Jim Burlingame's Top 10 Favorite Nick Cave Songs

Jim Burlingame’s Top 10 Favorite Nick Cave Songs

(In no order of preference)

Number One: “O Children”

Last night, when I was reading more of Nina Simone’s Gum, the nonfiction book about exactly that by Warren Ellis, long time violinist for the Bad Seeds and co-composer of songs and film scores with Nick Cave, I happened upon his mentioning as an aside why he lives in Paris (unsurprisingly, it’s because he has a French wife, plus two sons), and that made me remember Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, the left field double album Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds put out in 2004 (after the 2003 dud Nocturama, which followed the 2001 masterpiece No More Shall We Part), and it clicked that Warren Ellis maybe was able to just walk or bike home after recording sessions for this, as it came back to me last night — and Wikipedia just confirmed — that this album was put together in a Paris recording studio, however the most unexpected element (barring this being the first NCATBS album to not feature Blixa Bargeld’s participation) was the inclusion of a gospel backing choir not from Paris, but rather London, across the Channel, from the city where Nick and Warren saw Nina Simone play her last UK show in 1999, at the end of which the latter crawled up onto the stage and reverentially stole the gum she’d taken from her mouth and placed on a towel on top of her piano.

Even though it unfortunately highlights Nick Cave’s occasional Dr. Seuss-like lyric-writing style (“We have the answer to all your fears/It’s short, it’s simple, it’s crystal clear/It’s round about, it’s somewhere here”), “O Children” remains one of my favorite of the 17 tracks on that double album, for many reasons, but primarily because, like that long sentence above and like the reticulating chronicle in Warren Ellis’s book, it draws you in on a long journey, one which begins with plodding instrumentation, then come Nick Cave’s firmer and firmer piano flourishes, followed by that choir’s “ooOOoo”s and increasing, contrapuntal sung lines, which Cave’s vocals eventually line up with by the end. It’s a rich gift, this song, as are any of the hundreds this ex-pat Aussie in Brighton, UK, has written. I wouldn’t necessarily crawl up onto stage after one of his shows to claim as a talisman one of my own artistic idol’s left behind personal items, but I don’t need to, do I, when his music itself is magic enough to endow me with mysterious, lasting power.

Number Two: “I Let Love In”

One of the biggest mysteries of my already long life is why LIVE 105, the San Francisco Modern Rock radio station that raised me like the doctor director Francois Truffaut played raising the titular Wild Child in his 1970 film, didn’t play any Nick Cave songs, despite presenting a smorgasbord of overlapping non-pop genres across the airwaves, whose examples ranged from New Order and Depeche Mode to The Replacements and R.E.M. to Enya and Tanita Tikaram to Concrete Blonde and Shriekback. Nick Cave’s music would have fit into those playlists like Keyser Soze limping into the Usual Suspects line-up.

But, no: the first I heard of his music wasn’t even one of his album tracks, much less the hits he’d been playing on multiple continents for the past decade. My high school friend Noa, knowing my favorite band was James, lent me a cassette of the Leonard Cohen tribute compilation I’m Your Fan, because that Manchester band had a great cover of “So Long, Marianne” on it. I really dug some of the other covers on there too. But not so much the loud version of “Tower of Song” by this band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. That, I think, kept me away from trying out any of his official albums for quite a while.

I was a long time frequenter of Rasputin’s Records on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, though, and a couple years later I got obsessed enough with the poster they had on the wall for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 1994 album Let Love In — featuring the goth singer-songwriter shirtless and looking up out of frame and yet somehow piercing my soul with his magic Rasputin-like eyes — that I gave in and bought it on cassette and took it back to the high up Cal dorm room I was staying in (belonging to the absent friend of my girlfriend I was visiting on break back in the Bay Area from my Washington college), where I put it in this mysterious young woman’s left behind tiny boombox and Immediately was hooked on this guy’s music for life when I heard the opening notes of the first track “Do You Love Me” tear out of the little speakers like pages ripped from a spiral notebook.

I played that cassette over and over there that interesting long, somewhat lonely winter break of late-1996/early-1997. (Along with my Sleater-Kinney Call the Doctor cd). It was the title track, though, with its rolling piano and almost jolly cowboy guitar work juxtaposed with Nick Cave’s moaning lyrics that opened my eyes to the literary treat his songs could be, not just in terms of his phrasings, but also in how he and his backing band created fascinating musical textures to elevate the sentiments of those lyrics to a level that wouldn’t work if you just read them flat on a page. Here was a guy laying down lines about accepting love with a defiant ambivalence I’d never heard before, all the while doing so with a mastery of melody so effective I hummed that song in my head for decades.

Number Three: “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”

After buying that Let Love In cassette in late 1996, I bought a cassette of the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album that had actually been released that year: Murder Ballads. Next, I checked out of the Olympia library 1993’s Live Seeds, introducing myself to many of their earlier songs, including this perennial concert staple: “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry.” This song jostled me from my comfort zone, while simultaneously dovetailing neatly with the kind of literature I was into at the time, reinforcing my inclination not to be like the song’s protagonist in real life, but rather to format my own writing in a similar style.

