NPR Music - Nick Cave on the encounters that brought him to 'Wild God'

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

On August 30, the Australian-born rock titan Nick Cave will release Wild God, a new album with his band The Bad Seeds. It's a high point in Cave's career, and NPR Music's Ann Powers spoke with him about the struggles — personal, musical and religious — he faced on the road to making the album. Wild God is filled with songs about encounters with the divine, which does not always take a benevolent form. And it follows a decade in which Cave, having publicly faced tragedy in his own life, has evolved from post-punk's louchest fallen angel into a revered figure among his audience in a new way: a dignified seeker whose courage and wisdom resounds beyond musical boundaries thanks to advice he has shared in interviews, writing projects and public appearances. Perhaps it's not surprising that so many of the songs reckon with the moment of revelation or transformation, or the demand for conversion from what Cave describes as "a suffering god ... a god that is embedded in the world."As for the state of his own religious conviction, Cave says that the struggle is the point: "I would say I'm in the process of conversion," he tells Powers. Wherever he is on that road, he's found something ecstatic to share.Click here to read a transcript of this interview and hear songs from the album Wild God.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

So, Anne, I've been thinking a lot lately about how there aren't many artists or musicians where I can say, I remember the first time I ever saw or heard them because, you know, just of the incredible lasting impression they made on me. Yeah, very few. But one I can certainly remember, vividly remember, is Nick Cave. Yes. I mean, I remember precisely when I first heard him and saw him with the band The Bad Seeds. It was in the late 1980s. And he was in this, what I think is a legendary movie that came out around that time called Wings of Desire. One of my favorites.

Right. But for those who don't know it, and you really should watch it if you haven't seen it, it is a very beautiful, artful film about, well, I mean, it's about lots of things. But at least on the surface, it's about these guardian angels who watch over us. And there's this one angel in particular who just wants to live on earth. as a mortal human being to feel what it's like to be human, to fall in love, to feel the, you know, feel the weight of things and whatnot. It's actually, if you know the American film, City of Angels, that was the blasphemous remake. Yeah, not necessary, not necessary at all. Anyway, this angel and, you know, the main angel, he comes down to Earth. And at one point,

it's actually very near the end of the movie. He goes into a bar where there's this band playing and that band is Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a very young Nick Cave. Anyway, all of this is on my mind because here we are nearly 40 years later, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are back. They've got a new album coming out called Wild God. Yes. And, you know, when you think of the film, Wings of Desire, in retrospect, it almost seems kind of prescient. You know, there's this great moment in the movie where he's performing on stage, and there is an angel. standing behind him as he's playing. And of course, Nick Cave, the character doesn't know the angel's there, but the angel is watching. And a lot of the themes that come up in it around religion

and spirituality and the meaning and purpose of life, all those sorts of big questions are things that Nick Cave explores on Wild God. And Anne, you actually got to sit down with Nick Cave to talk about wild God and all of these themes in a conversation that we're going to share here. Oh, yes. Those themes have been there since the beginning. And, well, certainly when I was a young Nick Cave fan, I thought he was bringing, you know, the fire of hell to all of us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's, some of it's pretty terrified. And in a way, he was, but I think what's happened, especially in recent years, you know, in 2015, he lost a son in a tragic accident, his son, Arthur.

And especially after that, I think, you know, he wanted to bring those spiritual and, you know, And as he would say, religious themes, and even, I think he would say Christian themes, to the surface. I think his sense of mission changed as he coped with his own grief and became kind of a rock and roll grief counselor publicly, too. You know, he speaks with his fans online in his website, The Red Hand Files. He's done conversation tour where he discusses what he's gone through with his grief. And I think in that process, he wanted to crystallize his own beliefs, his own doubts, his own search for something beyond that he connects with. And this album is all about conversions. It's all about that moment where the human encounters the divine.

And that, to me, is a huge culmination for the bad seeds. I love how you put that because that's sort of what happened to me when I was watching. It was a bit of a conversion. Yes, it was a bit of a convert at the end of it. Yes. It was this amazing force before me, yeah. That's so funny because we even talked about that. We talked about how rock and roll itself is a bit of a little conversion every time you experience it.

