Nick Cave explains how grief inspired the creation of ‘Ghosteen’
The Australian musician Nick Cave has discussed how grief, following the passing of his son in 2015, inspired the creation of his 2019 album, Ghosteen.
Speaking on the CBS Saturday Morning show, Cave discussed how he used music to articulate his grief and the loss he felt for his child. “For me, especially songwriting is a kind of abstract way of articulating loss,” he states, “Music has that extraordinary potential of taking extremely complex things and sort of packaging it in a universal language that we can all kind of understand”.
With collaborator Warren Ellis, he penned Ghosteen, an album Cave says was inspired by the grief he felt following the loss of his son.
“It felt like these songs were sort of reaching towards him in some way…grief is just a great big swirling confusing thing, you know, and you try and make sense of it as best you can but when I finished that record I felt I’d done something for my child”.
The 2022 British documentary This Much I Know to Be True, explored the creation of the studio album, which produced such greats as ‘Bright Horses’ and ‘Spinning Song’.
Elsewhere in the interview, he discussed how his fans helped to get his career back on track, thanking them for saving him from, “a life of internal thinking”.
Check out the full interview between CBS and Nick Cave, below.
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