Nick Cave and “Wild God”: The Time of Joy and the Bad Seeds

“Said, we’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy”, sings Nick Cave in “Joy”: the song tells of the encounter with a ghost, a “wild ghost”, wild like the God who gives the title to the album. A ghost who invites the protagonist to free himself from ghosts, from pain, and to move forward.

It is the central phrase of “Wild God”, the new album by Nick Cave with the Bad Seeds, which is out on Friday, August 30. Paradoxically, it is in one of the album’s most rarefied tracks – but “Wild God” is both the album of the return to joy and the return of the Bad Seeds. After the minimal productions in duo with Warren Ellis, this is the album that has the sound of a band. A different return: very soft, choral music, but with the guitars almost completely absent. “Those times are over”, Cave said in one of the few interviews of these weeks: an album full of energy, yes, but without repeating the sound of the “old Bad Seeds”.

Mission accomplished: this is Nick Cave as we haven’t heard him in a long time: intense, airy, open. With glimpses of spiritual reflection on rebirth, joy and the transcendent power of music.

The Bad Seeds in the shadow (in the studio)

The story of the last 10 years of Nick Cave is a very particular one: a period marked by mourning (the loss of two children, starting with Arthur, who died at 15 in the middle of the making of “Skeleton Tree” – then his mother, and several friends/colleagues); an elaboration of mourning that has transformed into a deep spiritual and human research, through music: an austere hyper-productivity of study marked by bromance musical with Warren Ellis.

But also through other forms of parallel writing: books, and especially the Red Hand Files, newsletters in which he answers fans’ questions. The Bad Seeds ended up in the shadows, at least in the studio: because live it was another story, with the arrival in the arenas, with a show in which musical transcendence passed through the sonic and physical intensity of the band.

“Wild God” brings the Bad Seeds out of the shadows even in recorded music: hearing the piano and the openings of songs like “Final Rescue Attempt” one cannot but recall “Let Love In”.

But it is a very different Cave, more mature, who no longer speaks of the dark side of love: today he is rather “Amazed of love and amazed of pain, Amazed to be back in the water again”, like the frogs in “Frogs”. A reference brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s fish who instead do not know what the environment in which they live is in “This is Water”. Cave instead learned at his own expense what the water and mud in which frogs and even men live are made of.
Today Cave is “Touched by the spirit and touched by the flame”, as he repeats in the choral and overwhelming finale of “Conversion”. Conversion is, according to Cave, the central theme of the album: not in a strictly religious sense – even if the references to God are always numerous, starting from the title – but rather the transformation, the elevation, the transcendence after the pain. A process in which music is central “Regardless of how everything may seem to be going from bad to worse, we continue to do wonderful things. And that’s what I think this record expresses (…) Music makes things better. It’s one of the last things we have left to have a truly transcendent experience. Music is not something I take lightly”, he told Mojo.

Joy in Pain: A Great Return

The proof of this joy, of the wonder one feels in front of life, can also be heard in “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”, a moving dedication to Anita Lane, the bad girl from the early Bad Seeds, recently passed away. A tender dedication, far from painful, that opens by declaring that “She rises in advance of her panties/I can confirm that God actually exists” and closes with a voice message from Lane herself in which she remembers the fun of being together.

A great return for an artist and a band that have never left, but that bring us back to the dimension that we require from great music: to help us make sense of things, to transform us even for just a few dozen minutes, with words and sounds that you carry with you even after.