And I think he's one of our greats in terms of touching on that divinity in all music. I think it's really interesting to hear you say that he's always considered himself. a religious artist in ways, because one of the things that comes up in this conversation is how much he turns to the Bible when writing. Yes, absolutely. That's been true throughout his entire career. He's refined that approach, I think, and on wild God, it really reaches a culmination. I was curious, as a longtime fan, which version of the Bible he turns to when he wants to get to those sacred stories.

I'm a King James guy. I mean, only because I'm sort of a traditionalist in a sense, but there's actually probably better translations and more accurate, certainly. I like the King James version because it's possibly inaccurate, and it's sort of, it's very mysterious, and I don't quite understand a lot of it, and these attempts to make things more comprehensible, I think, stripped something away from the language of the Judeo-Christian religion. Right.

That I'm really attracted to. I find it very difficult to spend much time in the Anglican church, even though I try because it's been stripped of its mystery and in an attempt to be relevant and kind of down with the sort of current ideas about things, it's lost its essential weirdness and mystery. And that's the stuff that I particularly attracted to with Christian. Christianity. It's weird. I remember once walking into St. Patrick's Cathedral here in New York City. I was raised Catholic, but in Vatican II era, so very modern, you know, and walking into that church and seeing a woman kissing the feet of a statue and having the feeling I think you're describing and actually feeling sort of almost uncomfortable, but also a bit lit up by that, you know, that you could have that intense feeling of connection with with the divine even through cold marble so I don't know if that's what

you're that's a lovely way to put it but I mean anyone who thinks that a kind of an attempt to sort of connect to religion in some way as a comfortable thing to do hasn't tried and it's for me it's extremely difficult and you know it requires something that comes completely unnaturally which is to move away from the skeptical, rational side of my personality, to follow something that is intuitive and emotional. And this is difficult to do. When I go to church in London, I go to a church that is just, I mean, it's extreme in its beauty.

And it's a place that I feel that I can bring a whole lot of things I feel. about things, things I can't really explain. It can be a very beautiful thing. It can also be the opposite to that, depending on the church. There's a sort of idea, it's just good to go anyway. I don't necessarily believe that. I think there are churches out there that cause terrible damage to the idea of what it is to be a religious person. Well, that's the tension. And I do have some about the tension between like the dogma or the rules or the ordering aspects of religion. I mean there's either the dogma. Yeah.

There's the dogma which I guess American religion has up the wazoo. And there's also this sort of slightly embarrassedness about the whole thing down the other end of the scale. Yeah. And I find both of these things equally repellent. And there are places that you can take, not just your sorrows, but your doubts and your uncertainty about these matters. I mean, I feel very much that I float around in a middle ground sort of adjacent to belief, let's say, rather than hook, line and sinker kind of thing, you know. Although I'm certainly moving, I'm moving in that direction, but, I would say I'm in the process of conversion, if you want to just go back to that word,

but far from converted, shall we say. Once upon a time, a wild god zoomed, all through his memory in which he was into. It was rape and pillage in the retirement village, but in his memory, but in his memory, That explains a lot about this album for me, actually, because it is an anthology or it's like a gallery of moments when people surrender, when people don't have a choice to surrender, when the gods themselves require a conversion. And let's talk about the title track, Wild God, because I'm fascinating. by this God who needs believers, who in a sense doesn't exist unless someone is there to call the spirit down, the God is diminished. Am I reading that right? Yes, that's right. And I guess the idea of the wild God is a suffering God, you know, that it is not some God that stands outside

of the world, omnipotent and omniscient. But is, but is it, that it is not some God that is not a God that is not a a god that is embedded in the world. I think the god in this particular song, there is a comic element to this song too, but this god in this song is essentially an old man. Yeah. That's sort of moving around the world and through situations and his own memory and all of this sort of stuff,

looking for someone to believe in him, I would say. Right. And eventually he calls down, that essence of belief and the whole song explodes. But before we leave that God, I want to say he feels very much to me like a green man of the forest in a sense. Like there's a pagan element to this God. Is there a need to separate out mythologies from other narratives

or do you view them sort of... Mythologies from the religious, from the Christian story, let's say. Well, I do separate that out, although they are stories. There's something about the biblical stories that have a particular resonance with me. You feel that they resonate in a different way? In a different way, yeah. I certainly feel that the Christ story has, since I was a young child, it's had this allure of some sort.

or that other stories haven't had. I don't know how to explain that. It's not that I came from a religious upbringing or not. It wasn't that I was brought up religious. My parents weren't particularly religious, although we did go to church. But that was because we lived in a town, and that's what you did.

