Nick Cave wrestles with a ‘Wild God’

Is Nick Cave a holy man? After a decade that transformed the Australian-born rock titan from post-punk’s louchest fallen angel into a dignified seeker whose courage and wisdom resounds beyond musical boundaries, many would say yes. Reckoning with great losses, Cave reinvented the disruptive role he’d designed as leader of both The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, offering succor and advice in interviews, writing projects and public appearances as he took his music further and further toward a mystical union that remained tantalizingly out of reach.

Cave himself might cast off the holy appellation, even as he strives to live up to it. He declares his music religious, but maintains a complicated relationship with the entity that gives his latest album its title: Wild God. Struggle is the point for Cave as an artist, as it has been for the seekers who inspire him, from the mystic St. John of the Cross to the “lapsed atheist” poet Stevie Smith. “I would say I’m in the process of conversion,” he told me, explaining that title and the themes that resound on this eighteenth album with his band The Bad Seeds. “Moving in that direction, but far from converted, shall we say.”

What shifts with Wild God, in the wake of more experimental sonic wandering on albums like Ghosteen and Carnage, is the dynamic of the struggle: On this album, which is out August 30, Cave leads his collaborators toward its most dramatic and difficult point, the very moment of opening one’s arms and letting go. Entering the territory of conversion, these songs mark a high point in the Bad Seeds’ long and varied career, remarkable in its range and powers. In them Cave finds a way to integrate the lush melodrama that turned ballads like “Into Your Arms” into signatures with the forcefulness of his rawer, rockier material. He and the band discover a bloody grace that connects the carnal with the numinous. Wild God overflows with stories about transformative encounters — with a creator, but also with lovers, mortality, karma — and its clamor invokes the joy and confusion of such moments. Starting in darkness, it awakens to the disorienting wonder of resurrection.

Its songs also express Cave’s own experiences as a musician. In his early years with the post-punk chaos brigade The Birthday Party, Cave was already looking to the Bible, and particularly the sacrificial story of Jesus, for inspiration; its drama reflected his experience performing, when he felt he became “this creature that I wasn’t offstage.” Decades later, deep into a long career, the 2015 death of his teenage son Arthur led to Cave’s subsequent emergence as a pop-culture grief counselor speaking his own sorrow in music, public conversations and the online forum The Red Hand Files. He has fully embraced his role as a religious artist — a word he insists upon, in part, to “annoy” people — as he experimented with new musical approaches on exploratory, devastating albums like Ghosteen and Carnage. Returning the Bad Seeds to the center of his compositional process, Cave is now emerging from that mourning period without surrendering the intensity and compassion it produced.

When we met at Manhattan’s Greenwich Hotel for an early morning conversation, Cave leaned forward in his deep leather chair, a gold chain adorned with his wife Susie’s name around his neck, eager to talk about Wild God’s inception, the many phases of the Bad Seeds, and his determination to explode the “typical narrative-style Nick Cave song” and make it something recognizable, yet new. “Ah, the sheer grace!” St. John of the Cross said when he encountered his deity. Wild God reenacts that exclamation with a graceful bow and a roar.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation on the All Songs Considered podcast.

Ann Powers: You've been fascinated with the story of Jesus, and talk often about how that story — and the beautiful language of the New Testament — has inspired you. I have a small detail question: I'm very curious about which version of the New Testament you favor.

Nick Cave: I am a King James guy. Only because I'm sort of a traditionalist in a sense. There's actually probably better translations, and more accurate, certainly. I like the King James version because it's possibly inaccurate. And it's very mysterious. And I don't quite understand a lot of it. And attempts to make things more comprehensible, I think, strip something away from the language of Judeo Christian religion 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 current ideas about things, it’s lost its essential weirdness and mystery. And that's the stuff that I [am] particularly attracted to with Christianity: It's weird.

I was raised Catholic, but in Vatican II era, so very modern, you know, and I remember once walking into St Patrick's Cathedral here in New York City and seeing a woman kissing the feet of a statue, and having the feeling I think you're describing, of actually feeling sort of almost uncomfortable, but but also a bit lit up, you know, that you could have that intense feeling of connection with the divine, even through cold marble. 

It's a lovely way to put it. I mean, anyone who thinks that an attempt to connect to religion is a comfortable thing to do hasn't tried. For me it's extremely difficult, and it requires something of me 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. When I go to church in London, I go to a church that is just extreme in its beauty. 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 [that] 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 between, like, the dogma or the rules or the ordering aspects of religion.

So there's that, too. I mean, there's the dogma, which I guess some American religion has up the wazoo. And there's also the sort of slightly embarrassed-ness about the whole thing that is down the other end of the scale, and I find both of these things equally repellent. But there are places that you can take not just your sorrows, but your doubts and your uncertainty about these matters. 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. Although I'm certainly moving in that direction. 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.

That explains a lot about this album for me, actually. 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. I'm fascinated by this “Wild God” who needs believers, who in a sense doesn't exist unless someone is there to call the spirit down.

