Nick Cave is special. While his fellow 80s cohorts are playing the hits on revival circuits,
he’s still churning through the grist of his day-to-day existence and creating art out of it. He’s the rare celebrity that has grown wise instead of just old. Nowhere is that more apparent than on his website, theredhandfiles.com, where he runs the best life advice column on the internet, answering questions about spiritual travails, sobriety, and the responsibility of an artist. To celebrate the release of his 18th studio album out later this summer, I wanted to take a moment to appreciate the career of Cave and recognize how his songwriting has influenced our own.
In the beginning Cave was the singer of The Boys Next Door, a suitably ironic name for a career that would send him across the globe and explore the depths of human depravity. His band of Australian youths would eventually settle on the even more innocuous, and incongruent The Birthday Party. At this party, the clown would write “All pigs must die” on his naked chest, writhe around on broken glass, and shriek about vampires fucking. He would eat the cake with both hands. Iggy Pop’s Stooges influenced a lot of grinding garage rock bands after the birth of punk rock, but none as combative and yet artistic as the Birthday Party. If Cave fell into obscurity (or, like some of his bandmates, died young) The Birthday Party would still be considered a seminal post-punk band, and one of the progenitors of goth rock. “Release the Bats,” indeed.
After The Birthday Party disbanded (or collapsed), Cave cherry-picked among the best musicians in its orbit and formed The Bad Seeds, the backup band for his solo career. (Think: if Springsteen’s E Street Band played rippling waves of distortion instead of saxophones.) Initially Cave fashioned himself as some sort of gothic bluesman, a hornier and more violent Tom Waits, who sang about carnivals, criminals, and Old Testament damnation. He could be funny and he could be scary, but he was always theatrical.
And then something changed. Some time after his relationship with PJ Harvey ended, or after he quit hard drugs, or after he rewrote the traditional folk tune “Stagger Lee” with the immortally goofy line, “I would climb over ten good pussies just to get to one fat boy’s asshole,” he began to ease up on the stories of sin and started writing about – gasp – love. Maybe he just got older, maybe he started reading the New Testament of the book that had become such an artistic and spiritual lodestone to his identity. Maybe he realized the darkness doesn’t work without the light. Whatever the reason, he stopped writing behind the mask of a character and started expressing his true feelings in song. A series of some critically acclaimed albums followed…whose piano-led sonics do almost nothing for me.
Fortunately, in the new millennium, the newly relatable Cave course-corrected back to rock with a pair of Bad Seeds albums, and another pair of albums with an even harrier Bad Seeds offshoot Grinderman. This is my favorite stretch of Nick Cave albums.
Again he wrote about sinners, but he sprinkled in some saints, and a few people who were just trying to make sense of a cruel world. Dig, Lazerus, Dig!!! is probably the best example of the new and old Cave. The title song finds the Biblical prophet dropped in Modern NYC. “We Call Upon the Author to Explain” calls into question Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author. “More News From Nowhere” is about a very relatable case of romantic longing. By 2008, the longtime Loverboy had become a Loverman.
Wildly, this is only the third phase of what’s become, at this point, a four part career. In the 2010s, after the separate deaths of two of his children, Cave’s music became more ambient, more imagistic, and less reliant on narratives. This new music (with the Seeds and without) is obviously influenced by his extensive work on film soundtracks (he also scripted the bleak 2005 western The Proposition), but it’s also not really rock music any more. Personally, I hope this upcoming album, Wild God, is a revanchist move back to rock. I don’t expect another Birthday Party, but I definitely don’t want another funeral.
As far as Heck Reckoners go…look, we make gothic rock music, and there’s no one who looms as large in the genre as Nick Cave. He writes story songs with tons of concrete imagery, has a home base in garage rock (though that piano got quite the workout at the end of the last century), and identifies with the loathsome, downtrodden, and morally bankrupt. Also, wit like an exacto knife. Sounds like my kinda guy.