“A gift that God himself needs”: Nick Cave thinks love songs are how we keep God alive
The personal transformation of Nick Cave is a fascinating one. Once part of a band considered to be “the most violent band in the world”, life has evolved the artist into something of a sage.
However, that change was born from tragedy after tragedy. As Cave was making his name as one of the rowdiest punks of the 1980s, sharing murder ballads and ragers with the Bad Seeds, he was also being crippled by drug addiction. The fact that he was managing his heroin addiction insanely productively, sticking to a strict and regimented routine of scoring, shooting up and then getting to work, doesn’t change the damage it was doing.
One of the major turning points in his life came in the early 1990s during a period of personal collapse. Reeling from the end of his relationship with PJ Harvey, it was clear that his drug habit had become too much. “The truth of the matter is that I didn’t give up on PJ Harvey, PJ Harvey gave up on me,” Cave wrote on his Red Hand Files with decades of distance and consideration from the situation, recalling that when she left him, he was “so surprised I almost dropped my syringe”.
Knowing that something needed to change, he checked himself into rehab in Somerset, and while it wasn’t the first time he was trying to get clean, this time, it felt different. On the grounds of the facility, there was a church, and one day, while walking from the chapel back to his room, a song struck him as he recalled, “the tune came into my head, and when I got back to the facility I sat down at the cranky old piano and wrote the melody and chords, then went up to the dormitory, sat on my bed and wrote those lyrics”.
The song was ‘Into My Arms’, Cave’s most outright and adoring love song. A love song so divine it’s basically a hymn. From that moment on, and through several other turning points, he realised more and more that they’re basically the same thing.
Another change in his life was undeniably the moment when his son, Arthur, tragically died at only 15. A loss like that is the sort of thing that rearranges your whole life and calls into question all of your thinking. In the years since, that loss has pulled Cave closer to faith, and his music, in turn, has become more and more hymnal, singing on Ghosteen, an album devoted to his son’s memory, “I am beside you, I am beside you / Look for me, look for me”.
But Cave’s faith is distinct. He’s said himself that it’s not like he goes to church every week and prays in a classic way. Instead, his belief is inseparable from his creative mind as more and more he’s come to see art as the ultimate form of worship.
“Jesus Christ himself said, in one of His most beautiful quotes, ‘Wherever two or more are gathered together, I am in your midst’”, Cave said in a lecture on love songs, specifically. “He said this because wherever two or more are gathered together, there is language,” he continued, musing on how language and the ability to connect are the greatest gifts humans have, adding, “I found that language became a poultice to the wounds incurred by the death of my father. Language became a salve to longing.”
And what is one step above talking? Singing.
Levelling up, Cave sees the act of singing and making music as the highest kind of worship. It’s like talking, but using even more of this strange ability humans were granted, being able to push their voices and manipulate them. Levelling up even still, the love song sits as the highest pinnacle of all of this: using the human body in all its glory, and singing of the glory of the human heart.
“The Love Song is perhaps the truest and most distinctive human gift for recognising God and a gift that God himself needs. God gave us this gift in order that we speak and sing Him alive because God Jives within communication,” Cave said, connecting beautifully to the fact that he wrote his best love song on the walk back from a church, or the fact that all the love songs he’s written for his wife and children could act as a hymn too without changing a word.
Just look at his latest album, and the long song written for his lost friend Anita Lane, where the lyrics, “Oh, wow, oh, wow, how wonderful she is”, could be taken direct from a church’s songbook, worshipping on high.