I guess the idea of the wild god is a suffering god. That it is not some god that stands outside of the world, omnipotent and omniscient, but is a god that is embedded in the world. There's a comic element to this song, too. The guy in this song is essentially an old man 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. And eventually he calls down that essence of belief and the whole song explodes.

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?

Yeah, maybe, yeah.

Is there a need to separate out Greek, Roman, Celtic mythologies, you know, from other narratives? 

There's something about the biblical stories that have a particular resonance with me. I certainly feel that the Christ story has, since I was a young child, had this allure of some sort that other stories haven't had. I don't know how to explain that. It's not that I came from a religious upbringing. 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.

Do you remember how you first encountered the story of Jesus in a way that felt personal to you?

I first encountered it through pictures from a large Bible that my grandmother had, which was sort of stuck in some cupboard somewhere. I found this huge, leather bound 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. I was really taken by that 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 — 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. These stories of sacred encounters [are] enhanced, made possible really, through what music does.

Yeah, I think music is maybe the last truly effective, legitimate opportunity for a transcendent experience we have left to us.

You never feel that about cinema? You never feel that about theater?

It's just different. I do know that the feeling that I get on stage or at other people's concerts where you are pulled into the, into the absolute present. 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 song generators and 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. I try and look at it in every possible way because I don't want to be some sort of jeremiad 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.

I do want to return to how secular music can be a way for people to have an encounter with a divine source or spirit. 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. At what point did you claim that for yourself?

I mean, I use the word religious as well because it annoys people. But also, the idea of religiousness feels to me it has a purpose. I think that [my music] is religious music in that it's intent is a transcendent experience even from the early days. Even though I had no way of articulating it back then, I think that's what I was always trying to do. Or at least I felt that in the process of playing music, something happened to me. I became this creature that I wasn’t offstage.

The first song on the record, “Song of the Lake,” seems to merge a couple of different stories of encounters. At first I thought, “Oh, is this a kind of a Leda and the Swan encounter between this woman and this male figure?” But then it became more like the old men admiring themselves in the water or the feeling that this man seems to be at the end of life and perhaps to follow this figure into the lake is to follow into death. 

I mean, look, it certainly has those feelings running through it. I don't mean to be unhelpful, but I haven't really worked out what that song has going on in it yet. But, in time, they sort of reveal themselves, especially in a live situation. It happens a lot.

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.

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 that process in terms of 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 a meaning on a set of lyrics. 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. Once the band is playing underneath it, the whole song changes its intent. 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 band. You made records, but it wasn't working that that sort of band dynamic wasn't working for you. And you actually changed your approach to recording. You made some music that was only with your prime artistic collaborator, your dude, Warren Ellis. But on Wild God you changed things around. 

The thing is that me and Warren wrote Skeleton Tree and we recorded that just before my son Arthur died. And rather willfully, stupidly — I'm not sure why — I decided 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. And the record itself seemed to speak so deeply 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. So they didn't really play much on that record.

Then the next record we made, which was a double album called Ghosteen, me and Warren went into a studio in Malibu and recorded that. That record was deeply woven around the absence of Arthur. And when we brought The Bad Seeds in to play on [it] the record was so fragile that no one knew how to do anything on it either. 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.

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. And it was a wonderful thing because even though it's not a rock record, The Bad Seeds are off their chain and doing extraordinary things.

So what I'm trying to say is that if any bandleaders 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. [laughs]

Did they, though? I mean, I'm curious what transformations each of them went through that they brought in?

Well, you know, Thomas Wydler, the drummer, he hadn't been able to play, like he'd been ill for three years with quite a serious illness which he's since recovered from. But it was just extraordinary to watch him behind the drum kit again. I was so happy to be there and so energized. And I think Jim Sclavunos, who plays percussion, came in just full of ideas for this record. It was really very inspiring to see. Everyone, um, you know, came back with a sort of beautiful desperation.

Well, on Wild God I feel there is like a rock throughline on these songs in that they produce a kind of catharsis, not in the ancient Greek sense, but in the rock and roll sense — there are these clattering, clanging moments in some of these songs, whether it is at the end of the song “Conversion” itself or yeah, or “Wild God” or “Joy.” I was thinking of these moments of catharsis as kind of little conversions.  

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.

I'm glad you brought up “Conversion,” because it sets a mysterious scene in a really compelling way.

Yeah. I'm really happy with that.

I love that it's someone watching someone else be transformed, and being transformed themselves. And what I love particularly is the way you say, “You're beautiful, stop! You’re 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.

You just killed it on that one. 

Well, it was funny because the build up with the gospel choir, they were doing their thing, and Warren and I [are] in the studio. There's, I don't know, 20 singers or something, and Warren's like, “Get in there and sort of f*** them up.” So I kind of went in and ad libbed with them. And these people are kind of brilliant. I can just scream out anything and they'll answer it, in rhythm, together. You know, these they're just extraordinary musicians. And so what was going on in that final build is entirely improvised, lyrically as well. So what it sounds like is what it is, which is a sort of transported moment for us all.