The style in question in “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” is one of tightly-controlled bombast alternating with an alliteration- and internal rhyme-filled lyricism so masterful it calls to mind the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This should come as no surprise when we reflect on the fact that Cave’s rural Australian upbringing included a librarian mother and an English/mathematics professor father.[1] (The latter of whom died in a car accident when Cave was 19, the impact of which on the inchoate young artist was akin to what Jacques Lacan calls objet petit a, or in laymen’s terms the hole into which we pour so much metaphorical material throughout our lives, for not only does Cave say in his lecture “The Secret Life of the Love Song” – released on cd in 1999 -- that “the loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose,” but we can also see this family of origin processing shown in the on-the-nose name of this song in question, as well as its cathartically roared chorus).[2] The rambling, gritty, down-and-out content of “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”s narrative arc recalled the works by authors I immersed myself in midway through college: Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Charles Bukowski, William Faulkner, and not just those uber-masculine folks either, but also the stream-of-consciousness fiction and nonfiction of Virginia Woolf and the even more experimental prose of Marguerite Young, Djuna Barnes, and Carole Maso and others. As with Cave’s song, they all taught me that it was ok to put down on the page a magnifying glass caliber of details that I’d never seen examples of in the literature classics I’d had to read in high school — elevating the mundane to the profound, and the profane to the well-balanced — as well as a circumlocutious approach that mirrored, I found, the indirect twists and revelations of life itself.

The Oxford Dictionary defines “picaresque” as “relating to an episodic style of fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing hero,” and that’s an approximate gloss on what’s going on in not just “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry,” but also many other Nick Cave songs, from his provocative take on “Stagger Lee” to the journeying invalid in his “Hallelujah” (not the same as the Leonard Cohen song) to even some of his more recent heartbreaking songs, such as “Hollywood.”

As with gospel and the music of popular black artists, such as Nina Simone, whom Cave and his band mates idolized, “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” is built around a call-and-response chorus structure. (Also: Cave himself sang in the Holy Trinity Cathedral choir as a boy). This is an infectious way of drawing listeners in and in effect making them complicit in the mindset and activities depicted in this chaotic, risqué song.

Number Four: “Oh My Lord”

First came the phase, when I was a preteen, of listening to songs on the radio furtively, as if the wonderful secret world that pop music — and then Modern Rock — opened up for me could retract instantaneously if another member of my family said these magical sounds had reached their ears too, stirring up meaning and emotions I believed only I should be privy to. Then, at the end of junior high, came the phase of playing songs on my stereo at party-throwing volume, while either getting up from my bed to rewind the cassette in the stereo across the room to replay a catalyst for my melancholy thoughts (e.g., “Fall on Me” by R.E.M. or The Damned’s cover of “Alone Again, Or”) or else dancing around my room, stomping in proto-skanking moves upon the thin brown-green carpet to multi-textured bangers (e.g., “What You Need” by INXS or “Come Home” by James). Finally, by the first half of 1993, the end of my senior year in high school, I entered the phase called: shout-sing along to music in any room of the house with no concern about who might hear you. This was primarily due to — you guessed it — the singles off of Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten. But that phase lasted years: through my shout-singing inappropriate Jesus and Mary Chain lyrics in my Evergreen dorm room (“I’ve got syphilitic hetro friends in every part of town”), to shout-singing along with Modest Mouse songs in the little yellow house on 9th Avenue that I shared with numerous people over the course of three years, to that phase’s apogee in 2001, which saw me bellowing like Caruso to “Oh My Lord” off Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ eleventh studio album No More Shall We Part. I was living with my future ex-wife in the upstairs half of a duplex on State Street a block from the main Olympia firehouse, and I may as well have been trying to beat the fire trucks’ sirens in a top decibel contest, so committed was I to Paul Revere-ing that song’s meta message of artistic angst all over town.

“The ex-pat Australian Brit is coming! The ex-pat Australian Brit is coming — And he’s brought musical soldiers to tax our ears down to their last pound!”

Here now we have another of Nick Cave’s picaresque songs, following a version of the singer himself leaving the bedroom he shares with his wife and the house they share with their kids to have encounters with strangers out in the world both hilarious and existentially terrifying. (The former: “Now I’m at the hairdresser’s/People watch me as they move past/A guy wearing plastic antlers/Presses his bum against the glass”; and the latter: “Now I’m down on my hands and knees/And it’s so fucking hot!/Someone cries, “What are you looking for?”/I scream, “The plot, the plot!”) As I have seen him do in a couple live performances, Warren Ellis winds this song up to its climax with his violin like a sailor just barely on shore cinching a boat’s painter rope to the dock in the midst of a storm. The way Nick Cave twists his song’s rambling narrative into broad aphoristic strokes at the end — to address not just celebrity culture but also so much more about the unresolvable dilemmas in life we all must face and move past — is a knee to the diaphragm-worthy stroke of genius, compelling us to top a lifetime of singing along to songs.

Number Five: “The Train Song”

Now that we’re reaching the middle, it’s time to address the elephant in the room head-on: Nick Cave is the best living writer of both love songs and sad songs. This time around, I’ll be talking about the latter.

Certainly, if you’re familiar with the 2015 tragedy his family endured, then the painfully sad albums that followed that make a lot of sense. But I’d argue that his prior two decades of recordings include some even sadder songs, simply on the merit of the attention he was able to give to the lyrics and song structures at a time when he wasn’t pulled away from the concentration required of his profession by profound grief and all its attendant other heavy emotions.

