“Totally off the cuff”: Nick Cave’s improvised masterpiece
It’s hard to find an artist who seems to take as much care and consideration as Nick Cave does when writing lyrics. He is, without a doubt, one of the best lyricists in the world, as he tackles topics surrounding addiction, depression, love, life and death in a way that is equally profound and accessible. While only he could use the words he does in the order they fall in, they remain universal in how they apply.
Nick Cave is a disciplined writer. He is known to chain himself to his desk and his piano from time to time, beating his brain until ideas surface. This comes across in his work, as every single sentence feels like it has been carefully drawn out and considered. He will mark a date on a calendar and then ensure that is when he begins writing. It’s a rigid approach to the creative process, but it clearly works.
Of course, Nick Cave didn’t get as far as he did by sticking to one strict creative process. Bad Seeds guitarist George Vjestica spoke to Far Out recently about how much Cave is willing to experiment when working in the studio. “What Nick has is a very unique way of doing things,” he said, “He’s got such a distinct voice and way of presenting his songs. But he’s not afraid of trying things out. He’s very experimental; he always has been, he’ll go for it.”
He continued, “That’s the thing about him that is captivating; you can feel that he’s pushing for something else like ‘Let’s do this’, ‘Let’s try that’. That’s what’s so inspiring about Nick and his method of work.”
One song where Cave’s open-minded approach to songwriting is on full display is the track ‘Stagger Lee’ from the 1996 album Murder Ballads. The song was done incredibly last minute because drummer, Jim Sclavunos approached Cave with a book he was reading that he thought could inspire a track.
“It was a real last-minute miracle,” he said, “I came into the studio towards the very end of the sessions, and I showed Nick a book called The Life, which was a collection of black hustler prison poetry. I pointed out an old really nasty version of ‘Stagger Lee’, and he got quite excited. Just a few minutes later, we piled into the live room, and recorded the song, fully realised, totally off-the-cuff, in one take.”
This wouldn’t be the first time that Nick Cave improvised in the studio. Famously, while he was recording Skeleton Tree, he improvised a lot of the lyrics to express his emotions as raw as possible. This is just another example of how open-minded he is about using different methods when writing music.
