Nick Cave’s favourite Nick Cave songs
With such a spanning discography, including 18 albums with the Bad Seeds, 11 soundtrack albums, four compilations and one record simply with Warren Ellis – that’s a lot of music for Nick Cave to keep track of.
So when it came to even beginning to consider what his own favourite songs from his archive were, he had to call in some help. In a matter of his own music and on a mission to recall it all, who better to call on than the people who are obsessed with it?
Calling his own back catalogue “immense and bewildering”, Cave would be the first to admit that it’s an intimidating beast to first come up against. If you’re a newbie looking to dive in for the first time, the waters of Nick Cave look dark, bleak and deep as violent murder ballads or spanning ten-plus minute long songs stare back at you from the depths.
It’s tough to know where to first dip your toes; Cave gets that. His is also a discography where some sections are undeniably better than others, but as Cave himself is the most complex and emotionally attached to each and every era, with every one being painted or even tainted by personal memory, he decided he wasn’t really the one to ask about the best of his own work.
“Feeling not best placed to judge, I instead turned to the readers of The Red Hand Files for help, asking you to send in playlists of your 15 favourite songs,” he wrote on his newsletter, calling in the help of the best people to ask – his fans. “The response was overwhelming and well over 2000 playlists have come in so far,” he said when he finally sat down to work through it, begging, “please stop sending them now!”
In the list of tracks he compiled from all of his fans’ input, the hits are all there. He placed ‘Jubilee Street’ at number one, honouring the 2013 track that he’s always clearly had immense affection for, given the pride of place it holds in his live sets.
‘Into My Arms’ feels like an inevitable second too, marking a turning point in his writing style and also his life as he wrote it during a stint at rehab, getting clean from years of addiction.
From there on, the list of 15 tracks hits all the expected choices that fans would pick and Cave agrees with, including ‘Tupelo’, ‘From Her To Eternity’, ‘Bright Horses’, ‘The Mercy Seat’, ‘Red Right Hand’ and finishes with ‘O Children’, a song that took on new life for Cave after it featured in Harry Potter.
Perhaps it’s a cop out that Cave himself has never provided his own unique list of the deep cuts he may hold secret affection for, or the tracks his fans never gave enough credit to that he’s always wished would have become a hit. But as he said, is an artist ever best placed to judge their own work?
Can they ever be objective about the worth of something made in their own mind and with their own hands and as a product of their own feelings? Perhaps not, so maybe Cave’s fans are the ones to listen to, not him at all.
The 15 best Nick Cave songs, according to Nick Cave and his fans:
- ‘Jubilee Street’
- ‘Into My Arms’
- ‘From Her To Eternity’
- ‘The Ship Song’
- ‘Tupelo’
- ‘The Mercy Seat’
- ‘Stagger Lee’
- ‘Push The Sky Away’
- ‘The Weeping Song’
- ‘Higgs Boson Blues’
- ‘Red Right Hand’
- ‘Ghosteen’
- ‘Bright Horses’
- ‘Straight To You’
- ‘O Children’
