Nick Cave explains how his fans saved him from a “life of internal thinking”
Australian musician Nick Cave recently discussed how his music helped him through a period of grief, crediting his fans with saving him from a “life of internal thinking.”
In a recent interview with the CBS Saturday Morning show, Cave detailed the role of music in dealing with hardships, explaining: “Music, for me, especially songwriting, is a kind of abstract way of articulating loss,” adding, “music has that extraordinary potential of taking extremely complex things and packaging it in a universal language that we can all understand.”
The singer goes on to discuss the inspiration behind Ghosteen following the death of his son, telling Anthony Mason how the album felt like “it was reaching towards him,” adding that it felt like something he had done solely for his son.
Arthur Cave, one of Cave’s twin sons, died at the age of 15 in East Sussex in the summer of 2015. Cave has discussed the grief he and his wife felt during this time, in previous interviews, explaining: “Susie [Cave’s wife] and I have learned much about the nature of grief over recent years. We have come to see that grief is not something you pass through, as there is no other side.”
Adding: “For us, grief became a way of life, an approach to living, where we learned to yield to the uncertainty of the world, whilst maintaining a stance of defiance to its indifference. We surrendered to something over which we had no control, but which we refused to take lying down.
He also offered his advice on those suffering from grief, saying that it is “much more than just despair” and comes in many variations: “We found grief contained many things — happiness, empathy, commonality, sorrow, fury, joy, forgiveness, combativeness, gratitude, awe, and even a certain peace.”
Concluding: “For us, grief became an attitude, a belief system, a doctrine — a conscious inhabiting of our vulnerable selves, protected and enriched by the absence of the one we loved and that we lost.”
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