The first Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds B-Sides and Rarities 3 CD boxed set, which came out in 2005, was the most expensive item I bought at the old location of Rainy Day Records, on the edge of a Westside strip mall, before that staple Olympia store moved to the heart of downtown, where thankfully it has continued to thrive for many years since. (The second NCATBS B-Sides and Rarities boxed set comes out in a week, in late October 2021, and of course I’ve already got it bought on pre-order direct from Nick Cave’s site). That set of discs became one of my most treasured possessions. The only other large expenditures on artists’ works I can think of that have felt comparably so worth their monetary value — if not more so — are Crosstown, the rare photography collection by street life chronicler Helen Levitt, and Amazons, the hilarious faux-memoir of the first female NHL player that Don Delillo published under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell in 1980.

Similar to Amazons, the songs on B-Sides and Rarities show us both familiar and unfamiliar sides to an artist whose surface level oeuvre has etched distinct expectations into our heads. And like the black-and-white, haunting, slice of life images in Crosstown, here Nick Cave pulls back the curtain to reveal some of his most serious and affecting works, whether his redoubling of the melancholy element in his cover of Neil Young’s “Helpless” or his stripping his own early barnstormer “Deanna” down to a harmonized, acoustic number that suddenly morphs into the 1967 gospel hit “Oh Happy Day.”

But who can explain the process that led to “The Train Song,” recorded during sessions for the 1990 album The Good Son, being relegated to just the b-side for the single “The Ship Song”? All I can think of is that this song was found by Cave and Company to simply be too beautiful to humbly step back into an equitable line-up of eight other tracks. I mean, Yes, of course all the songs that made it onto that album are great! But “The Train Song” towers over them like Half Dome casting its shadow across the Yosemite Valley.

I’ve written plenty about the controlled chaos that builds up in Nick Cave’s loud songs, but he has an equal musical facility for deploying the opposite: an effective use of space and the searing tenderness that can come through in clearly repeated lines. This is evident in his most famous song, “Into My Arms,” off of 1997’s The Boatman’s Call. (Which I’ll skip in this list, even though it was the first dance song at my wedding reception). And these skills are used with sublime results in “The Train Song,” an ode to longing that builds to an orchestral climax that rarely leaves my eyes dry.

Number Six: “Straight to You”

In his brilliant lecture “The Secret Life of the Love Song,” Nick Cave says:

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call “saudade,” an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration, and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world. The love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting up through our wounds.[3]

Thus, it is no surprise that his own songs’ most common subjects are not just love, sadness, God, and trauma, but also the confluence of all of these rivers into musical waterfalls that astound us with their beauty, while obscuring their secrets behind a mist of their own essence. What’s hard to grasp is plainly on display, is what these synthesis songs seem to say, and while there are frankly too many of these masterpieces to choose from, right now, for me in this moment, I’m identifying most with “Straight to You” from the 1992 NCATBS album Henry’s Dream.

Over pleasant, jangly instrumentation that recalls not at all the long arc of aggressive songs Nick Cave had been known for –from 1982’s “Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow)” with The Birthday Party to “John Finn’s Wife” on Henry’s Dream too – so much as a Crowded House song (in fact, the Anton Corbijn-directed video for “Straight to You,” which just shows the band playing on a vaudeville theater stage, with the red curtains opening and closing at key moments, recalls the New Zealand band’s similar video from four years before for “Better Be Home Soon”), this Cave ballad nonetheless contains enough saudade to sink a 10 story cruise ship to the bottom of the Mariana Trench – where, despite the partying that had been happening up on the surface, the authentic experience of true love awaits. Employing his most Leonard Cohen-influenced writing technique, Cave alternates between tight two-line stanzas envisioning the worst with hyperbolic imagery (“Gone are the days of rainbows/And gone are the nights of swinging from the stars/For the sea will swallow up the mountains/And the sky will throw thunderbolts and sparks”) with the title line chorus fleshed out:

And I’ll cry, girl, but I’ll come a-running
Straight to you, for I am captured
Straight to you, for I am captured
One more time

This song is Roy Orbison’s crooning declarations meets Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. It’s the sappy sentimentality that greases the gears of relationships meeting cute down a dark alley with the withdrawn, prickly figure that is true romance. It’s unflappable persistence – like a magnet spinning around and racing to its north pole’s goal – in the face of all the apocalyptic challenges the world may hurl at a couple.

If you’ve risen up after being knocked inarticulate by the unexpected only to be met by the right person again, then this song is for you. If you’ve driven across town in the dark and the rain just to sit under a warm kitchen table light in someone’s presence for an hour, then this song is for you. If you’ve driven 11 hours roundtrip and found yourself first stopping in at someone else’s home to visit with them before making it back to your own to collapse, then this song is for you. “Straight to You,” as all Nick Cave’s love songs do, speaks for us, like a beautiful stitched thread, in between our heartfelt declarations to each other.

