While others nursed hangovers on New Year’s Day, 2023, Nick Cave got to work.
Picking up his brown bespoke notebook, the songwriter stared at the blank pages. Inspired by the Old Testament parable of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, a couplet eventually came: "Ushering in the week he knelt down and crushed his brother’s head in with a bone / It’s my great privilege to walk you home."
These first day of the year ruminations appear in "Frogs," one of the stirring songs on Wild God, which is out now. Despite the brotherly violence depicted in "Frogs," Wild God — the 18th studio album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — is a joyful listen.
Co-produced with longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, Wild God features 10 soaring new Cave compositions guided by the artist’s distinctive baritone. "It’s pure pleasure," Cave says of the listening experience, adding that making the album with the band he first formed in 1983 and guest bassist Colin Greenwood was "extraordinarily good fun."
On this first release since 2021's Carnage, Cave meditates on the past, present and future. True to form, the songs are complex narratives sprinkled with metaphor and profundity. Wild God is one of the few records Cave has made that he relistened to after all the mixes were complete. And, after each playback, the artist smiled.
Like Neil Young’s relationship with Crazy Horse, Cave has a similar longstanding agreement with the Bad Seeds: When the songs he pens call for these band of musical brothers, they are ready. In session, the band were operating at "full force" and "off their leash," the two-time GRAMMY nominee says. The band recently announced that it will embark on its first North American shows in seven years, beginning in the spring of 2025.
Learn more: The Essential Nick Cave: 10 Songs Highlighting His Dark Brilliance
Born and raised in rural Australia, the 66-year-old has been making music for more than a half-century: From his beginnings as the frontman for the anger-driven post-punk group Birthday Party, to the Bad Seeds and his own solo efforts. While the artist has worn many hats in this storied career, Wild God developed the way all of Cave's music has: slowly, via discipline and hard work.
"There's a lot of work done prior to going into the studio that I do on my own," Cave explains. "I sit there day after day writing lyrics. It’s a difficult, painful and slow process that does not get any easier as you get older."
When Cave begins writing songs for a new record, he treats the process the same as any other job. Once he opens his notebook — and puts pen to paper — the singer/songwriter stays there from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m., whether or not the words flow. The next day, he begins again and repeats the process. "I do that whether I feel like it or not," Cave explains. "I work like pretty much everybody else. I don't walk around the world waiting for ideas to drop down from the heavens … I've never felt that happen. Songwriting, for me, has always just been hard work."
Cave typically goes into a songwriting session without a plan. "Whenever I sit down to write, I don’t really find out what I feel about things at any given time," he adds. "Having said that, with Wild God the one thing I wanted to do right up front was to get the Bad Seeds back in, just for the basic health of the band, I felt that they'd been kind of put out to pasture for a couple of records: Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen."
While the songwriting process remains the same, and the Bad Seeds are a constant companion, what has changed the most for Cave — especially in the last decade — is his relationship with his audience. Earlier in his career, Cave cared little what others thought about his art, an attitude derived in part from the angry energy of the Birthday Party. Today, Cave is an empath who embraces music’s universal role as a spiritual, connecting force.
While Wild God may be more joyful than previous records, Cave's work is still informed by grief and pain. Life's fragility was revealed to Cave in 2015, when his 15-year-old son Arthur fell off a cliff near his Brighton home. Cave's eldest son, Jethro, passed away in 2022 at just 31 years old. These experiences led to the artist feeling acute grief, which he had never experienced before. "O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)" is one of the songs on the new record that speaks to another lost love: Anita Lane, an ex-Bad Seed and longtime girlfriend of Cave, who died in 2021.
In September 2018, Cave started a project called The Red Hand Files as a way to process grief, and connect with others in a world marked by too much disconnect. What began as an online experiment — with no moderator, simply the artist allowing anyone that visited the site to ask a question — recently surpassed 100,000 letters. He has read all of these epistles and spends three days of his week on this non-monetary project. Through this correspondence with strangers, Cave shows vulnerability; it has revealed a side of the artist’s personality many did not know. And, through these exchanges — and his non-judgemental, heartfelt replies — the artist has helped many grieve and in the process this noble experiment for him has also been life changing.
