A lighter rewriting: Exploring Nick Cave’s self-references on ‘Wild God’
Being 18 albums into a decades-long career, it is an incredible triumph that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have managed to keep delivering greatness and reinventing themselves as a seemingly tireless musical force. Helmed by Cave’s creative mind, the artist is a long way from the wild punk he started out as, taking his band on a lengthy journey. But on their latest release, Cave is revising all those old eras as if marking how far he’s come and using references to his past self as the best metaphor for development.
“I could feel him trying to get back to that kind of raw approach,” Bad Seeds guitarist George Vjestica told Far Out. Everyone in the band seemed to notice a change in Cave when it came to making their new album, Wild God. While their last few releases were grief-stricken albums that were markedly personal, as if made in an outpouring of pain after the death of his son, Arthur Cave, the new one feels like an active return to solid ground.
It was the solid ground of a great song and of the work that a great song takes. “He is a great songwriter,” Vjestica said of his leader, “And he was bringing that element back so it’s less abstract.” On Wild God, Cave seemed interested in returning to his craft. There are no more lengthy, atmospheric pieces that sprawl way beyond the ten-minute mark with no chorus. Instead, Cave was back to his original process of getting up and dressed and heading out to his office, where he would work all day on building a song. In his Red Hand Files, he wrote, “The most important undertaking of my day is to simply sit down at my desk and pick up my pen. Without this elementary act, I could not call myself a songwriter.”
“Pen poised, I sit to attention,” he added. Cave waits for inspiration to strike and is ready when it does, and for this album, the thing that seemed to strike was himself. In several forms, it appears that a cast of younger Cave’s appeared before him to be written or revisited in the new work.
But the reinterpretation of his old work in these new songs all seem to serve the same message. Throughout, there is a sense of a more mature, healthy and balance Cave looking towards his raging punk days and writing a new outlook.
On ‘Wild God’, he references the 2013 track ‘Jubilee Street’, singing, “He went searching for the girl down on Jubilee Street / But she’d died in a bedsit in 1993.” In many ways, ‘Jubilee Street’ was Cave’s final murder ballad. As the original track tells of a sex worker amid a dangerous mafia situation, with the insinuation that the narrator dies at the end, It was the last brutal track before a sharp change came in his discography. The nod to the track in ‘Wild God’ feels like a reference to that. As the looming religious figure of the new album wanders through the dark setting of an old song, the revelation of the girl from the original being dead feels like a comment that Cave has left all that behind. Or even perhaps a comment on how darkness only leads to more darkness and that the character’s death was an inevitability amidst the gloomy world Cave used to inhabit.
But now, the Wild God seems to be searching for the light. That message comes through loud and clear on what is perhaps the most beautiful and moving reference to his old work on the record. On ‘Joy’, Cave lays out the record’s message as he sings, “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.” Throughout this album, Cave described joy as a state to aim towards and a feeling to truly embrace. It is a feeling he wants, and he wants to protect.
But back in 1996, Cave was murdering joy. On ‘Song Of Joy’, he writes of a character with that name and recounts a bloody affair, singing, “Joy had been bound with electrical tape / In her mouth a gag / She’d been stabbed repeatedly / And stuffed into a sleeping bag.”
In his days of Murder Ballads, Cave’s narratives left no space for happy feelings. Instead, the mere suggestion of them was something to be mocked and twisted, something to add a touch of irony when delving into the dark underbelly of violent human nature.
So as the topic of joy is return to on Wild God, seeing Cave down on his knees begging “have mercy on me” before standing up, turning towards the light of goodness and “jumping for joy”; it’s a comment on where he is now. Just as how the Wild God cannot revisit the gloomy scene of Jubilee Street, it appears that Cave is beyond returning to the grit and gore of his old self. Instead, he gathers up these references to his past on the new record as if to say goodbye to them. He’s saying his thank yous for the inspiration they once served, but he’s saying he’s ready for joy now as he colours his album with distinctly brighter shades.
