God, Pain and Love in the Music of Nick Cave (Critical Essay‪)‬

[1] My topic is the love songs of Nick Cave, who remains one of the most original and arresting of alternative musicians in last three decades. Cave, front man for bands such as The Birthday Party and--more famously--the Bad Seeds, has woven together music, poetry and performances that draw heavily upon the Bible and yet creatively reinterpret that text. (1) So also with the love song, which is not only one of the basic genres of Cave's writing but also finds inspiration in the Bible. For most people, a mention of Cave's love song evokes the soft and rather melodious songs of the 1990s and early 2000s--"Into My Arms," the "Ship Song" and "Where the Wild Roses Grow" are perhaps the best known of these. They were also the songs that gave Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds a much wider audience, for the ex-punk rocker had finally given away the clashing music and harsh lyrics for the piano and harmony. It may, then, come as a surprise to find out that Nick Cave has been writing love songs ever since he began writing in his teens (i.e., for almost four decades). There are a rather large number of them; Cave says that at a rough count he has written over 200, which is more than the official releases of all the songs he has written. (2) And they cover all the phases through which Cave has moved with his music--some evoke the first awakening of love and its passion, others the sadness of parting, yet others pain and revenge and anger and sheer brutality. [2] How are we to make sense of such a range of love songs? I wish to argue that two factors are crucial to the way that the love song comes together in Cave's music: God and pain (whether inflicted or received). Before I do so, however, we need to deal with a couple of reflections on the love song by Cave himself. As ever, he tries to direct the interpretation of his own material. As I have at length elsewhere, Cave is not the best interpreter of his own work. (3) For example, Cave states in a lecture on the love song in 1999, "The Song of Solomon, perhaps the greatest Love Song ever written, had a massive impact on me". He followed this up with: "The Song of Solomon is an extraordinary Love Song but it was the remarkable series of love song/poems known as the Psalms that truly held me ... In many ways these songs became the blueprint for many of my more sadistic love songs." (4)