So as an outside observer, it seems that at different times in The Bad Seeds, you've had different primary partners. You and Warren, you two connect on this intuitive level that is unusual, don’t you think?

I think we have a sort of truthful relationship about things that's quite unusual. It's not competitive. When we work together, it's for the common good of us both. And we really understand that. It's quite different, I would say, than the relationship I had with Mick Harvey. Or Blixa [Bargeld] for that matter. Even though they were deeply creative relationships, they were primarily interpretive relationships. With Warren, that I found a writing partner was extraordinarily fortunate for me 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, sing on it.” “I don't want to do that.” [growls] “Go on.” “Yeah, 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. There’s a kind of a fetishization of stars, as if this person has to be this lone genius. But you've said that throughout your entire career, collaboration has been your forte.

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.

I mean, I write lyrics on my own. I don't collaborate when I write lyrics. They're entirely on my own. There's no one that can help out in this respect except maybe when I get completely lost in the whole process and frustrated, I can sit down and read some of Stevie Smith's beautiful poetry. But essentially, I'm on my own with with my own self and my own feelings of limitation. And, it's quite a dark time too, to write lyrics.

But I take these lyrics into a collaborative experience and it's just incredibly fun. I'm dying to take these words into the studio and do something with the band. It's pure joy to make music with The Bad Seeds. You know, I hear other bands talk about the misery of being in the studio and how difficult it was and “We almost died making this record.” And I think, “God, perhaps you should do something else. I mean, life is short. But to me, making music and performing music with the band is just [amazing] because you see your little ideas exploding in front of your eyes into something truly beautiful.

We were talking before a little bit about the use of the choir, and you sang in choirs as a child. It’s a very important presence. For me, one thing that happens with the choir is [like when we were talking about] these explosions or moments of transformation. It's like the self expands in those moments and you can't really tell where the center is. 

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. So [we say], “[This] song is 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 says, “I'll be out around about 3:00 with something for you to listen to.”

And he comes out at 3:00. And he’d mixed the record in a way that we would not have done at all. And we listen to it, like, shocked because it's so compressed, and all our beautiful strings are sort of just crashed into all the synths and the choirs are all sort of crushed. And we listen to it again. And by the third time, we just loved this sound. It just leapt out at you.

Is there a song in which the mix really changed completely?

“Song of the Lake” is a good example. It had much more of an elegant build. Now, it's just a 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 Bad Seeds. The Serge Gainsbourg aspect is still there but with that drive. I didn't realize it was in the mix.

Yeah I think it's in the mix. I mean, it's in the songs too. But you know, not everybody in the band liked the mixes. Most of us did. Not everybody did. I won't go into details, but I rang Dave and said, “Look, we've got this problem in the band. You know, some people think this is like they're being aurally mauled.” And he goes, “Really?” And I said, “Yeah, that 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.” And we're like, “Oh, fair enough.”

The song “Joy” starts with a classic blues text, basically “Death Letter” by Son 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 this existential devastation. But [with] you this song transforms.

So it is. Those first lines are taken from that song: “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head / Woke up this morning, thought someone in my family was dead.” I heard that and I thought that was an extraordinary way to start a song. And so I just wrote that down because it just felt so raw, and then continued to write the song. And it slowly moves from a blues song into something more …. I don't know what it really is. It goes from a, let's say, low blues feel to a kind of a high religious drama.

You also invoke a poet I love, Saint John of the Cross, in the song “Long Dark Night.” The story of Saint John of the Cross is one of grace coming at a time of unimaginable deprivation. A story of a man who was living in a room the size of a closet who wrote these timeless poems. And I was curious if the story resonates for you just because even though 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 about the story of Pinocchio, which really is one of my favorite books. Gepetto, 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 Saint 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 — being saved by some sort of spiritual reckoning from a dark place resonates very much with me personally.

It resonates in terms of love and partnership as well as these more explicitly religious stories. There are a couple of songs where that happens. I imagine “Final Rescue Attempt” is for your wife, Susie.

That's right. That just 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 round to my house where I was even in a worse state and says, “I'm here.” And that's the final rescue attempt.

That’s a story you told in your wonderful book with Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, made into a song. I wonder if telling those stories, having that conversation with him, influenced your songwriting on this album?

Yeah, maybe. That book changed everything for me. It was a strange thing to think, God forbid, that I could sit down and do an interview with somebody. AndI think through those long conversations that made up that book, I learned how to speak about things. I learned the transcendent nature of conversation, meaning, conversation is another one of these things where you can start at one place and, if you're alert to what's going on, have your mind changed.

I would say that that book is one long, difficult conversation, for many different reasons actually. It was transformative for me. And it 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 permission to talk to me about other things.

I'm very grateful to him and to you for that. It's interesting to think about, uh, how Faith, Hope and Carnage might have flowed into this record. I love 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 doesn't fit, and yet you find language in these songs. It's very powerful.

Yeah, that is the thing that poetry can do, I think. If it's good, at least. 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. Some music. 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.