In a new interview, the musician Nick Cave discusses grief, creation, and the divine.
,” an extended interview with the journalist Seán O’Hagan; a paperback version will be released by Picador in September. Cave has been open about his suffering, even as it changes shape. In 2022, seven years after Arthur’s death, Cave’s oldest son, Jethro, died in Melbourne at age thirty-one. “I’m not talking about Jethro, because his mother has expressly asked me not to,” Cave told me recently. “She’s a grieving mother and very protective over him.
That’s exactly right. It seems to be essential, even if just as a corrective for the bad, unexpressed ideas we hold in our heads. A lot of things I talked to Seán about I had never expressed before. They were thoughts and ideas that lived in my head. Grief. Religion. When we rehearse our ideas in our minds, it’s always at a kind of fever pitch, and the ideas can feel extraordinarily articulate.
You have found a way to apply useful, elegant language to the experience of loss—to articulate it with grace and accuracy. In the book, you describe the early days of your grief as “a place of acute disorder—a chaos that was also a kind of incapacitation.” But you also point out that it’s ordinary: “We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss.
The book also broaches the idea of religion and spirituality. At one point, you present music itself as a kind of argument against atheism. You describe it as “the great indicator that something else is going on, something unexplained, because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence.
You’re right that profound grief quickly pushes you away from both certitude and indifference, which are unproductive feelings—Am I asking too many questions about grief? I have found it to be an excruciating but nonetheless fascinating experience. You had a wonderful response to a fan sending you a song produced by ChatGPT “in the style of Nick Cave.” You, “This song sucks.” Perhaps A.I. can never understand the sublime, or the self-annihilation, required to make good art.
Anyway, I’m coming over to the States to promote “Faith, Hope and Carnage” when it comes out in paperback, because I didn’t really get a chance to do anything in America when it was first published. And, at the same time, I’ll be driving from town to town playing live shows, playing the piano, and singing in theatres and bringing Colin Greenwood along to play bass. He just fits in there and plays so beautifully.We’re making a Bad Seeds record soon.
Some artists talk about writing or making work as a kind of channelling. You have described the writing process as fraught and difficult, but has being onstage ever felt that way? As though you’re receiving a signal? Suddenly, the world is full of radical possibility because you’re not scared of anything anymore. It’s kind of naïve, because you can always lose more, but it also feels very real.
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