How Leonard Cohen gave the world Nick Cave
For the cover of his book Stranger Than Kindness, Nick Cave chose a painting by Ben Smith. It’s less of a book, really, and more of an archive, with notes from the musician and photographic documentation of the things he owns and the things that moved him: postcards with notes, old lovers, a Kylie Minogue bag, a vast collection of religious iconography. On the cover, an old Nick Cave holds a younger one. But the painting is a redo of an earlier piece by Ben Smith, in which a younger Nick Cave is embraced by an older Leonard Cohen. Its title? ‘The Influence’.
Nick Cave’s artistic world is at once both utterly singular and totally tethered to a network of others. His evolution as an artist is truly fascinating, going from a rowdy punk to a mature, epic songwriter whose work now feels more like hymns than rock songs. His phrasing feels unique to only him, but his path is one well-walked.
He’s not shy about that, and it’s beautiful. Cave loudly and proudly honours his idols, whether it be singing about Elvis Presley, smiling like a loser in a photo with Nina Simone, or dedicating whole sections of an epic poem to Leonard Cohen, writing in The Sick Bag Song, “Leonard Cohen will sing, and the boy will suddenly breathe as if for the first time, and fall inside the laughing man’s voice and hide”.
In a lot of ways, the connection between Cave and Cohen feels obvious, even just from the headlines. Both tackled music, poetry and novels. Both artists engaged a lot with the divine and spiritual, even the religious. Both wrote, or in Cave’s case, still write, a lot about love, lust, and seduction. Both only ever cut about in a suit.
In The Sick Bag Song, Cave writes about his earliest experiences with Cohen and the way that, in his eyes, it changed absolutely everything. “The boy will suddenly breathe as if for the first time,” he writes, meaning that after hearing Cohen, everything seemed different, existing felt different or perhaps, he finally felt alive. To him, this was the moment the artist in him awoke, starting him down the road to his own respected stardom.
“The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs—not many—ten or maybe 20 in a lifespan, that stand apart from the rest of the music he will discover”, the poem continues. In his Red Hand Files, Cave laid out a list of these special songs, and Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’ tops the list as the first and most important.
As an artist who truly opened doors in Cave’s mind, Cave has attempted to repay that by honouring him again and again. He covered ‘Avalanche’ beautifully. He took part in the 2005 tribute show to the artist, singing ‘I’m Your Man’ and giving it all the sleazy edge it deserves. He’s written about him a lot, both in his poetry and his newsletters, and is never long off bringing him up in interviews. And then, when Cohen passed and the idol was lost, Cave shared a moving tribute, stating, “For many of us, Leonard Cohen was the greatest songwriter of them all. Utterly unique and impossible to imitate, no matter how hard we tried”.