Right, right. But I don't think my mother didn't believe, and I don't think my father had particularly those sorts of beliefs. Do you remember how you first encountered that story and it felt personal to you? Yeah, I mean, well, I first encountered it through pictures from a large Bible that I found my grandmother had, which was sort of stuck in some cupboard somewhere. And I found this huge book, leatherbound book, and sort of pulled it down and sat there on the end of the bed and looked at it. And it had pictures in it.

And I was really taken by that, you know, as a nine-year-old or however old I was. And then I joined the cathedral choir in the country town that I lived in. And so had to go to church two or three times a week. And in that time, I learned the stories of the Bible. And I actually always found them interesting. It occurs to me as we're talking that you, like me, as someone who was raised Catholic, we were introduced to this story in a kind of multimedia way, and that you're not only reading it, you are seeing beautiful art, you are hearing this music, and you are experiencing a ritual,

which is what you've brought as a musician as well. Like you're relating similar stories, maybe not sometimes specific stories inspired by the Christ story, but these stories of sacred encounters also enhanced, made possible really through what music does. Yeah, I think music is maybe the last truly effective, legitimate opportunity for a transcendent experience. have left to us. You never feel that about cinema. You never feel that about theater? It's just, it's a different, it's a communal act. But I do know that the feeling that I get on stage or at other people's concerts where you are pulled into the absolute present with music, with the people around you, the intensity of focus.

on what's going on. If the performer is good, the performer is deep inside the music, and this does something to us, it improves matters. Without particularly getting into this, I'm concerned that this great human act that is sort of a primary thread that runs through our culture is in danger of being taken away from us,

through, you know, song generators and all of this sort of stuff for AI. And this worries me a lot, really. It feels strange that the habits of listeners would change so much that they wouldn't long for the human connection that music offers, which has always been at the heart of its power. Well, that's right. And the human struggle to compose. and to create art. This is the very nature of what it is to be a human being

and to live in this world as far as I'm concerned. And to see the human artistic struggle as a kind of inconvenience of some sort on the way to the product, which is the music, is a terrible thing. And as far as I can say, I try and look at it in every possible way because I don't want to be some sort of Jeremiahed

about this kind of stuff. I can't see any good from these song generating platforms where you simply put in a prompt and a song comes out. No matter how good that song is, this is the idea that art can be produced without struggle. And to me, that's deeply worrying. In relation to what you're saying and the different ways to have these encounters, whether they are encounters with a divine source, with the spirit or the memory, however you want to define, with someone who's lost. I do want to return to how secular music can do that for people.

Or, I don't know, actually, let me interrupt myself. Would you call your music secular at this point? I've never called it that. It's never been secular music. If I have to define my music from the beginning in any way, it's religious music. It's interesting as someone who grew up playing in folk mass. There were distinct lines that I was taught between secular and sacred music. So at what point do you recall that you claimed that for yourself?

I mean, I use the word religious as well, a, because it annoys people. But also that the idea of religiousness feels to me it has a purpose. It has an intention rather than spiritual music, let's say, which seems to be something that floats around and doesn't have an intention. And I think that it's religious music in that its intent is a transcendent experience, even from the early days. I think even though I had no way of articulating it back then, I think that's what I was always trying to do. do. Or at least I felt that in the process of actually playing music, something happened to me. You know, something happened to me that I became this creature that I wasn't offstage.

Okay, let's just talk about the first song on the record song of the lake. And that's a very interesting song for me, in the way that it seems to merge a couple of different stories of encounters, right? So I honestly, listening to that song at first, and It is a ballad. It is a beautiful, it floats along. On the shore of the lake, the old man sat and watched a woman baby. With its golden touch, the light was such that the moment was worth saving. And he sang the song of the lake, the song of the lake. And he knew that he wouldn't have a lake.

But he also knew that if he wrote, At first, He would in time evaporate. He sang the song of the lake. At first I thought, oh, is this a kind of a lead-in? The Swan? Are we going to have an encounter between this woman and this male figure? But then it became more like the old men admiring themselves in the water.

