“The covenant of love”: Heartbreak and godliness in the world of Nick Cave
From a violent punk to a sort of prophet, no one ever expected this path for Nick Cave. At one point, during his younger years, he was the face of what was being deemed “the most violent band in the world” as The Birthday Party tore through the music scene in the wake of blood and black eyes. Even after that, Cave built a legacy of rage with the Bad Seeds and their pile of murder ballads. But things change; life changes you, and now, decades on, it’s faith and love that Cave holds closest, opening his balled and bruised fist out to the world.
And here comes the crowd, “he sold out” is what they like to chant or simply confusedly stare at the man in front of them now. Sure, I agree with some of the confusion. It does feel disorienting to wonder how a famous punk now happily attends a royal coronation or why Cave, a man who preaches so much about love now, is happy to support someone like Kanye West. But in all of his complexities, the artist’s turn towards faith, tenderness and preaching the power of connection is not one of them.
Let’s trace it back to one crucial song—‘Into My Arms’. For Cave academics, this is a watershed moment. Sitting on The Boatman’s Call, the whole album was really a turning point. It was softer, more introspective. Suddenly, after ten albums of wild characters, fictional plots and songs that were more like horror movies, Cave was his own protagonist. He looked inward for real, for the first time in his career. The context is important, for Cave himself has said, “Artistically, my hand was forced by a convergence of events that felt so calamitous at the time that I could not find a way to write about anything else.”
Herein lies a perfect microcosm of the way love lies in Cave’s life now and in his work. Here we have ‘Into My Arms’, his simplest, richest love song. Contextually, it was written after a period of intense heartbreak, right when he began to love again. It’s a song of adoration, yearning and of complete and utter affection for someone. It’s the sort of song people walk down the aisle to.
But there’s a secondary context to it; Cave wrote this song in rehab. “I was actually walking back from the 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,” he told Sean O’Hagan in their book Faith, Hope and Carnage. After about a decade of intense heroin addiction, Cave was there to try and shift it and save his life. Here, the godliness of the song becomes essential.
It’s a moment of convergence that seemed to truly change his life. Not only was Cave in a situation of surrender, seemingly turning towards a higher power of love and hope as he was trying to get better, but his depiction of love in his track is nothing short of holy. It’s a perfect example of how, when words falter, the idea of ‘God’ or any higher power, whether or not in a religious sense, can fill the gap.
While Cave has by now talked at length about the role religion plays in his life, it always seems to come down to that. To him, there seems to always be a moment of surrender that he believes people should pay attention to, or a moment when a certain feeling or experience is so powerful, sometimes you simply have to chalk it up to something bigger than you or I or any human coincidence.
He put this philosophy into words so beautifully in his Red Hand Files, offering his perspective and this idea of a kind of divine plan to a 17-year-old boy looking for advice on love and to a fan who wrote in simply to ask, “How do I not have my heart broken?”
“The surest way to avoid a broken heart is to love nothing and no one,” Cave advised. He meant it when he said nothing: no person, no job, no place. He also warned against things that open the heart—art, music, film, nature, and philosophy. “Keep your heart narrow, hard, cynical, invulnerable, impenetrable, and shun small acts of kindness; be not merciful, forgiving, generous or charitable—these acts expand the heart and make you susceptible to love,” he said.
He said all of this to say simply, “In short, resist love, because real love, big love, true love, fierce love, is a perilous thing, and travels surely towards its devastation. A broken heart—that grief of love—is always love’s true destination. This is the covenant of love.”
That’s it, “this is the covenant of love”, borrowing from the language of prayer because really, how else do we talk about something so grand, so complex, so important, and so special as love? With no real way to chalk up the richness of that human experience to science, it eventually has to falter into something bigger—just as Cave says and how he’s spent a career ever since trying to put into words, album by album since he surrendered to the idea.
His philosophy now is uncomplicated and easy. As the reformed violent punk, Cave now tells his followers to open themselves up; “It is your duty to love in whatever way you can, and to move boldly into that love—deeply, dangerously and recklessly—and restore the world with your awe and wonder. This world is in urgent need—desperate, crucial need—and is crying out for love, your love. It cannot survive without it.”
