The best Bad Seeds song, according to Nick Cave: “I cried”
For decades, Nick Cave has been a vampiric godfather of outcasts.
From his earliest days fronting The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, Cave has appeared as a ghoulish romantic, tapped into the grotesque nature of life and death while grasping at the beauty that lurks somewhere within.
In his youth, he exhibited a violent streak, performing like a man possessed by the sensations of spirits beyond comprehension. He carried this energy into his subsequent work with his Bad Seeds, which ventured into more gothic, avant-garde territory.
Sonically, there is a menace in even the softest Bad Seeds songs, and this is reflected in Cave’s lyricism. He writes with a literary sense, fashioning musings of love and introspection that are unafraid to plunge into the depths of humanity. Expansive and all-encompassing, Cave’s best work has him act as a spiritual conveyor, tapping into expressions that no one else can do quite as eloquently.
Across four decades of work, Cave has used his music as a channel to reckon with tragic grief, dissect the loss of love and welcome a constant, unwavering optimism for humanity. Escaping from his lowest points with a renewed sense of fortune and a yearning for connection, his fans, in turn, look to him to answer their own life’s questions and hardships. Cave’s candour is striking, communicated not just in his lyricism but in his connection with the people who resonate with his work. There is an intimacy that comes with listening to Cave’s discography and, regardless of which song of his found you first, all produce the same tug at the heart.
Being introduced to Cave’s music can feel quite daunting, assumed to require a comprehensive knowledge of his life’s work to be accessible. This is a perplexity that Cave attempts to dispel in his newsletter, The Red Hand Files, upon learning that his appearance on Louis Theroux’s podcast.
“It seems that a whole lot of uninitiated people have come to The Red Hand Files this week, following my interview with Louis Theroux,” Cave writes. “I am afraid that I don’t think I am the right person to help you navigate my music though. My relationship to my songs is too entangled with their personal history, and I have no clear understanding as to which are the good ones and which are not.”
Cave proceeds to list his songs that come to mind, all of the good, the bad and those existing somewhere in between. In one declarative statement, he writes, “For a whole lot of despairing reasons, I think Ghosteen is, by any metric, the best album the Bad Seeds have ever made, however The Bad Seeds song I love the most is probably ‘Sad Waters’ from Your Funeral, My Trial”.
Released in 1986, ‘Sad Waters’ is a tale of being enraptured in love, unable to differentiate whether he is going with or against his will. Cave’s vocals echo against one another, evoking the sound of two minds at war. Lines such as “And then I ran my tin-cup heart along / The prison of her ribs,” are both sensual and haunting, sung with Cave’s customary wail. If this love he has found himself trapped in proves inescapable, then he records every detail and moment to savour. ‘Sad Waters’ was a song that, from its beginning, held weight in Cave’s mind.
He writes, “I cried at its slippery beauty when I first played it to my then girlfriend, Elisabeth, as we sat on her bed in Schöneberg, Berlin.”
Cave continues to name his other favourite Bad Seeds songs, including an earlier classic. He singles the electrifying love song ‘From Her To Eternity’ as being, as he writes, “Probably the best early Bad Seeds song, primarily because of Blixa Bargeld’s extraordinarily eccentric guitar playing, although perhaps Blixa’s most inspired moment was his blood-curdling scream at the end of ‘Stagger Lee’”.
Wherever your venture into Cave’s world may start, a song like ‘Sad Waters’ reveals his sensitivity wielded in his finest work.