The feeling of this man seems to be at the end of life, and he's following perhaps the potential to follow this figure into the lake is to follow into death. Yeah, I mean, look, it certainly has those feelings running through it. I think a song like that, I don't mean to be unhelpful, but I haven't really worked out what that song has going on in it yet, except that it's definitely something. But in time, they sort of reveal themselves, especially in a live situation. It happens a lot.

It also happens a lot that I think I know what this song is about, but it actually ends up being about something else. Or a good song. A good song has the capacity to be able to find its theme as time goes on. I love the phrase, never mind, never mind as a kind of meditation or a mantra, you know? Yeah, you know, I mean, just on an absolute prosaic level, you know, swim in a lake. I swim in a lake every morning. And that's for sure has something to do with how much water and stuff is running through this record. I mean, every song is really,

it's raining. It's a new thing for me to find myself inside nature. I was a country boy to grow up with. Maybe it's a return to that in some kind of way. But I was a country boy but became quickly after I was about 12 or something like that, became a city person and loved the city and have lived in cities and I've lived in Berlin and Sao Paulo and these sorts of places outside of nature to some degree and swimming, cold water swimming, swimming in the lake, swimming through winter, these sort of things have connected me up to a feeling of nature and I think that there's more of that on this record than there would normally be. When you say, I don't know what the song is about yet.

Only over time and over performance will I come to a place where I really understand it. Tell me about the process working with the band. How do different meanings come out in these songs, and particularly on this album as you returned to work with the bad seeds? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't dare to sort of impose the meaning. on a set of lyrics, but by which

I mean even, look, just even putting a meaning to a song is a way of sort of shutting it down and I try not to do that. But one thing that totally affects the meaning of the lyric is the band.

And once the band is playing underneath it, the whole song changes its intent. I would think. You know, they do amazing things and music, the music deeply affects the lyric. There was a time after your son Arthur died and you were working with the bad seeds where you were unable to connect with the bands.

You made records, but it wasn't working, that sort of band dynamic wasn't working for you. and you actually changed your approach to recording. You made some music that was primarily or only with your partner, Warren Ellis, your compositional partner. You really reconfigured what... My compositional partner. I actually have a wife.

Let's call him your prime artistic collaborator. Thank you. Your dude. My dude. Your dude, Warren Ellis. But you change things around. But I don't want to call this record a return because I don't, I hate that idea because you always carry yourself with yourself wherever you go.

You never return to exactly the same place. I don't like that word return on a different level. We can get to the bad season. Tell me why you don't like the word. I don't like that. Well, this is sort of connected to the idea of acceptance, let's say, which is supposed to be the place that we're supposed to arrive at after we've experienced deep loss or something like that. Eventually we get over things and arrive at a place of acceptance as if we're returning back

to the old self. And it's exactly, as you say, you carry yourself with you and nothing returns to the old self. But anyway, me and Warren wrote skeleton tree essentially three records ago. And we recorded it just before my son Arthur died. And rather willfully, stupidly, I'm not sure why I decided that it was okay to go into the studio and finish the record months after that event when I was just not equipped in any way emotionally to do that. Some go on, some stay behind, some never spinning, and the record itself seemed to speak so deeply and into that moment that none of the band could find a way into the record like if we were going to put drums on it or whatever the band would bring to it it just felt too raw a thing to be able to find their voices on it or whatever the band would bring to it. It just felt too raw a thing to be able to find their voices on it.

So they didn't really play much on that record. Then the next record we made, which was a double album called Ghostine, me and me and Warren went into a studio in Malibu and recorded that. And that record was deeply woven around the absence of Arthur. And when we brought the bad seeds into play on it, the record was so fragile that no one knew how to, how to do anything on it either. So that's essentially it, I mean, it has a little bit of the bad seeds on it,

but essentially it doesn't have drums, there's very little bass, no guitar. So the bad seeds didn't really get an opportunity to play on that record. Then COVID happened, and me and Warren did a record on our own together at the very end of COVID, which didn't have the bad seeds on it. So it's been quite a few records since the bad. seeds were able to sort of flex their muscles and do what a band of their extraordinary caliber can do. And when I decided to make another record, the first thing that went through my mind was just this record has the bad seeds back on it. I wanted that just for the health

