Nick Cave - Interview

One Word At A Time

by Tina Whelski

It’s better to believe in something than nothing at all. So whether Nick Cave is searching for faith in the pages of the New Testament, on the disorderly streets of New York City, or rummaging inside his own soul, it becomes clear. He at least believes in the journey.

“A hemorrhaging of words and ideas,” is how the Australian-born singer/songwriter describes Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, his fourteenth studio album with The Bad Seeds. And like previous works, his narrative songwriting looks for God, love, and sex to explain their mysteries. But this time, he probes more emotional, abstract territory. And lets himself and bandmates, Mick Harvey, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos, Thomas Wydler, James Johnston, and, Conway Savage get more expansive.

Nick Cave talks about Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

Can you describe your mindset going into Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!?

What I tried to do was make a record that was not just a bunch of songs but that the songs kind of echoed throughout each other. I’m just trying to think what I was trying to do. I can’t remember what I was trying to do to be perfectly honest. It was a long time ago.

I’d imagine from start to finish, that your music passes through many lives. After completing the album and listening back, did it surprise you?

Well I was really pleased that it was good. That’s all I really cared about. And then I quickly forget about it and involve myself in the next thing. It’s always the next thing that’s of interest to me. But it’s important to know that thing before is at least good. And Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is a good record. It’s been an immense pleasure to play live. But what was going through my mind when I wrote it and all that sort of stuff, to be completely honest, I have no idea. I can’t really remember. Since then I’ve been writing a closing chapter for a novel, I’ve written a screenplay, I’ve done the music to the Cormac McCarthy movie The Road. All sorts of things have been going on. So it’s difficult to remember what the actual process was behind the record. But the process is pretty much always the same. I just sit down and do something. There’s not really a story behind it. I just put my head down and work.

Let’s talk about the narrative on “Today’s Lesson?”

“Today’s Lesson,” I think, was one of the first songs that I wrote. I mean what normally happens, and this took a longer time than usual, is that I have to write myself from the last record I made. So I sit down and I start working on a new record and it takes maybe a month to stop writing songs that sound like the last record. Or that come from previous records. This record took a long time to do that, to get away from what sounded to me like Nick Cave lyrics. And I think “Today’s Lesson” was one of the first songs that I found kind of wrenched itself away from that kind of writing. It was something different. “Today’s Lesson,” to me, is much more abstract. There’s a kind of humor to it, but it’s an extremely sinister, violently sexual song.

I guess what happened was that I found a different way to be narrative. Songs that I’d written before that had always been largely narrative songs. That’s just the way that I write. I find it difficult to write any other way. But there’s a different narrative style going on in these songs, which is much more confused and much more about digression and things like that. With that particular song I wrote it and it really creeped me out lyrically. I found it a very disturbing song. It related strongly to certain things that I was thinking about at the time. And that I’d heard about at the time. But it wasn’t a straight narrative. And that really pleased me.

What’s going on in "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!?"

Well you know that song came out of unfinished business. I’d spent many hours as a child at bible studies, hearing the stories of the bible. And that particular story always disturbed me. That Christ had brought this guy back after being dead. After being dead for three days as an example of his miraculous powers? And you never found out what happened to Lazarus. And we don’t ask him. That always disturbed me, so I thought that I would finish the tale.

Let’s discuss one more.

Well “Moonland” was kind of a long song. With much more of a narrative story within those words. I just kept chopping down and chopping down. And I got rid of the event that the story is around. And just talked about the peripheral activities going on around the song. That ended up being beautifully mysterious to me.

I’ve been playing Grinderman concerts for a while. It’s quite nice to do this interview because you keep reminding me of particular songs and I keep thinking, ‘Fuck that’s right. We do that song.’ And that song live is wonderful. It’s become something else.

People often paint a dark picture of you. But these songs seem like your way of casting those feelings away. To me that’s ultimately optimistic?

Well, I find the whole process of writing and recording a positive thing to do. It can’t be anything else. If you want to use that language, it is an optimistic thing to do. I know I’ve written some heavy going songs in my days. And I apologize to everyone for that. But I’ve never considered them depressing.

Do you remember when music touched you in a way where you knew it would always be part of your life?

I’m still surprised that it is. It was never what I was going to do. It was just an accident. I wanted to be a painter. But through a series of accidents I ended up being a musician.

We talked earlier about how for you, it’s always about moving on to the next project. What were you working on today?

Well I’m writing a novel. And today I killed off the central character. I’m quite pleased about that. It was a big day for him. (laughs). He is now officially dead. Which means I’m nearly finished the book. So that’s been quite exciting.

What inspires you to write?

Everything inspires. Other people’s art inspires me. Everything that I see. But in the end, I work. I sit down, put my head down and I work. And inspiration doesn’t really have that much to do with it. It’s more about writing one word after the next.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform at WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden on October 4.

Originally published in The Aquarian Weekly Oct 1, 2008.

Nick Cave Video for "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!"


an older one, "Into My Arms."