“It’s just a perfect love song”: St Vincent picks her favourite Nick Cave song
Some songs are so evocative that all it takes is one line to have you hooked. It’s a skill, or perhaps even a superpower, that some artists have, harnessing this unique ability to move listeners or bring up strong feelings and emotions with little more than a note and new words. For St Vincent, Nick Cave has that touch.
Nick Cave’s legacy is a unique one. For the majority of his career, he was known as a raging punk. He started out in The Birthday Party, a group once declared to be the most violent band in the world, as it was rare for the audience, or sometimes even the musicians, to get out unscathed. Then, when that band disintegrated in a blaze of chaos, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds emerged, that energy essentially just continued. For nine albums, the group were a ragtag group of addicts, somehow managing to create some incredible tracks plucked from the dark, punkish imagination of Cave.
He wrote songs about death row, violent gangsters and villains and even a whole album of Murder Ballads, dropping into the horror-tinged minds of bad guys or narrating tales of woe. Largely, the band’s discography cared more for telling stories and creating fictional worlds than ever bothered with feelings. But then something shifted.
Love is a powerful thing, able to change even the hardest of hearts. In 1997, when fellow musician PJ Harvey broke up with him, Cave said, “I was so surprised I almost dropped my syringe.” Things seemed to change after that. In the stark light of heartbreak, two realisations hit him; he needed to get clean, and he wanted to write about his feelings.
The Boatman’s Call was his response to that as suddenly the punk subsided and Cave emerged as a different kind of musician. The album is more subdued and poetic, crafted almost solely from Cave sat solo at a piano. While the majority of his career was spent as a punk, it’s the track ‘Into My Arms’, a simple love ballad, that has emerged as his most popular and well-known release.
It’s understandable, though. ‘Into My Arms’ has that unique and powerful quality where no matter where you are, what you’re going through or even how many times you’ve heard the song before, it feels just as moving and staggering. For St Vincent, it only takes the opening line, and she’s invested as she told Kerrang, “Just that line [from Into My Arms], ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do,’”, stating, “it just moves me.” She said of the track, “It’s just a perfect love song”, as, for the first time in his career, Cave allowed sentimentality to come into his work and wrote a classic ballad of pure devotion.
The context of the song also seems to play into its power. The Boatman’s Call is populated by moving tracks on the topic of love and heartbreak, but ‘Into My Arms’ is different. It sounds more like a hymn than anything else, as Cave, at the time, was essentially on his knees, looking for guidance and care.
He wrote the track during a stint in rehab. He recalled, “I was actually walking back from church through the fields, and the tune came into my head, and when I got back to the facility, I sat down at the cranky old piano and wrote the melody and chords, then went up to the dormitory, sat on my bed and wrote those lyrics.” So, the kind of vulnerable sincerity of the track and its humble air undoubtedly come from the moment Cave was living through it as he was trying to turn his life around.
Still today, he counts the song amongst the ones he’s most proud of. But for St Vincent, as well his other fans, it’s simply one incredible piece in a lengthy discography of them. “I’m drawn to various periods of Nick Cave,” she said, picking out a song from his new album as another favourite as she added, “His new song ‘Frogs’ was just gutting me, it moves me so deeply.”
