Nick Cave names his favourite Neil Young song
Since Nick Cave began his career as a musician in the 1970s, he has gifted the world with some incredibly beautiful pieces of music. The Australian singer has the magnificent ability to piece together universal emotions and weave them into emotive and dynamic stories or declarations. Hits such as ‘Into My Arms’ demonstrate Cave’s outstanding writing skills, using delicate religious imagery to convey his love for the song’s subject, singing, “And I don’t believe in the existence of angels/ But looking at you I wonder if that’s true.”
Cave’s ability to write such masterful lyrics owes its debt to a keen interest in literature and music from an early age. After his father introduced him to novels such as Crime and Punishment and Lolita, the discovery of Leonard Cohen as a teenager, who not only possessed a magnificent voice but sang pure poetry, changed Cave’s world. In his epic poem The Sick Bag Song, he wrote about this definitive moment: “Leonard Cohen will sing, and the boy will suddenly breathe as if for the first time, and fall inside the laughing man’s voice and hide.”
This led Cave to discuss what he refers to as his “hiding songs.” These “sacred” tracks “deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy.” He writes, “The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs – not many – ten or maybe twenty in a lifespan, that stand apart from the rest of the music he will discover.”
Furthermore, these songs are designed to “shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world.” Although Cave was previously hesitant to share such personal songs with fans, in 2019, he released the complete list on The Red Hand Files.
Cave shared, “My ‘hiding songs’ serve as a form of refuge for me and have done so for years. They are songs that I can pull over myself, like a child might pull the bed covers over their head, when the blaze of the world becomes too intense. I can literally hide inside them. They are the essential pillars that hold up the structure of my artistic world.”
Alongside Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’, another track that Cave refers to as a “hiding song” is ‘On the Beach’ by Neil Young, the first track on side two of his 1974 album of the same name. The album explores the isolation and alienation that Young experienced after the success of his 1972 album Harvest. Discussing how his successful album inspired On the Beach, Young said, “[Harvest] put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”
‘On the Beach’ reflects Young’s struggle with fame and his love-hate relationship with being a performer. The musician sees escape as the only way to cope with his feelings, which he admits are “meaningless” in the grand scheme of things. He finds that escaping into nature, spending time with friends and hitting the road doesn’t rid himself of his issues, but that’s all he can do.
The song has been covered numerous times by the likes of Radiohead and Joan as Police Woman; however, Cave has never attempted to perform his own rendition of the song. Instead, Cave graced fans with a cover of ‘Helpless’ in 1989 for a Young tribute album, The Bridge, which included covers from various artists such as Sonic Youth, The Flaming Lips and Pixies.
Listen to Young’s track below:
