“Sleep now”: the most devastating line in a Nick Cave song
There are few artists who can evoke as strong a sense of pathos as Nick Cave. He isn’t known as the ‘prince of darkness’ just because of his raven black hair (though it helps) but also because of the depth of overwhelming emotion conveyed through his songwriting. He has penmanship skills like those of the most revered classic authors and is a master of his style of gothic writing, which is completely unmatched in music today. Not only this, but he has endured a plethora of devastating life events which imbibe his songs with an even deeper chasm of emotion.
Perhaps the most impactful personal tragedy Cave endured was in 2015 when his 15-year-old son Arthur fell from a cliff near Brighton after taking LSD. When Cave heard the news of his son’s death, he was midway through recording his 17th studio album, Ghosteen. The result is an album that is chillingly sad yet euphoric; for Cave, it was a “way to write beyond the trauma … that deals with all manner of issues but does not turn its back on the issue of the death of my child.”
Where earlier records channelled Nick Cave’s ferocity and romanticism into fiery narratives of revenge, love, murder, and myth, Ghosteen is something altogether different. It is a spiritualistic exploration of grief, legacy and collective memory.
After Arthur’s death, Cave began inviting fans to write to him through the platform The Red Hand Files, opening a quiet, public dialogue about death, loss, and meaning. Through this, Cave began to explore the concept of communal grief, using his art not only to mourn but to help others mourn as well. Ghosteen became part of that, offering a profoundly personal elegy turned universal healer.
This album also reveals Cave’s connection to Christianity more intensely than ever before. Having described himself as a Christian who struggled to keep up, around the time of Ghosteen, we see a Cave with a deeper connection to his faith, using it as a mechanism to close the realms of distance between himself and his departed son.
In perhaps the most devastating song on the album, ‘Waiting For You’, he sings, “Your soul is my anchor/I never asked to be freed/Well, sleep now, sleep now/Take as long as you need/Cause I’m just waiting for you, to return”.
It’s a stunningly poetic image. I love the idea that although the grief he is experiencing is keeping him anchored in his sorrow, he doesn’t yet want to be freed from it. Instead, he wants to remain with it until he can truly understand this deeper spiritual connection he has to his son and his now eternal absence.
His faith in his son returning that makes him wait in some form hints at Cave’s deepening connection to his spirituality. Perhaps this belief attests to the idea that our loved ones who pass away never truly leave us and instead leave their mark on everything we do. And he’s right. In the case of Nick Cave’s legacy, it’ll live on for centuries after he’s gone.