Number Seven: “Old Time”

In 2019, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released Ghosteen, the third in an unofficial trilogy of albums (following 2013’s Push the Sky Away and 2016’s Skeleton Tree), united not just by their even more somber than usual subject matter, but also by their progressive drift toward predominantly quieter sets of tracks. On top of that, though, these songs were increasingly less melodic and more of a sort of ambient, blended-together, Brian Eno-type sound experiment. This was all the more striking coming from a band leader known for writing some of the catchiest hooks of the last three decades, from the whip-cracking cadence of “Red Right Hand” to the lullaby-speed metronome of “Into My Arms.” On Ghosteen, Cave and co-producer Warren Ellis even deliberately eliminated many of the percussion tracks Bad Seeds drummer Thomas Wydler had recorded, because, as Cave puts it on his Red Hand Files fan mail response blog, “the drums anchored the songs to the ground and didn’t allow them to float.”[4]

Thus, in early 2021, when Nick Cave dropped a new album, Carnage, that for the first time (barring their joint film score efforts) was labeled as just a collaboration with Warren Ellis, one would be forgiven for assuming that the musical trajectory we’d watched these two flying on together during the Twentyteens would continue here, as expected: on into the golden, nebulous Maxfield Parrish clouds in the middle distance.

But, no, Carnage, even though it is mostly (though not entirely) the work of just this duo, is a return to the sharp, provocative albums we came to expect from the full Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds outfit of days of old. Like the unnamed protagonist in the climax of “John Finn’s Wife” from Henry’s Dream, Cave takes out his bolo knife and sticks it in the neck of the mad man standing in between him and his muse. That obstruction could be seen as the literally too-close-to-home trauma that mired Cave down, locked out of his usual wheelhouse of meticulous songwriting skills. But that’s not quite right either, because one of Carnage’s strongest features is its fearless, jazz-like freedom within the musical medium.

It’s as if, by resting within the thick chrysalis of those previous three studio albums, Nick Cave was able to emerge onto – yes – the same damn branch he’d always been happy to call home, only now with wings patterned with a predator’s eyes to help him rise up – with vulnerability and defiance – in any direction his whims should take him, though never far from that solid foundation.

No song on Carnage epitomizes this throbbing contradiction so much as its second track, “Old Time,” which in its title and lyrics literally harkens back to a through line in the artist’s oeuvre that draws up the past like a rope from a well, while exuding the confidence and playfulness of footsteps from the future knocking over that bucket and leaving tracks through the spilled water that point toward a whole other album to come.

For someone who has lived in Australia, Germany, Brazil, and England[5], Nick Cave’s music has always primarily evoked the mythology of a country far from those: America. Specifically, his songs resurrect and reframe for modern times scenarios and themes that are globally associated with America’s hard-scrabble past. The easiest artistic shorthand for talking about the fact that in the USA the good life always seems to be waiting somewhere else has historically been to build a story around traveling on a road. Thus, the most famous John Steinbeck book, The Grapes of Wrath, is about a down-and-out family doing just that. And thus, two of the most well-known American novels of the last 70 years are literally called On the Road and The Road.

It’s no surprise then that, when we flip through the Nick Cave songbook, we find many titles and lyrics built around this theme. Here are just the examples that quickly came to my mind:

·       “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” (“And I went on down that road…”)

·       “The Loom of the Land” (“It was the dirty end of winter/Along the loom of the land/When I walked with sweet Sally/Hand upon hand”)

·       “Stagger Lee” (“His woman threw him out in the ice and snow/And told him, ‘Never ever come back no more’/Stagger Lee/So he walked through the rain and he walked through the mud…”)

·       “Oh My Lord” (“I thought I’d take a walk today…”)

·       “Hallelujah” (“On the first day of May I took to the road..”)

·       “We Came Along This Road”

·       “Darker by the Day” (“And so with that, I thought I’d take a final walk…”)

·       “Moonland” (“In Moonland, under the stars/Under the snow and I followed this car/And I followed that car, through the sand…”)

·       “Hollywood” (“And I’m nearly all the way to Malibu/Oh babe we’re on the run, we’re on the run, we’re on the run/Halfway down the Pacific coast/I left you sleeping like a ghost in your wounds”)

So now, with “Old Time” on Carnage, we get – I won’t say the apotheosis of this trope, because, who knows, we’re likely to see it turn up again in future songs, in perhaps even more impressive incarnations – the most self-aware and recursive instance of this. It’s there from the beginning:

With black trees and a field of frost
Birds fly low and you and me and the car are lost
We took a wrong turn somewhere
Into the old time
Into the old time, for sure

By the end, after stops on the journey and side-of-the-road sights have been described, Cave sows deliberate confusion about what kind of good life for this couple lies ahead by throwing a spanner in the works with the lines “I’m throwing my bags in the back of the car/Just like the old times/Just like the old times, baby/And I’m not coming back this time,” but then wraps up the song with a return to the chorus we’ve been hearing on and off for more than five minutes: “Like the old times/Like old times/Wherever you are, darling, I’m not that far behind.” It’s as if he’s talking to us about the watershed moment we’re observing on his long journey as a musical icon: he’s not going back to the past – yet just as always, he’ll still follow the path that his muse is on.

Just as the lyrics seem to draw in the air the golden ratio diagram (the three quartered rectangle with an arc drawn to the smaller section, which is then three quartered, and so on), the instrumentation too evokes the sonic image of a blossoming fractal. Over a percussive loop that includes a slight contrapuntal hitch (with credit given here not just to Warren Ellis, but also, ironically, to Thomas Wydler, the only other Bad Seed on this album’s personnel list, though just for one this track), Cave and Ellis sprinkle what sound like the shrieks and groans of a twirling chandelier, with low piano notes lining up with the drum beats just occasionally, like reminders of the flourishes this piano man from down under has long been renowned for, but no longer needs to depend on to earn his bread and butter.