of the band. And it was a wonderful thing because even though it's not a rock record and it's not a return to former bad seeds records the bad seeds are off their chain and performing it and doing extraordinary things what I'm trying to say is that if any band leaders are out there and want to keep their band going for a long time you know put the band out to pasture for a few records

and they come back renewed. Did they, though? I mean, I'm curious what transformations each of them went through that they brought into the studio. Well, you know, Thomas Vidler, the drummer, he hadn't been able to play life. He'd been ill, apart from anything, been ill for three years, I think,

even more with quite a serious illness, which he's since recovered from. But, you know, he was just extraordinary. to watch him behind a drum kit again. He was so happy to be there and so energized. And I think Jim Sclavunis, who plays percussion and sometimes drums and various things with us,

he came in with just full of ideas for this record. It was really very inspiring to see. So everyone came back with a sort of beautiful, desperation. Well, you say it's not a rock record, and I mean, it isn't Abattoir Blues, but it has connections certainly to Lyra of Orpheus, which was the second half of that record. I actually wanted to ask you, how do you think of the Bad Seeds as a band, given that the members have changed so many times over the years? What's the continuity for you? I think from a songwriting perspective,

there's a deep divide, which happens, I think, around Boateman's where a series of sort of, I don't know how to put this really, but things happened in my life, mostly just a basic, pretty ordinary kind of bust up, which at the time felt Shakespearean, forced me, I think, or pushed me to write lyrics that were personal. I just couldn't stop myself. were banked in black hair And in my bed, my lover Her hair was midnight black

And all her mystery Dwelled within her black hair And her black hair framed A happy heart-shaped face And heavy hooded eyes And before that my songs had been Narrative songs Songs that were essentially stories

With a third person Protagonist they weren't personal in that respect even though they were personal I always sort of hid behind a character and I think it began a kind of writing that continues to this day and perhaps becomes more acute

in this respect of writing about what is around me what I see around me which are essentially ordinary things even mundane things and sort of inflating them into epic narratives Right.

And so that is a dividing line between third-person narratives and deeply personal songs. So as a songwriter, there's a divide there. As a band, there's certainly a huge shift when Mick Harvey, I think, left the band. Mick Harvey was the primary musical sort of director of the Bad Seeds up into that point.

I was the songwriter But you know The way in which it would work really is I would walk in to the studio And sit at the piano with the band around me And play the songs The band would listen to them and walk off And do their thing right

And much of that Was under Mick Harvey's very clever Very musical Watchful Eye then he left and he did two things he took that aspect of himself away and he also took his guitar away or his rhythm guitar away which I personally was pleased that that particular instrument

stopped dominating the sound it's very difficult to do other sorts of music when the primary instrument is a rhythm guitar chugging along as you can't get away from things just being like rock records And so that allowed us to move away from making more, making, I mean, I don't think the bad seeds are conventional records in any way, but they are essentially rock records up into that point. And our music changed. Well, on Wild God, I feel there is like a rock through line on these songs in that they produce a kind of catharsis. and I was thinking about catharsis, not in the ancient Greek sense, but in the rock and roll sense. There are these clattering, clanging moments on some of these songs, whether it is at the end of

the song conversion itself or wild God or joy, these moments. Most of them actually. I was thinking of these moments of catharsis as kind of little conversions and how a rock fan, that's one reason we love to see this music live but also to listen to the albums because they bring that experience and I wondered about the clatter on this record and how that happened. You mean the clatter, you mean the builds and the explosions, the explosions, yes. And part of, I guess, what the bad seats do is we're capable of doing, playing extremely aggressive, violent music and then doing something that's extremely vulnerable and intimate

immediately afterwards. We're not afraid to do that. But some of these songs are put together in the studio as like Wild God is two songs. Essentially, we've just edited together. Oh, interesting. So it's a typical long sort of narrative style Nick Cave song. And then there's just this cool sort of vocal line that we've just built a massive thing on top of and chopped it on to the bring your spirit down bit. Chopped it onto that and it's like, wow, that works really well. I never would have thought that. And then singing new lyrics across it to join it all together.

Wow. Interesting. Interesting. And even, I mean, you know, I mean conversions like that too. but it is a kind of formless excursion into something weird and strange that bursts into something quite opposite. It sets a mysterious scene in a really compelling way. It's where it takes you is so interesting, like where even am I,

but then the immediacy of that moment of conversion. and I love that you're watching, it seems, it's someone watching someone else be transformed, being transformed themselves. And what I love particularly is the way you're, you say, you're beautiful, stop, your beautiful, stop, the tension between the desire, the need to transform and the fear almost. Yeah, it's pretty brilliant that song. Good job, Nick Cave. I know.

