Nick Cave's Sacred and Profane

Reading the Bad Seed

I was 15 the first time I ever read anything by Nick Cave. I was sitting shotgun in an older friend’s Honda Civic while he played the Massive Attack album he’d just purchased. I was feeling fidgety, so I opened up the case to look at the booklet that came with the used copy of Henry's Dream I’d bought for eight dollars and read Cave’s lyrics before ever hearing the music that accompanied the words. That’s one of those experiences I worry we’ve lost in the digital age, the ability to actually read along to the music, to know what the singer is singing, and to experience songwriting as actual writing.

Since then, I’ve paid close attention to not just every word Cave has written down as song lyrics, fiction, or his advice column, but anything that I heard he was influenced by or smacked of his sensibility. I’m not ashamed to say I got to Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy because I read somewhere he was a fan of those writers. There are a few other people who are primarily known as songwriters who I think truly understand how to make music a literary experience (Warren Zevon, Leonard Cohen, and I think Lana Del Rey has earned herself a spot among the living contemporaries in this category), but besides Lou Reed, Cave is the one I find myself constantly going back to for inspiration.

The difference between Cave and any of his contemporaries is that he is constantly writing, songs and everything else. And besides maybe Leonard Cohen, he’s one of the only people known primarily as a musician who I’d tell people to read to better understand and appreciate them. If they ask me where to start, I usually tell them a point that surprised them: his 1998 introduction to the Gospel of Mark. Interestingly, I discovered Barry Hannah, another writer I now love due to his proximity to Cave. I read the intro Hannah wrote for the U.S. edition of the same part of the Bible and decided to check him out when I was 21 or so and I haven’t looked back since.

But Cave is more than just a cipher for me to discover other artists. He has published two novels, both of which I stand by as absolute classics deserving of discovery by people who enjoy fiction, and not just fans of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I read his first one, And the Ass Saw the Angel, before I’d actually engaged with the sort of literature that influenced it, so O’Connor’s Wise Blood or anything by William Faulkner appealed to me because I recognized the kinship with Cave. Years later, during a reread, I came to understand the Australian-born Cave’s Southern Gothic was more than just a pastiche of his forbearers, but the evolution of it. He wasn’t trying to copy American authors he loved with all his backwoods darkness, Old Testament inhumanity, and dialect from the South; he was putting his own spin on it and adding something to the canon using his unique perspective and views. As for his 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, I couldn’t help but notice a massive leap for his second novel. It was as if Philip Roth was a dirtbag from seaside England, mixing in a little Irvine Welsh for good measure. I was pretty taken by it the first time I read it.

All this is to say that next week will see the release of another book with Cave’s name on it, except the paperback edition of Faith, Hope, and Carnage isn’t fiction. I picked up the hardcover when it came out next year, curious to see what the collection of conversations with Irish journalist Seán O'Hagan would offer, not really sure if a book comprised entirely of interviews done over 40 hours would hold my attention. To my surprise, Cave’s thoughts and insights ended up inspiring me almost like nothing else I’ve read in the last few years. Cave opens up and talks about everything from art to his relationship with religion in an extremely candid way that frankly took me by surprise. But it was his thoughts on death and mourning, specifically over the death of his 15-year-old son Arthur, that moved me. I wasn’t mourning anybody specific at the time, but when I read it, I think we were all in mourning whether admitted it or not. I suppose the same goes for now, as we try and make it out of the last few years of a pandemic. But there is one specific part that stuck with me, in a paragraph he pretty much went full Didion when talking about the sort of energy that went through him after his son died.

I was genuinely surprised by how susceptible I became to a kind of magical thinking. How readily I dispensed with that wholly rational part of my mind and how comforting it was to do so.

I’ve been reading Nick Cave, and listening to his music for closing in on 30 years now. And something that I became very interested in somewhere in the middle of that was how he continued. Not just living—through addiction, loss, and the toll being a musician takes on a person—but creating at such an astonishing clip, and always surprising me with what he does next, whether it’s a Bad Seeds album, a novel, or the score for a film with his bandmember and frequent collaborator, Warren Ellis. Cave is 65, and when something new with his name is released into the world, I drop everything and experience it. I’m not a person who is prone to super fandom, and I’d feel especially silly saying something like that when it comes to Cave. I don’t have a little shrine to Nick Cave in my apartment and I don’t have any Cave memorabilia. What I do have is an almost anthropological fascination with how he works, where he finds inspiration, and how he has done nothing that seems out-of-step with who he is as a person and artist, but he’s also never rested on any one style or idea.

And besides Faith, Hope, and Carnage, the one thing I’ve read of his that helps me understand how he does what he does and continues to do is a 1996 letter he wrote to MTV asking the network to withdraw the nomination for his band’s Murder Ballads album from its award show.

My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature.

I have a difficult time hearing anybody say the word “muse” and not rolling my eyes. Cave has also said that he isn’t all that comfortable with the term, either. But discomfort doesn’t mean disbelief. If the idea of a muse does hold water, then the belief is that you need to be open to the inspiration it provides. And in the same Red Hand File where Cave says he doesn’t love the term because, “I think the problem with the word is that traditionally ‘muse’ feels female and takes a secondary position, as the source of inspiration for the male artist — a kind of sanctifying of a subordinate role,” he also adds that his wife, the designer Susie Cave is, “without a doubt, my point of influence and I spend most of my creative life journeying back and forth along the axis of her wonderfulness.”