This is late-period Picasso painting a bull on glass with just a half dozen white lines expertly applied.

This song is a gently torqued cousin of “Sinnerman,” the 1962 runaway train masterpiece by Cave and Ellis’s idol Nina Simone. It’s a broken mirror reflection of Thelonious Monk’s 1958 11-minute live version of his towering jazz soundscape “Misterioso.” It evokes modern antecedents, such as “Hong Kong,” the plodding, textured 2005 “D-side” by Gorillaz, and “Study in Blue,” the rock-dub jam by former The Jam front man Paul Weller. “Old Time” isn’t just a palimpsest of Nick Cave’s musical pages laid down upon each other year after year, but also an avowal that all artists contribute to each other’s works in an infinitely enriching exchange.

In his best world-weary voice, on “Old Time” Nick Cave groans:

The trees are black and history
Has dragged us down to our knees
Into a cold time
Everyone’s dreams have died

But of course, this is followed by: “Wherever you’ve gone, darling/I’m not that far behind.” Because this song is an arch wink that belies its literal content. It accomplishes with panache what its singer asks us to mourn out there on the road we’ve long been on with his songs. It keeps all of our dreams alive.

Number Eight: “(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World”

Every project should be a learning experience, and I’ve already learned a lot from writing these mini-essays that I didn’t know before about Nick Cave – but here’s something I’ve just learned about myself: it was not actually the winter of 96/97, when I bought Let Love In on cassette, that I first got into his music. Recently, a friend mentioned watching the five-hour cut of the 1991 Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World, and that brought back the memory of moving off campus with my first college girlfriend in the summer of 1994 and listening over and over to her cd of that film’s soundtrack. It had many great songs – by the likes of U2, Lou Reed, R.E.M., and Depeche Mode – but one of my favorites was “(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

For this soundtrack, Wenders commissioned all these cool musical acts du jour to write the kind of music they might be making in a decade.[6] In some cases, this wasn’t too far off: “Sax and Violins,” the valedictory recording by Talking Heads, sounds akin to the experimental solo stuff David Byrne would dabble in in the 21st Century; and “Death’s Door” by Depeche Mode sounds less like that band’s output than the bluesier recordings its front man has made of late with his side project David Gahan and the Soulsavers. Many of these artists, though, just produced great songs that dovetailed smoothly with their contemporary output, and this was the case with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ contribution. “(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World.”

Its sound fits in snugly between the sweeping, grown-up lullabies of 1990’s The Good Son and the pricklier roadhouse tales of 1992’s Henry’s Dream. From the former, “(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World” gets its orchestral composition, with unobtrusive backing vocals that recall those on The Good Son’s Portuguese opener “Foi Na Cruz.” From the latter, it gets the clear-cut narrative arc tendency that Nick Cave would lean into as the 90s went on (as opposed to the more impressionistic lyrics that characterized his 80s songs, a style which would return again with the trilogy of ethereal 21st Century albums I discussed earlier). Another way of saying this is that his contribution to the Until the End of the World soundtrack is itself a cinematic story, which in fact does point toward his future as an artist ten-plus years down the line.

In 2005, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis began their ongoing side project of film scoring with The Proposition, directed by fellow Australian John Hillcoat. This film was also the first of several screenplays Cave has written to date. Storytelling predates Cave’s dive into music making, as he explained at 2013’s Brisbane BIGSOUND Conference, in reference to this first film script:

I had written long-form before but it is pure story-telling in script writing and that goes back as far as I can remember for me, not just with my father but with myself. I slept in the same bedroom as my sister for many years, until it became indecent to do so and I would tell her stories every night – that is how she would get to sleep. She would say “tell me a story” so I would tell her a story. So that ability, I very much had that from the start and I used to enjoy that at school so actually to write a script – it suddenly felt like I was just making up a big story.[7]

It should come as no surprise then that, in my opinion, in just 4 minutes and 38 seconds on “(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World,” Nick Cave conveys a tighter, more gripping film going experience just through audio than Wenders does through both audio and visuals in the entire 158-minute (or 179- or 300-, depending on which version you’re viewing) film the song was written for.

As in any good three-act screenplay, the long second verse of this song turns on its head a detail casually mentioned in the first verse (“The pencil seller’s dog/Spooked by the explosion…”), reframing not just the story we’re taking in, but also our impression of the narrator – and the urgency of his motivation, which, before the long coda of choruses, is taken to a meta level in the short third verse:

And with the horses prancin’ through the fields
With my knife in my jeans and the rain on the shield
I sang a song for the glory of the beauty of you
Waitin’ for me in your dress of blue

This shifting is anticipated by the reference to the object of desire in the first verse via the second person (“And me, if you can believe this, at the wheel of the car/Closin’ my eyes and actually prayin’/Not to god above, but to you…”), yet, in the third verse, via both this and the third person (“And it was this genius hand that pushed me up the hotel stairs/To say my last goodbye/To her hair white as snow and her pale blue eyes…”). Thus, 20 years before Carnage’s fractal-like song “Old Time,” Nick Cave was anticipating his musical (and, more broadly, artistic) future very well indeed.

