The track Nick Cave called “the greatest song of spiritual collapse”
“Art does have the ability to save us, in so many different ways,” Nick Cave said to Sean O’Hagan during one of their many conversations for Faith, Hope and Carnage. This is the belief that the life-worn artist has settled into as the world has seen him evolve from the wild, raging punk into a kind of magic.
Throughout everything, through all the tragedy and grief Cave has experienced, he’s only ever been drawn closest to art. His time spent in rehab, finally trying to confront decades of addiction head-on, led to him writing ‘Into My Arms’ as a sort of hymn. The death of his son Arthur was processed in real time across Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, while on Wild God, Cave sings of his resolve to live and to love and to surrender to art as a saving grace.
“It can act as a point of salvation, because it has the potential to put beauty back into the world. And that in itself is a way of making amends, of reconciling us with the world,” he said. It cannot be understated to him as he continued, “Art has the power to redress the balance of things, of our wrongs, of our sins.”
To him, art can readdress a balance between beauty and pain as even the saddest, most gut-wrenching tunes can reignite a spark of passion in our souls and remind us of the power and potential of human creativity.
A perfect example of that, in his eyes, is Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’. It’s a song about depression, to put it simply. It’s a song about a complete personal collapse as the artist sings, “’Cause there’s something in a Sunday / makes a body feel alone / And there’s nothing short of dying / half as lonesome as the sound / on the sleeping city sidewalks / Sunday morning coming down.”
Kristofferson captures loneliness so viscerally, setting the song on a Sunday morning as the end of a drunken Saturday night dawns into the lord’s Day of Rest and makes the heartache unavoidable. To Cave, it’s one of the most impactful songs he’s ever heard.
“I love Kris Kristofferson, always have. ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ is one of the greatest songs of spiritual collapse ever written,” he said.
To him, it represents the fact that art can be restorative, even if it’s sad. In his own song, ‘Frogs’, Cave references this track, singing, “Sunday morning and I’m holding your hand / Frog-marching us home to a bed made of tears / Kris Kristofferson walks by kicking a can.”
He finds the balance he believes art can address, balancing the sadness of Kristofferson’s track, with the more hopeful image of holding someone’s hand and walking towards a warm and safe home, even amongst the harder feelings.
