‘Papa Won’t Leave You Henry’: The Nick Cave song about fatherhood
Nick Cave is no stranger to tackling macabre themes. Through his years with The Birthday Party and his solo work with The Bad Seeds, Cave has made an entire career out of making some of the most frightening sides of life work in a song, from murder ballads to old-wise tales. Outside of being the modern rock incarnation of Edgar Allen Poe, Cave boasts a heart of gold underneath the rough exterior.
Many of Cave’s best songs had to do with the sour side of love and frequently feature the gore that comes with getting there. Even though he made an ode to the Greek tale of doomed romance in ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’, Cave was in for a different kind of love once he became a father in 1991. After welcoming his newborn son Luke into the world, he wrote ‘Papa Won’t Leave You Henry’ in the room with him, saying to Mojo in 2009 (via Songfacts): “more or less completely in my head while standing over Luke’s crib”.
Listening to the song’s chorus, Cave is writing this effort from the perspective of a young father, telling Luke that he will always be there for him even during the darkest times. Though all of the others might fall by the wayside, Cave will always be there to protect his son.
While the track might sound wholesome by Cave’s standards, the verses are where the depth comes in, as he talks about the people he has seen meet their doom when walking through town. Cave is inhabiting a much seedier character than usual in this song as well, talking about spending his night among the bones of another. It could be this man’s old flame, but it could also be him returning from the graveyard.
As Cave reaches the end of the song, the drawl in his voice starts getting a lot more sinister as he visits the overturned side of his hometown, where the prostitutes reside and residents can put their arm through a hole in the wall and come back out missing a bone.
Though the conditions of the outside world might plague the narrator as he keeps moving, he is more than capable of carrying Henry to the ends of the Earth so long as he stays safe. Although the song might have a more hopeful undertone than fans would expect, Cave’s relationship with his kin came to a shocking end.
In 2015, Cave was dealt a parents’ worst nightmare when his son Arthur died after falling off of a cliff in Ovingdean. When Cave eventually returned to making music, his songs were coated in the melancholy from his son’s passing, including stepping away from story songs to paint abstract pictures with his writing.
When asked about how he went about writing songs with vicious tones to them, Cave mentioned his perspective on grief changing once he lost his son, saying in his newsletter, The Red Hand Files, “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”.
Listen to the heartbreaking ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ below.