What's that? Oh, okay, that's good. just killed it on that one. Well, it was funny because the buildup bit with the gospel choir, they were doing their thing, which was a sort of classic gospel moment, right? Yeah. And Warren, and I'm in the studio, there's, I don't know, 20 singers or something in the, it's doing that stuff.

And Warren's like, get in there and sort of fuck them up type of thing. And I'm like, all right. So I kind of went in and ad lib with them. And we did, I think, two takes. And so these people are kind of brilliant. So I can just scream out anything. And they'll answer it in rhythm together. You know, they're just extraordinary musicians.

And so I was just able to go in there and ad lib stuff over the top. You're beautiful. You're beautiful. All of that sort of stuff. So what was going on in that? in that final build is entirely improvised and lyrically as well. So it was just this, it was, I know how to say it, but it was, what it sounds like is what it is, which is a sort of transported moment for us all.

As an outside observer, it seems at different times in the Bad Seas, you've had different sort of primary partners. You spoke about McCarvey and the kind of sense of order and authority he brought to his role. I mean, obviously, Blix-a-bargild, anyone who loves that period of the bad seeds, it's the chaos agent quality, although I know from what you've said about him in the past, he actually was a pretty rigid person in some ways to work with, but they're at least live. there was a chaos agent quality to him. And now with Warren, it feels very much like he is your spirit guide, I guess. You two connect on this intuitive level that is unusual, I think.

I think that there's something that goes on between me and Warren. I think we have a sort of truthful relationship about things that's quite unusual in that respect. It's not competitive. and it's clearly when we work together it's for the common good of us both and we really understand that so it's quite different I would say than the relationship I had to say with Mick, Harvey

or Blixer for that matter even though they were deeply creative relationships they were with Mick and Blixer primarily interpretive relationships. I would come and they would they would interpret. And I'm amazing. With Warren, it's much more from a bass creative, creatively. He's writing the songs as well. Yeah. It was quite that I found a writing partner. It was extraordinarily fortunate for me. Yeah. In that it's helped me. write songs in a completely different way.

I think Warren has much more faith in my abilities than I do. He's often like, go on. Really? Yeah, in the sense that this happens quite a lot. Go on, sing on it. Go and sing on it. And I'm like, I don't want to do that. No, no, I don't want to do that.

Go on. All right. He has a good sense of looking beyond, the act at the final thing. I love that you've said that your primary artistic identity is as a collaborator. I think there's a resistance especially toward artists who record under their own names primarily. What I'm saying is you're not the Rolling Stones. It was always Nick.

I mean, after the birthday party, it was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but also the, you know, kind of fetishization of stars. that this person has to be this lone genius. Yeah. But you've said that throughout your entire career, collaboration has been your forte. Well, first of all, it wasn't my idea for it to be Nick Cave and the something. I think we had like the bad scenes or something like that.

And Mick said, you should put your name first. It was his suggestion in that respect because I think he just thought that it would distinguish us in some kind of way. I don't know. So just my hands up there. But second of all, if there's anything that I'm proud of with the bad seasons that I've had,

in some cases, extremely long enduring collaborations with artists. And the only people that would criticize me about like needing someone else or feeding off someone else or whatever the criticism might be are those people who just don't know anything about making music. or don't know anything about making art, I would say. For me, the collaborative experience personally, not everyone needs this, is what it's all about. And thank God. I mean, I write lyrics on my own.

I don't collaborate when I write lyrics. They are entirely on my own. There's no one that can help out in this respect except maybe Stevie Smith or something like that when I get completely lost in the whole process and frustrated, I can sit down and read Stevie Smith's beautiful poetry or someone else, and I'm sort of filled with a kind of inspiration and that sort of thing.

