Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. . . . So how do we return to our lives-to the awe of existence-and reclaim a sense of wonder?” Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder. “In an artist’s case (and perhaps it is the same for everybody) I would say it is a sense of wonder. “But what had collapsed? What is at the centre of our lives?” Cave wrote. He then admitted that, for about a year, he had trouble mustering words, owing to the fact that the “centre had collapsed” from his life after the tragedy. Did it get easier after what seemed to be quite a challenge around ‘Skeleton Tree’? ” Cave started with good news, telling Jakub that something had “definitely shifted,” and that he felt “intensely connected” to his writing. “I would love to know how you feel about your writing now. Jakub, a listener from Łódź, Poland, was featured in the first newsletter exchange, in September. Earlier this year, he embarked on a worldwide speaking tour, “Conversations with Nick Cave,” which revolves around Cave having direct discussions with audiences and playing some of his band’s songs solo on piano.Ĭave’s newsletters both demystify his persona and directly address longtime fan curiosities, such as whether Grinderman, another former band of his, might one day reunite. His recent concerts have included an act that involves inviting roughly fifty people onstage to join him in singing, swaying, and collectively reaching heavenward to “push the sky away,” as one song goes. Then, in 2016, he pulled back the curtain on his creative process in “One More Time with Feeling,” a gripping black-and-white film that documented the band’s recording of “Skeleton Tree.” He also turned to face his fans and pass them the microphone. They cultivate discussion and the radical notion that people can still be good to one another.Īfter Arthur’s death, Cave stepped away from the spotlight, living as privately as possible. While the artist-fan relationship relies on symbiosis, these nuanced exchanges-communions, really-confront listeners with brutality and tenderness. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption.”Īside from his music, Cave’s newsletters seem like the most resonant connection between him and the people who have found a sense of themselves, and of the world, within his sung words. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. “Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake,” he continued. Within the inevitable chasm between life and death, Cave noted, something else emerged.
There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves.” He felt that his son beckoned to him and his wife, the fashion designer Susie Bick, from beyond the grave, too, both in waking and in dreams. “Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.
“It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. “You fell from the sky, crash-landed in a field near the River Adur,” he sings in the first line of the album’s opening track, “Jesus Alone.” At the time, Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds, were deep into conceptualizing their sixteenth album, “Skeleton Tree.” (Before Arthur’s death, they had written the songs but hadn’t fully recorded them.) The transformative weight of this album, released the following year, is propelled in part by Cave’s uncanny writing and his grave, baritone intonation. In 2015, Cave’s fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, died when he accidentally fell from a cliff. Are you and Susie feeling that your son Arthur is with you and communicating in some way?” “I have experienced the death of my father, my sister, and my first love in the past few years and feel that I have some communication with them, mostly through dreams,” she wrote. It featured an exchange between Cave and a listener named Cynthia, from Shelburne Falls, Vermont. Named “Issue #6,” the message was part of an ongoing newsletter dubbed The Red Hand Files. He made no pressing announcements, nor did he alert his fans about coming tour dates. Last week, the Australian musician Nick Cave sent his e-mail subscribers an unusual missive.
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