Thank you, Nick Cave, thank you, man
I’ll love you till the end of the world
With your dyed hair black as coal and your songs balm for my soul…

Number Nine: “Moonland”

When we say “genre,” we’re talking about not just the sound of music, but a set of values that are embedded within the music about what is cool, what is not cool, what is legit, what is not legit… Now a lot of us who are music fans, we eventually grow out of that, right? We stop thinking about music in such a limited, genre-based way, and we start to expand our consciousness about it. We start to realize that… genres don’t actually define real boundaries of different music, that sounds and ideas bounce around and influence each other between genres…When we get to that stage, we start to realize that genre can be something that separates us from understanding and connecting with music…

That’s a transition that I went through, maybe a lot of you did too. But here’s a question: what if that’s wrong? What if there’s an even bigger, more open-minded, fully galaxy brain way of looking at genre? Because what if our cultural enjoyment of music is in fact inseparable from it? What if “genre” is just a term for the ideas, and values, and community that we use to talk about music? … What if our cultural beliefs about music can shape our feelings about it and, in fact, can shape the music itself, just as much as the invention of a new instrument or a new recording technology. In other words: what if genre is truly an essential part of listening to and enjoying music. What if instead of separating us from it, it actually connects us to it?[8]

– Adam Conover, Intro to “Factually” podcast number 128: “How genres shape music with Kelefa Sanneh,” released October 26, 2021

Between Door, Door, the first album by The Boys Next Door (which became The Birthday Party) released in 1979, and 2021’s Warren Ellis collaboration Carnage, Nick Cave has been putting out music for 42 years that both defies categorization and, in its totality, circumscribes a category all its own. For sure, at times his songs have clearly fallen into the boundaries of punk, hard rock, soft rock, goth, sappy ballads, neo-gospel, ambient, folksong, singer-songwriter, blues, jazz, and more. And certainly, of all those, goth is the genre applied to his music most often. The UK press dubbed him “the Prince of Darkness” soon after he moved The Birthday Party to London in 1980 and that nickname has continued to turn up in media profiles of him over the decades.[9] His wife Susie even started a fashion line called The Vampire’s Wife. (It is named after an unfinished novel of his).[10] As Adam Conover points out above, associating an artist with a certain genre can fit blinders over our ability to see the ways they draw from and contribute to other genres; and yet it also provides us with the satisfaction of being a member of a finite, niche community. To be a fan of Nick Cave, though, doesn’t mean one is most likely a goth – not by a long shot. The group we connoisseurs belong to is united by just one thing: seeing his output as the nameless hub of a wheel, with the spokes coming off it being all the named genres it connects to and the rim past them being the role music plays in all our lives, rolling us and him along.

Because we’re in that conceit too: fans of artists are up in the wagon, setting all such wheels in motion by flicking the reins against the sixteen strong horses of humanity’s compulsion to make and share culture, for without us the contraption would sit as still as a rock in Monument Valley.

I thought of this as I was looking up details about “Moonland,” the song I’d decided to write about next. I had no luck finding any primary source citations, however other fans were out there pointing the rest of us in well-founded directions. On the website songmeanings.com, one person (who goes by the handle the_boatman) does lodge an actual Nick Cave quote on the topic amongst a stream of speculative comments…

Nick Cave (from The Sun March 7, 2008): “‘Moonland’ is about a guy whose woman has criticized him sexually. There might be some men on this planet who have never experienced that. Not many. It’s part of the male experience and it’s devastating. To criticize a man’s sexual prowess can reduce that man to a dribbling wreck.”

For further info, see the Grinderman [the Nick Cave side project] song Decoration Day.[11]

… However, I could not find the article this is from anywhere online, so while it sounds legitimate, I’ll have to treat it as apocryphal until I can be certain otherwise. Then, in contrast to that line of thinking, there is this intriguing contribution by commenter sjindustries:

The start of the song seems to be from Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The character Billy Pilgrim – and Vonnegut himself in World War II – are one of the few survivors of the fire-bombing of Dresden, because they were in a meat locker. When they come up, after two days of burning, the city was destroyed and described desolate and covered in ash, looking like the moon.[12]

It’s hard to argue against this hypothesis when we look at the song’s opening lines (“When I came up from out of the meat-locker/The city was gone”), as well as a few further in (“And everything moves slow, under the stars/Under the ash, through the sand”). For sure, we’ve all gotten used to many buried literary allusions in the songs of this son of an English teacher. In fact, “More News from Nowhere” – one of only two songs on the 2008 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! to have its own Wikipedia page (the other being the title track) – is allegedly named after News from Nowhere, an 1890 utopian novel by William Morris.[13] I say “allegedly,” because, unfortunately, that page has a tsk-tsk at the top saying: “This article needs additional citations for verification.” But really, I should have written “fortunately,” because this slipperiness is exactly what I’m writing about here.

The artists can tell us a lot themselves about the original meanings of their works (and Nick Cave often does in his Red Hand Files responses to fan questions), but ultimately, if that exists at all, it will be insufficient, especially as posterity rolls over them and the amalgamated opinions and analyses of future fans gain dominance over those of the present, with the hard-to-predict applicability of the art in question to their lives in a sense remaking the art anew, over and over, like a turning wheel’s parts being hammered together from above by successive, spelled out stagecoach drivers. We are all a part of this process. This series of song essays, this is part of the momentum that moves our group music appreciation wagon into a new frontier too.

