'If I have to define my music in any way,' Nick Cave says, 'it's religious music.' His new album is a gallery of encounters with spiritual, possibly divine figures, not all of whom are benevolent.
"If I have to define my music in any way," Nick Cave says,"it's religious music." His new album is a gallery of encounters with spiritual, possibly divine figures, not all of whom are benevolent.The rock icon on why true art is always a struggle, why his music has always been religious and why his new album required the full power of The Bad Seeds.
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 current ideas about things, it’s lost its essential weirdness and mystery. And that's the stuff that I particularly attracted to with Christianity: It's weird.
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, right?Is there a need to separate out Greek, Roman, Celtic mythologies, you know, from other narratives? 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.
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. At what point did you claim that for yourself? Just on an absolute prosaic level, you know, I swim in a lake every morning. And that for sure has something to do with how much water and stuff is running through this record. And swimming, cold water swimming, swimming in the lakes, 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 on this record than there would normally be.
Then COVID happened, and me and Warren did a record on our own together. 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.
Part of, I guess, what The Bad Seeds do is playing extremely aggressive, violent music and then doing something that's extremely vulnerable and intimate immediately afterwards. We're not afraid to do that. I mean, “Conversion” is a kind of formless excursion into something weird and strange that bursts into something quite opposite. So these are movements from one thing to another, but we weren't attempting to do that. They just sort of turned out that way.
If there's anything that I'm proud of with The Bad Seeds it’s that I've had, in some cases, extremely long, enduring collaborations with artists. And the only people that would criticize me about 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 is what it's all about.
You know, this had something to do with, I think, Dave Fridmann, who mixed the record. We recorded it ourselves as we normally do, but it was a complex record and I wanted someone to come from outside and add something to it. Dave Fridmann had this extraordinary way of working where we went up to Buffalo 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.
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