“It was perfect”: The song Nick Cave is still trying to match
“Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment,” Bob Dylan writes in his memoir, Chronicles One – we’re still waiting for Chronicles Two over 20 years later. “They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic.” The words “liberated” and “republic” elicit a sense of politics; however, there can also be something deeply personal about these notions— some of the most meaningful music can create worlds in which to shelter. Nick Cave calls these efforts his ‘hiding songs’.
Taking to his Red Hand Files forum, Cave explains his curious concept: “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.” They are, in essence, the trusted gateways to his own walled republic of spiritual liberation—one where the horrors of mundanity and heavy baggage of stress are shunned.
However, you can’t be expected to do menial things like driving while a figurative bed cover is being pulled over your head, which is why Cave had to stop the car when Karen Dalton’s ‘Something on Your Mind’ came waltzing out of the speakers one idle day in the States. “I was driving around and I had this cassette on and ‘Something on Your Mind’ came on,” Cave divulges in the 2020 documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time. “Through the course of that song, I had to stop the car, drive to the side of the road, and y’know, I was in tears.”
She might have been an idol to Dylan and a thousand other Gingham-clad vagabonds on the Greenwich Village folk scene after she left a family life of farming behind and headed to New York City in the early 1960s, following two divorces before even turning 21, but wider success never matched the adulation she recevied from her peers.
Despite how confounding her music might make this reality seem, in truth, it is easy to see why she was never met with the commercial favour she deserved. Her big break on this front came when she was set up to support Santana on tour. This was never going to work. Her singular style seeks you out when you’re alone. The unrefined yelp of her high-pitched growl doesn’t pair well with the chatter of parties, her songs pine for the proverbial blanket that Cave speaks of, and when it’s pulled over you, the constellations of life begin to swirl. It’s not easy to unveil such open-hearted vulnerability and then proclaim, ‘Alright, now who is ready for some ‘Black Magic Woman’? Let’s go, Connecticut!’
As ‘Something on Your Mind’ extolls, her art is at first confrontationally personal and then it digs deeper. Her voice doesn’t deal with background noise, and her spirit cuts through arrangements like a barbed assegai bearing sincerity and defiance, hardships and exultation. Written by Dino Valenti and then performed and polished by Dalton, this song carries an aura of ‘triumph of will’ that few can muster, and that simple feat of harnessing euphoria in music is one that has shaped Cave’s output with the Bad Seeds ever since it first forced him into a layby many moons ago.
Her hammering guitar style imbues the track with a foreboding rhythm. She may have ordinarily felt out of place in the studio, but here, in 1970, a decade into her stuttering musical journey, you can feel Dalton fittingly giving herself up to the music. As Angel Olsen commented regarding her cover: “‘Something On Your Mind’ for me is about letting yourself face something that keeps setting you back.” It’s the relief of scratching an itch in the grandest way.
This majesty was humbling for Cave, who wept on a roadside that wove its way through the same sleepy dustbowl towns that seemed to spawn the blistering track. “The thing about the song: it wasn’t that it was sad that made me cry, it was that it was perfect. There is something about human achievement when it reaches so high in such a casual way and can do something that is so utterly perfect,” Cave decreed. He’s been aiming to lasso that same sense of ethereal exultation ever since.
”I really felt a kind of shift in myself when I heard this song. It really changed a lot of how I looked at music,” Cave effusively continued. “I think that the Bad Seeds have been attempting to write that song for years now.”