If it seems I’ve leaned a little too heavily into that Old West conceit, it’s only fitting, because that’s a milieu where Nick Cave has set a good number of his songs. In fact, Dig!!! Lazurus Dig!!! includes a song literally called “Albert Goes West.” (My favorite in this sub-genre of the nameless, vast Nick Cave genre is “The Loom of the Land” from Henry’s Dream). The lyrics of “Moonland” also evoke the barren, inhospitable landscape of the stereotypical western U.S. But not so much of cowboy/gunslinger times (since cars are mentioned), so much as an era closer to us now, when another kind of outlaw was on the rise, in reality and in culture: the 1950s serial killer, specifically Charles Starkweather, and more specifically the scene in Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands – about Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate going on the lam to the west after his senseless killings – where Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, depicting those two (but named Kit and Holly), pause their journey in the night when Nat King Cole’s “A Blossom Fell” comes on the radio so they can get out and slow dance to that in the dusty beams of the Cadillac’s headlights. In the middle of “Moonland” we hear:

And the chilly winds blow, under the snow
Under the stars, the whispering deejay
On the radio, the whispering deejay
On the radio, I’m not your favorite lover

Significantly, in the voiceover monologue that opens this scene, Spacek lets us – and him – know that she intends to be done with this lover: “I felt all kinds of things looking at the lights of Cheyenne, but most important, I made up my mind to never again tag around with a hell-bent type, no matter how in love with him I was. Finally, I found the strength to tell Kit this…” This ties us back to that supposed Nick Cave quote in The Sun, saying this song is about a man flailing about after being rejected by his lover.

That theme of fragile masculinity – a frequent one throughout Nick Cave’s oeuvre – makes me think of another association “Moonland” brings to my mind: the ending of Mike Leigh’s powerful 1993 film Naked. The loose instrumentation Cave and crew lay over his speak/singing narrative has a step-and-drag cadence, like an outlaw trying to get away with a leg iron still weighing down one ankle, or like David Thewlis’s misanthropic Johnny shown limping down a London street at dawn at the end of Naked, having been beaten up by strangers the night before in a mirror image of the aggressive/abusive way he’s been shown to treat all those who get close to him even for a few minutes. If there were ever a contest for the most Nick Cave-type character in cinema not created by Nick Cave, Johnny would win hands down.

Yet, these references to Badlands and Naked (and Slaughter House Five and so on) tilt the impression of “Moonland” I mean to convey toward an imbalanced weightiness. The truth is it’s propelled by a glib, light touch. (And the inexplicable way Nick Cave is able to suffuse humor throughout even his most serious songs adds to the mystery of the broad genre over which only he has dominion). Cave’s vocals here contain the hamminess and resignation of late-career Frank Sinatra, cluing us in to the fact that this fictional sung scenario is both a bit of silliness and a vehicle for him and for us to release some very real emotions.

And that’s the purpose of that rim around the wheel, isn’t it, of music overall and in fact all the arts: to unite us and the artist and others in the audience in the act of feeling something, even if we can never agree on the meaning of the catalyst for that.

Just as the narrator of “Moonland” at times hisses, “I’m not your favorite lover,” Dig!!! Lazurus Dig!!! is not one of my favorite Nick Cave albums. However, this track is in my Top 10 for the way it epitomizes Nick Cave’s ability to produce songs in a genre that, at best, might be called: obliquely cast lassos around the heart.

Number Ten: “Good Good Day”

Like all the twins that Adam Driver’s poet/bus driver character keeps seeing over the course of the Jim Jarmusch film Paterson, the longer we examine Nick Cave’s oeuvre the more parallels appear sitting next to each other in the rearview mirror. I will get to “Good Good Day,” the final song in this series of favorites, after examining a couple others, because the route to our destination requires us to take on passengers from stops along the way.

First, I want to point out how easy it is to see many parallels rise up just in one song, as when I contemplate “Darker by the Day” from the end of No More Shall We Part. With its opening line (“And so with that, I thought I’d take a final walk”), it announces it’s firmly planted within that sub-genre I described in essay seven above. When he says of his neighbors, “I could see their frightened faces/Peering at me through the gate,” it echoes the section in “Oh My Lord” that describes his turncoat fans: “They called at me through the fence/They were not making any sense.” In the second verse, the lines “I thought of my friends who had died of exposure/And I remembered other ones who had died from the lack of it” remind me of these from “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”: “Well, I thought about my friend, Michel/How they rolled him in linoleum/And shot him in the neck.” The line “And love followed just behind me, panting at my feet” doesn’t repeat specific language from “I Let Love In,” but it certainly evokes that song’s conceit. Given that frequent “on the road” trope, it’s no wonder that here we get “I passed by your garden,” just as we get “I passed beside the mission house” in “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” and similar observations elsewhere. At the end of the final verse, surprisingly his father makes an appearance: “My father sits slumped in the deepening snow/As I search, in and out, above, about, below.” Yet the setting is familiar, because earlier on this album he gives us a song called “15 Feet of Pure White Snow,” which has searching for someone as its theme. This list is just scratching the surface, of course, for a song two-thirds of the way through a career that has gotten more and more self-referential by the year.