But essentially, I'm on my own and with my own self and my own feelings of limitation. It's quite a dark time to write lyric. but I take these lyrics and the music into a collaborative experience and it's just incredibly it's fun something I'm dying to do I'm dying to get into the studio and take these words into the studio and do something with it with the band it's it's pure joy to to make music with the bad seeds you know I hear other bands talk about the misery of being in the studio and how how different

difficult was and we almost died making this record and I think god you know perhaps you should do something else you know I mean life is short to me making music and performing music with the band is just because you see you see your little ideas explode in in front of your eyes into something truly beautiful and it's amazing We were talking before a little bit about the use of the choir, and you sang in choirs as a child. The choir is a very important presence. Can you tell us a little bit specifically about the choir that you used? I mean, for me, one thing that happens with the choir is the kind of, you talk about these explosions or these moments of transformation.

It's like the self expands in those moments, and you can't really. tell where the center is and that's the power of it. Yeah. You know. This had something to do with, I think, Dave Friedman, who mixed the record. So we recorded it ourselves as we normally do, but it was a complex record and I didn't want to mix it myself or I didn't want me and Warren to mix it. I wanted someone to come from outside and add something to it. And Dave Friedman had this extraordinary way of working where we went up to Buffalo to record with him. And it's just in this little studio in the woods with no staff or anything like that. And we would just turn up there at breakfast. And he would ask us to describe what the song was about in words. So this song's called Wild God. And it's like

got a narrative story and then it explodes at the end or something like that. And he goes, okay, thank you. And then he goes into the studio and locks the door. And me and Warren, aren't invited into the process, which we were initially like, hang on, did he just go into the studio? And he said, I'll be out at around about three o'clock with something for you to listen to. He comes out at three o'clock, and he mixed the record in a way that we wouldn't, we would not have done at all. And we listened to it. We're like, shocked about it. It was so compressed, sort of distorted and all our beautiful strings are sort of just crushed into all the sense. and the choirs are all sort of crushed.

We listened to it again, and by the third time, we just loved this sound. It just leapt out at you. Yeah. You know, it just sonically, that sort of elegance of the bad seeds that you were talking about before, where we,

has been taken away to a sort of pure emotional, it's pure emotion. Is there a song in which, which the mix really changed completely. A song of the lake is a good example too, which is just this weird sound that's kind of, it was much more of a, it had a much more of an elegant build to that song.

Now it's just this strange thing that kind of jumps out of the speakers as soon as you put it on. This is unlocking something about the record for me because it does have that drive that I, loved as a young person about the bad seeds. The Gainsbourg aspect is still there, but it, with that drive, and I didn't realize it was in the mix. Yeah, I think it's in the mix.

That's really fascinating. I mean, it's in the songs, too, but it's, it's, um, and, you know, not everybody in the band like the mixes. Most of us did. Not everybody did. I won't go into, into details, but I rang Dave about it. look, we've got this problem in the band. You know, some people think this is like they're being orally mulled by the,

and he goes, really? And I said, yeah, that you've trade, we've sort of traded in the elegance and the musicality for pure emotion. And he's just like, I'd trade that stuff in for pure emotion any day. Wow. Right on. And we're like, oh, fair enough. I did want to ask you about the song Joy.

I'm fascinated with what you do there, the turn in that song. Starting with the classic blues text, basically, Death Letter, Sun House, one of the great and fundamental blues songs. The scenario in that song is despair. It's the devastation of losing someone, but it's kind of, of this existential devastation. But you, this song transforms. Yeah, so it is, those first four lines are taken from that song.

I woke up this morning, the blues all around my head, woke up this morning, thought someone in my family was dead. And I heard that, I thought, I thought that was extraordinary way to start a song. And so I just wrote that down because, It just felt so raw. I felt like someone in my family was dead. I woke up this morning with a blues all around my head. I felt like someone in my family was dead.

So I just wrote that and then continued to write the song and there's a sort of apparition. And then it moves from, it slowly moves from a blues song into something that's much more pastoral and not pastoral, something more, I don't know, I don't know what it really is. It goes from a kind of, let's say,

low blues feel to a kind of high religious drama. It's very hard for me to say, what that is. I'm dying to say the word gospel, but I think that's just me being pedantic and saying, oh, the blues historically became gospel. But to me, it's much more about high, it moves into a kind of high poetry. This is where you're talking about the Anglican choir versus the gospel choir. And maybe that's the shift that's so fascinating because we would expect the gospel redemption from a song that started as a blues, but you take it to a different place. Yeah, it, it becomes,

you know we we gaze upon the stars and and all of this sort of stuff and bright bright triumphant metaphors of love and all of this high language yeah it goes from low language I mean that with the deepest respect yeah right to to kind of high poetry um incrementally and and it's broken with this you know we've all had too much sorrow now as the time for joy really pleased with that. You also invoke a poet I love,

