“There is a joy and happiness on the other side of grief that is hard to believe in at first,” Nick Cave recently confided, sitting in the guest chair of the Late Show by Stephen Colbert, a television moment of rare depth, worthy of the respect with which the great lord of darkness considers each of his speeches, he for whom an interview is never just an interview.
A song is never just a song for Nick Cave, either, and even less so since tragedy intruded into his life without permission – tragedy, impolite, never asks permission – following the death in 2015 of his son Arthur, who was only 15, and then, in 2022, of his other son, Jethro.
For him, a song is always a safe-conduct to the sacred or, at least, a window that can open onto the part of divinity that lies dormant in each of us, and which we just have to learn to honor (not always an easy task).
In the Gospel according to Nick Cave, we are all mad gods of an equally mad life, picking up here and there bits of joy, despite the constant threat of a long dark night (Long Dark Night).
Wild God18e album of his Bad Seeds, is therefore not the gaga work of a man denying the profoundly cruel nature of existence, but that of a survivor who, despite his intimate experience of this cruelty, refuses to enlist in the already too imposing armies of nihilism.
It takes a lot of courage to title Joy a song that opens with the lines: “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head, I felt like a member of my family had died.” You have to be called Nick Cave.
On less hypotonic music than that of Ghosteen (2019) and Carnage (2021), the most punk of crooners will have taken the salutary decision to give back their full powers to the Bad Seeds, who raise with their powerful combination of elegance and bite the moments of grace of this album of introspection and exultation, generous in gospel flights. The coda of Wild Godin which Cave invites his disciples to a communion of spirits, is already shaping up to be a highlight of his upcoming shows.
And if he seems to be addressing a god with a capital d in the celestial Final Rescue Attempta god thanks to whom nothing hurts anymore, it is less a question here of proselytism than of transcendence. A transcendence that does not belong only to believers, but also to all those who believe in something greater than themselves, like the liberating power of music.
Rock
Wild God
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Play It Again Sam