In fact, an increasing theme in Nick Cave’s songs are the meta references to his being a creator of works we, the audience, are taking in. “Messiah Ward” off Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus begins with “I hope you’re sitting comfortably/I saved you the best seat in the house.” Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! has a song literally called “We Call Upon the Author.” The standout track on Push the Sky Away is “Jubilee Street,” a classic crescendo-building fictional narrative, yet later on that album Nick Cave includes another track called “Finishing Jubilee Street” that begins: “I just finished writing Jubilee Street/I lay down on my bed and fell into a deep sleep.” It’s as if, given enough time, this great songwriter was bound to cover so many topics that the only one left was the lived reality he and his listeners share.

The caught-in-a-cul-de-sac aspect of this theme birthed a more fraught corollary one: the existential angst that comes from looking too much at yourself through the multi-faceted lens of your work. To great frightening effect, on “Oh My Lord” Nick Cave encapsulates this identity crisis with this scene:

I grab my telephone, I call my wife at home
She screams, “Leave us alone!”
I say, “Hey, it’s only me!”
The hairdresser with his scissors, he holds up his mirror
I look back and shiver
I can’t even believe what I can see

On the title track to Abattoir Blues, he tills this ground again, but this time with a jauntier thrust of the plow:

I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed
I woke up this morning with a Frappucino in my hand…

I wake with the sparrows and I hurry off to work
My need for validation, babe, gone completely berserk

And therein lies the saving grace that keeps Nick Cave’s hyper self-awareness from turning into off-putting, baroque self-importance: not just the lightness of touch I’ve mentioned above, but also the through line of clues that he is not actually pointing to the boards of the post-modern stage he prances upon to impress us, so much as he is doing so to enthrall the woman he loves.

The earnestness of his efforts is at the heart of what makes his music so affecting and relatable.

This is notable, for me, nowhere better than on “Good Good Day” off his first B-Sides and Rarities boxed set. The paramour is referenced in the third person here, but the earnestness of the message leaps out into real life more vividly than even in, say, the second person address of “Into Your Arms.” This song was a b-side from a single for No More Shall We Part, but it was clearly too peppy to fit in with the dark arc of that album. It might even be the most uplifting, optimistic song Nick Cave has ever written.

This is not to say it doesn’t provide us with a couple parallels to other songs, as we’re used to by now, because, of course, that was the point I began with here. With this stanza…

Hear her feet skipping up the stairs
It’s a good good day today
She is the answer to all of my prayers
It’s a good good day today

…we get a cathartic inversion of the doomed love storyline in “(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World”:

And me, if you can believe this, at the wheel of the car
Closin’ my eyes and actually prayin’
Not to god above, but to you…

And it was this genius hand that pushed me up the hotel stairs
To say my last goodbye

The lines “There can be times/Yeah…/Where all things come together” looks ahead to the title of another b-side: “Everything Must Converge.” (Which likely is an allusion to the Flannery O’Connor short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge”). It also looks back, though, to “Do You Love Me?” and the line “All things move toward their end.” The most remarkable parallel, though, is one that Cave draws attention to himself:

See her breasts how they rise and fall
It’s a good good day today
And she knows that I’ve used that line before
It’s a good good day today

It seems he’s making an allusion to the repeated line “Her breasts rise and fall” in “Hard On for Love” off of 1986’s Your Funeral…My Trial. The rest of the band’s instruments fall silent at the beginning of that stanza, so that just Cave’s staccato repeated piano chord stands out, as if he is saying, “Get ready for this: twins!”

The title character in the film Paterson (who is himself a kind of twin, because he drives his bus around the New Jersey city of Paterson) is constantly shown observing the details of his everyday world – not just the uncanny recurrence of twins, but everything that rises from the mundane to the beautiful and awe-inspiring by dint of his gently forceful gaze, constantly pounding this mettle into future art on the anvil of his turning thoughts. The film is really a love story, though, about the support Paterson and his wife Laura provide each other for their different creative endeavors: he with his writing, she with her cupcakes and music and unique interior decorating projects. We leave the film wishing we could be in a relationship as sweet as that.

And that’s what Nick Cave’s music gives us too: Even at its most raucous and dirty, we know he’s setting an example of how we can gather bits of the world – or even just recycled bits of our own earlier efforts – to build something remarkable, the way a male bowerbird does, to present to our lover in an ongoing act of courtship. “Forever me standing next to her,” as he sings in “Good Good Day,” could be the condensed message of any of his songs.

[1] Hattenstone, Simon; “Old Nick”; The Guardian; February 23, 2008

[2] https://www.nickcave.it/extra.php?IdExtra=43

[3] https://www.nickcave.it/extra.php?IdExtra=43

[4] https://www.theredhandfiles.com/uplifting-jubilant-record/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Cave

[6] https://www.avclub.com/the-until-the-end-of-the-world-soundtrack-promised-a-hi-1798252365

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20130913163308/http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/news/36893/10-things-Nick-Cave-said-at-BIGSOUND-2013

[8] https://www.earwolf.com/episode/how-genres-shape-music-with-kelefa-sanneh/

[9] https://thevinylfactory.com/features/from-bad-seed-to-skeleton-tree-how-nick-cave-grew-in-the-darkness/

[10] https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/susie-cave-the-vampires-wife-vogue-interview

[11] https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858709367/

[12] ibid

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_News_from_Nowhere