you’re creating, or on stage?
What I’m singing about, even though they’re grave matters, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the way I’m feeling myself. That goes for performing on stage. Just because the songs are sad sometimes doesn’t mean I’m suffering when I’m singing them. I’m mostly caught up in the beauty of the present moment, hopefully.
The Bad Seeds play a bigger role on this record, compared with 2016′s Skeleton Tree and 2019′s Ghosteen. Was that a conscious decision?
It was incredible to see the Bad Seeds pulled back. To have songs where they could dig into them is something really amazing. I feel like they were almost put out to pasture for the last couple of records.
At what part of the process do you make the decision on how much the band will be used?
It happens in the end, in a way. Something like Skeleton Tree, for example, the Bad Seeds didn’t really play on that much. And that was because of the nature of the record and what I was going through at the time. It was so sort of raw and dark and tragic. I think the band felt there wasn’t any room for them on that record. They didn’t feel there was anything to add, and they didn’t want to take anything away. In a different way, I think Ghosteen was so fragile the songs just couldn’t carry the weight of the Bad Seeds, so the band just stands back a little bit. But Wild God calls for a whole band – an exuberant band.
You chose Dave Fridmann, often associated with the Flaming Lips, to mix the album. Why didn’t you and your songwriting partner, Warren Ellis, mix it?
I just felt we needed someone else to deal with the sound. It was a risk we took. I love those Flaming Lips records, but Dave was also recommended to me by Coldplay’s Chris Martin. Dave radically changed the sound of the record. Or at least mixed it in a way we wouldn’t have, which was to crash all the strings and the choir and compress the whole thing into this extremely immediate feeling of pure emotion. We were really excited and impressed by what he did.
Those two previous Bad Seed records were affected by the accidental death of your son Arthur in 2015. After that, could you ever have imagined making such a joyous new album?
Do you mean, could I ever be happy? Is that what you’re actually asking?
Yes it is.
The beautiful truth of grief is that ultimately you can experience joy and happiness in a way that you’d never known. I’ve learnt that, but it’s not something you can understand at the time, in the early days. I was taking things as they came.
I attended your solo concert at Toronto’s Convocation Hall in 2019, which was part of a tour that involved audience members asking you questions between songs. Did that format help you with your grief?
It was such an odd thing to want to do, especially in the condition I was in. To walk on stage and say, “Hey, is there anything you want to ask me?” I think my wife, Susie, was very concerned about me doing that. But I did get something from it. I got further evidence that most people are suffering, and that we are all going through things like this, or ultimately will. It was very powerful.
The audience members in Toronto seemed more interested in sharing their own grief with you. What was happening? Was it empathy?
I would say compassion. I know empathetic people. When I talk about things, I can see the pain in their faces – they absorb it. Maybe that’s what the man in The Green Mile represented – a kind of acute form of empathy.
The song Frogs on the new album has lyrics about frogs leaping to God, amazed with love and pain, and ecstatic to be back in the water again. Is that self-referential?
I’m talking there about human nature in general, but, yeah, I’m talking about myself. For all the grand drama of my songs, I write about ordinary stuff. I just have a way of expressing these sorts of things. That song is essentially about me and my wife walking home from church in the rain. There’s a sense of ecstasy with these frogs jumping with their arms and legs extended. That’s what the song is – a momentary explosion of joy that is bookended by a desolate beginning and desolate end.
What’s the title song about?
Wild God is essentially about an old man moving through his memory and through the world and searching for someone to believe in him. It’s literally God searching 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 to the album?
It’s set very much in the present moment. If it’s saying anything, it is that we should be alert to the present moment and to the inherent beauty and joy of the world and the people in it, rather than neurotically agitating toward some sort of better life down the line. We need to enjoy present laughter, as Shakespeare calls it.
Was writing lyrics difficult?
Extremely. It always is. You don’t know what you’re writing and you don’t know whether what you’re writing is of any value. You don’t even know what you’re writing about. You don’t know anything, essentially.
Talking about writing Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen recalled sitting on the floor of a hotel room, wearing only his underwear and banging his head on the floor in frustration. Is that you?
I’ve heard three stories from random people meeting Leonard Cohen, and he’s always in his underwear. But, no, I don’t write that way. He’s an extremely careful songwriter – you feel that every line is being worked at and thought about. I’m not really like that. The way creators create is really interesting. In a way, it’s handing your work to the gods. Also, I would say, at the risk of being hung from a lamp post the next time I come to Canada, that it could be argued that some of Leonard’s songs could have used an edit.
Speaking of gods, some might argue the same thing about the Bible.
[Laughs] Yeah, well, some might say that. Usually it’s the people who haven’t read it.
This interview had been edited and condensed.