While the songs on Wild God brim with hope, wonder and love, these joyful meditations that Cave feels has "the effect of throwing its arms around the listener" were born from Cave’s grief and the newfound connections made with people from around the world, one question at a time, via The Red Hand Files.
Bible Stories, Wild Gods & Frogs
The Bible has been a constant inspiration throughout Cave's career. Parables from the good book are evident in a close-reading of Wild God's lyrics and song titles, but what is it about the Scriptures that make Cave return to them again and again?
"It's never a return to these stories," he explains, "it’s more that the language of the Bible is in my blood. I've just read it so much, from the time I was a child to the present day, and I find it an extraordinary source of inspiration. The stories are challenging, mysterious, extraordinarily beautiful and also haunting. It's endlessly good for the business of songwriting!"
The phrase "Wild God" was similarly derived from Biblical themes. Depending on one’s religious beliefs, God is often referred to as either vengeful or loving, but rarely "wild." Yet, for Cave, who grew up singing in the church choir, and has always been drawn to Christianity, this phrase felt right.
"For many, religion is not a neutral thing," he explains. "There is a wildness to it. There is a danger of involving yourself in the religious experience. It asks something of you that's challenging and confronting and difficult. And, often, it's not as people imagine the religious experience to be … it's anything but a comfortable place."
"Wild God" summed up those feelings, and is represented by a character who moves through the record. "[It's] this sort of old, restless individual searching through the songs for something and finding an assortment of different ways and scenarios," Cave details. "The record was actually going to be called Joy, which is also one of the song titles, but I thought people might misunderstand the word."
"Frogs" is one of the most allegorical songs on Wild God. When the single was released earlier this year, a fan asked a question about its meaning via The Red Hand Files, to which Cave provided this detailed answer. Probed to expand on this song’s symbolism, Cave offers some more insights into how humans resemble these amphibians.
"'Frogs,' for me, is a beautiful metaphor for the act of creation," he explains, "for that joyful feeling where we sit in our own selves and occasionally we can leap up. This represents the creative journey; then, we land back on the lily pad and there's something very beautiful about that to me. That’s what I want my life to be … that of a leaping frog. For me, the whole record really is that transcendent leap."
Buffalo Bound
After Wild God was produced and the rough mixes completed, Cave felt something was still missing. "Sonically, the mixes sounded like what you would expect from a Bad Seeds record, but there was something about them that just wasn’t touching me emotionally," he explains.
So, Cave decided to seek an outsider’s opinion. Enter David Fridmann, a founding member of 1990s alt-rock band Mercury Rev and producer of critically-acclaimed records for the likes of the Flaming Lips, MGMT and Sparklehorse. "He'd done a bunch of records that I really love and I thought what he did sonically with them was really immediate and catchy, so we took the songs to his studio in Upstate New York," Cave recalls.
Fridmann mixed the record without the band in the room, only inviting them back in to listen at the end of the day. His mixing mastery made the record soar. "David took all the nuanced elegance out of the music and turned it into something that was purely emotional, so that when the builds hit, they hit hard, clearly and spaciously," Cave effuses.
A Note From Leonard Cohen
GRAMMY.com caught up with Nick Cave on a day when he admitted to being "slightly delirious" from a week of press that included an intimate conversation held by the GRAMMY Museum. By the end of our conversation, he's anything but.
Cave reflects on the power of Leonard Cohen, one of his earliest creative touchstones. The artist was 14 years old when he first heard the Canadian songwriter and it’s a day he has never forgotten. "The sister of my best friend told me, ‘I’ve got this new record you’ve got to hear, come around to my place and give it a listen," Cave recalls. "She put on Songs of Love and Hate. The first song ‘Avalanche’ just blew my mind. The earned wisdom in that voice spoke to me in a way that no other music has ever spoken to me."
Cave met many of his songwriting heroes, like Johnny Cash, before they passed, but Cohen is not one of them. They did have a few mutual friends, however, and in his time of grieving the poet laureate of pessimism reached out.
"When my son died, out of the blue, Leonard sent me an email that said, ‘I'm with you, brother, LC.’ That simple, beautiful gesture helped me. For that kindness alone I owe him."
With Wild God — from the opening notes of "Song of the Lake" to the choral closer, "As the Waters Cover the Sea" — Cave, like his mentor Cohen, shares earned wisdom in beautiful words and melodies that transcend time and touch the listener listen after listen.