St. John of the Cross, in the song Long Dark Night. You brought me back to my old volume of the collected works and I was reading it again and what is fascinating is that you actually interpolate some of the language

of the poem, the image of the saint and getting entangled in God's hair. The hair. It's just and I think he cuts him with his hand, you know, cuts his neck with his hand. The story of St. John of the Cross is one of grace coming at a time of unimaginable deprivation.

Yes. The story of, as we know it, of a man who was living in the room the size of a closet and wrote these timeless poems in those circumstances. And I was curious if the story resonates for you just because you have always been interested in these. In that way, although your relationship to extremes has changed, it seems you remain interested in how humans emerge from the most trying circumstances. Yeah, I mean, it is a very beautiful story. you know it reminds me too as you're saying that about the story of pinocchio and in the story of pinocchio which is which really is one of my favorite books geppetto the father who made the puppet

who wants to become a little boy goes on this epic journey to find the puppet and in the process gets swallowed by a whale a dogfish three miles long or something like that. And he spends some time in the belly of this dogfish in the dark. And it's very much that scenario that you're talking about with St. John of the Cross. And it is the little boy that enters the belly of the whale and saves the father. And this idea of, it's a conversion idea again to some degree. But being saved by some sort of spiritual.

reckoning from a dark place resonates very much with me person. I was long inside a dream. I could not get loose. I'll tell you it is to tell a dream when dreaming is all you ever do. Things were not so good that I can't make a light of it. My poor soul it was having a dark night of it. It was a long night.

And it resonates in terms of love and partnership as well as these more explicitly religious stories. There are a couple songs on here where that happens. I imagine final rescue attempt is for Susie. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That just once again relates a particular moment where I wasn't in a particularly good place. and she left me. And eight months later, she decides she'd made a terrible mistake

and sort of rides her bicycle around to my house where I was even in a worst state and says, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm, she says, I'm here. And that's the final rescue attempt. So it's quite literal, actually. It is a little. This is a story you relate in your wonderful. book with Sean O'Hagan, Faith Hope and Carnage, made into a song.

I wonder if, I wonder if telling those stories, having that conversation you had with him, with your friend, the writer, influenced your songwriting on this album, and that those stories were bubbling in your mind. Yeah, maybe. Maybe they're, yeah, maybe that book changed everything for me. It was a strange thing to happen to think, God forbid, that I could sit down and do an interview with somebody. And it actually has some. It actually, you know, it helps matters, right?

And I think through those long conversations that made up that book, I learned how to speak about things and learned the transcendent nature. of conversation even, that meaning you can, conversation is another one of these things where you can start at one place and finish a conversation and if you're alert to what's going on, have your mind changed about things? Yeah. And difficult conversations, which I would say that book is one long difficult conversation for many different reasons, actually.

What was transformative for me, and it over. opened up the way I do interviews now completely. I mean, we wouldn't be talking in this way, to some degree, if it wasn't that this book gave journalists a permission to talk to me about other things. I'm very grateful. I'm very grateful to him and to you for that. It's interesting to think about how Faith Hope and Carnage the book might have flowed into this record. I love this idea that the willingness to speak the unspeakable that it carried into this project, which is all about people reaching a moment where they can speak the unspeakable,

all about these moments in life when language sort of, it doesn't fit, and yet you find language in these songs. It's very powerful. Yeah, that is poetry. That is the thing that poetry can do, I think. Yeah. If it's good, at least the poetry, it doesn't sort of diminish. It doesn't need to diminish the depth of feeling that you have about something.

It can, in fact, sort of make sense of it. And I think music can do that too, some music. I think we have these feelings. These things happen to us. And there's no real, true, effective way to articulate a lot of this stuff. But there are songs and poetry and paintings and art that can do it for us. That's NPR Music's Anne Powers talking with Nick Cave about his new album with the Bad Seeds called Wild God. Our audio producer for this episode was Joaquin Kotler.

Our editor is Jacob Gantz. I'm Robin Hilton for NPR Music. It's All Songs Considered.