Nick Cave Talks Grief, Joy, and Wild God

The rock legend says he’s learned a thing or two about madness and spiritual longing by answering thousands of fan questions on the Internet. On the eve of his 18th album with the Bad Seeds, he answers a few of ours.

Nick Cave doesn’t get enough credit for being funny. To explain to me why his Australian accent is still so strong despite his having left the country in 1980, he begins doing an impression of his wild-haired musical partner Warren Ellis. “I just have a Warren accent,” he says, grinning. “I spend a lot of time with him and he’s like”—Cave shifts gears—“Aw fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that and this cunt!” It’s as accurate as if they were blood family, spoken in the voice he hears when Ellis talks incessantly about documentaries he watched the night before—the kind of one-sided transmit-only conversations that Cave believes could be helped along by holding up little paddles occasionally that say either WOW or NO WAY or UH HUH. He adds with love that this is an endearing thing about Ellis. Everyone’s aware of it: watch One More Time With Feeling, the 2016 Andrew Dominik film documenting the recording of the Bad Seeds' sixteenth studio album, Skeleton Tree. Observe how Ellis rarely gets to the end of whatever it is he’s saying. His audio just gets faded down.

We’re sitting in a hotel near Sloane Square in London, in a room so filled with rare sunlight that Cave’s perfect vampiric hair appears almost blue. I ask if it’s possible that since, traditionally, men don’t talk to one another—not properly at least—he knows more about the interior lives of strangers thanks to his online Q&A experiment, The Red Hand Files, than he does Ellis, the man with whom he has made 14 records and 20 soundtracks. “I know nothing about Warren!” he says, laughing. “He’s an extraordinarily mysterious character. But just to defend men for a second,” he says, pulling a wait, this is going somewhere face, “you know, that we don’t talk to each other…. In a way, musicians don’t. Some do. But what men do do, at least in the studio, in my experience—because I mostly work with men in music—is that we are able to be extraordinarily vulnerable and intimate and articulate when we make music together. That’s where the real stuff is done—the real communicating. And it’s extremely moving to watch. And then we just sit down and just sort of grunt at each other for the rest of the time.”

Cave and Ellis have been communicating in the studio again, this time with the rest of the band. The last two Bad Seeds albums were largely put together by just the two of them. Skeleton Tree (2016) was recorded before Cave lost his 15-year-old son, Arthur, who in 2015 fell from a cliff and died from his injuries. But the record so prophetically spoke of the event (“You fell from the sky / Crash-landed in a field” was the first line to the first song) that the rest of the band didn’t think they could play on it. “Anyone who tried to do something to it, it just didn’t work,” says Cave. In 2018, recording Ghosteen was similar. “Ghosteen was just so fragile. It was sort of this weird, trembling thing, and there was just no room for the band again.” With this new record, Cave wanted everyone involved, whatever it was they ended up making.

What they made is Wild God: a record of furious energy. Cave sings about hell and mortal souls, rape and pillage, even Cain crushing Abel’s skull with a bone. But it is a rapturous album. An ecstatic choir sings about bringing your spirit down. “My poor soul, it was having a dark night of it / It was a long night, a week, maybe a year” goes one line, and if you’ve lately had a dark night of any length, this album may hit you at an angle that both hurts and revives. It’s anacknowledgement of pain, loss, and damage in a way that is transcendent, vital, and raw—from someone who has lived it. As another line goes, “We’ve all had too much sorrow / Now is the time for joy.”

Read more at GQ.