IN 2023 Nick Cave played solo US dates accompanied by Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood, toured the bookshops of North America with Seán O’Hagan to sign their acclaimed lockdown meditation Faith, Hope And Carnage, and revisited the Second World War songbook for Apple TV+’s upcoming drama of fashion in Nazi-occupied Paris, The New Look. He also worked on his eighteenth album with The Bad Seeds. As he told MOJO earlier this year, “everything circles back to music.”
Thanks to his regular online confessional/advice column The Red Hand Files, Cave’s thoughts on the process have been regularly shared. He began work, he said, on January 1, 2023, and five days later was already wrestling with it. “It’s the same with every record, I feel that familiar feeling of lack, like I’m a big, dumb blank thing in a suit. I’m grumpy as fuck… anything that resembles a creative impulse is bur rowed way down in some mossy, froggy hole, asleep, I hope, not dead. I have to call it forth, provoke it from its slumber.” He added some lyrics he’d painfully composed: “The frogs in the gutter are jumping for God/Amazed of love, amazed of pain.”
Things were looking more promising in May and June. “The songs are sounding great,” wrote Nick. “I won’t really know until I get the Bad Seeds into the studio and we actually make the album. But it is feeling very good, very positive.”
Will the new songs revisit the ambient analogue electronics and hymnals evidenced on 2019’s meditative _Ghosteen?_Cave’s indicated not, but told Rolling Stone that it isn’t a rock album either. “There’s a lot of energy in the new record, but it’s not done as a rock’n’roll group,” he said. “We’re just looking at different ways to get to the emotional core of what I’m trying to write about.”
As regarding the line-up, in March Cave pondered to The New Yorker that Greenwood, his tour mate from Radiohead, could make an appearance. “Maybe Colin will come in and play something. He has a completely different style from [regular Bad Seeds bassist Martyn P. Casey]. Marty ’s a jaw-dropping powerhouse who holds everything together. Colin tends to be more fluid and melodic.” Cave also reiterated the importance of his creative partnership with Warren Ellis, who has announced a new album by The Dirty Three with partners Jim White and Mick Turner.
Cave’s most recent communication regarding his new album came in November, a month after he played the piano-and-voice song To Be Found – his one new piece of music this year – at a show in Chicago. He was, he announced, mixing the new songs in “Western New York” (online Cave watchers claimed this was in Buffalo, backed up with sightings of the singer dining at a local Denny ’s). “As the new and beautiful songs wash over me,” wrote a seemingly re-energised Cave. “I feel inspired to say to you that the privilege of having this most vulnerable of occupations – of being a singer – is immeasurable.”
Picture: Andreas Rents/Getty Images
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