Just like a bird that sings up the sun
In a dawn so very dark
Such is my faith for you
Such is my faith
And all the world’s darkness can’t swallow up
A single spark
Such is my love for you
Such is my loveThere is a kingdom
There is a king
And he lives without
And he lives within– Nick Cave, “There Is A Kingdom” (1997)
Nick Cave is one of the most prodigious and deeply religious songwriters of our time. He has traversed the trials and temptations of the inferno to have contributed some of the most poetic, transcendent, human, and biblically inspired work of the popular music canon. Cave’s oeuvre walks the line between the sacred and profane, good and evil, murder and mercy, Christ and the devil, embodying the mysterious and terrible beauty that Dostoevsky expressed through the voice of Dimitri in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” In this article, I would like to share with you Nick Cave’s life, work, and relationship to faith as he moved through the heart of darkness to humanly “walk like Christ in grace and love.”
Nicholas Edward Cave was born on September 22, 1957, in Warracknabeal, a small country town in rural Australia. His father, Colin Cave, was an English school teacher and his mother, Dawn, was a librarian. Nick seemed destined to a life dedicated to the written word, as his father shared with him his love of Nabokov, Shakespeare, and the classics of the Western literary tradition. Cave’s first foray into music was as a choirboy: “I attended church a couple of times a week when I was young, because I was in the cathedral choir. And I learned a lot by going to church. I became familiar with, and really loved, the stories of the Bible. I was just drawn to the whole thing.” At thirteen, Cave was expelled from Wangaratta High School and sent to Caulfield Grammar School in Melbourne to finish his studies. Unfortunately, when Cave was nineteen his father was killed in a car accident, which left an indelible imprint on his life and work. “[My father] died at a point in my life when I was most confused. . . . The loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float, collect, and find their purpose.”
The young Cave was immersed in the popular progressive rock of the mid-seventies like Jethro Tull and King Crimson, but it wasn’t until he saw the legendary Brisbane-based punk band the Saints that he conclusively decided to become a musician. In 1977, he founded The Boys Next Door with long-time collaborator Mick Harvey, which subsequently became The Birthday Party, featuring the iconoclastic Rowland S. Howard on guitar. It was during this time that Nick began his decades-long immersion in heroin dependency, stating to Sean O’Hagan in Faith, Hope, and Carnage (2022), “I was already using heroin before my father died; I was well on the way.” The band was notorious for its extremely violent and drug-fueled live performances, even bludgeoning fellow punk rock assailant Henry Rollins into submission, with Rollins recounting, “I’d never heard a musical assault like that.” The Birthday Party imploded in 1982 and two years later Cave released his debut LP, From Her To Eternity, embarking on his more than forty-year career at the helm of the Bad Seeds.
The Bible is the enduring and comprehensive thread tying, underlying, sustaining, and nurturing Cave’s artistic vision . . .
The music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is defined by the blues, country, folk, and gospel tradition coupled with flourishes of post-punk, noise rock, and ambient music. Cave draws specific inspiration from singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, blues artists like John Lee Hooker, and the mythos of Elvis Presley. His lyrics are littered with references to pivotal works and characters in the Western literary canon including Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and “the poems of St. John of the Cross or the strange erotic writings of St. Teresa of Avila . . . which are in service to the divine, and become ladders to spiritual experience.” Yet the Bible is the enduring and comprehensive thread tying, underlying, sustaining, and nurturing Cave’s artistic vision from the earliest days of the Boys Next Door, the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds, and everything in between. In my view, Cave’s work can be roughly divided into two periods when the testaments of the Bible had a more pervasive influence: the Old Testament (1983–1997) and the New Testament (1997–present day).
In Nick’s Old Testament years, he professed, “I had a burgeoning interest in violent literature, coupled with an unnamed sense of the divinity in things and, in my early twenties, the Old Testament spoke to that part of me that railed and hissed and spat at the world.” It was during this time that he wrote some of his most compelling and revered songs, including “Tupelo,” “Sad Waters,” “The Ship Song,” “Straight To You,” “Nobody’s Baby Now,” and “The Mercy Seat.” This last work is particularly emblematic of this time period, telling the story of a man on death row about to be sent to the electric chair. The song perfectly reflects Cave’s unique balance between the sacred and profane, metaphorically relating the death row electric chair with the Ark of the Covenant’s mercy seat from Exodus chapter 25:
In Heaven His throne is made of gold
The ark of His testament is stowed
A throne from which I’m told
All history does unfold.
Down here it’s made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.Into the mercy seat I climb
My head is shaved, my head is wired
And like a moth that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life
Just to hide in death awhile
And anyway I never lied.…
And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I’m yearning
To be done with all this measuring of truth.
And an eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I’m not afraid to die.”– “The Mercy Seat” (1988)
The song was later covered by Cave’s hero Johnny Cash on his LP American Recordings III: Solitary Man (2000) to Nick’s thrill and appreciation: “Like all the songs he [Johnny Cash] does, he made it his own. He’s a great interpreter of songs—that’s part of his genius. These are the things that can’t be taken away from you. . . . It doesn’t matter what anyone says, Johnny Cash recorded my song.”
It was during the Old Testament period that Cave was in the depths of heroin dependency; upon later reflection, he equated that time with a spiritual emptiness and a seemingly contradictory desire for order: “It could be that using heroin and the need for the sacred dimension to life were similar pursuits, in that they were attempts at the time to remedy . . . a kind of emptiness. . . . I took heroin because it fed into my need for a conservative and well-ordered life.” Unconventionally, heroin did not interfere with the volume or quality of his output, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s, after several failed attempts, that Nick finally put heroin behind him.
Cave’s New Testament period began with the autobiographical LP The Boatman’s Call (1997). The album was a departure from his more character- and narrative-driven output to a confessional, personal, and intimate songwriting style that defines his later catalog. The album consists primarily of piano-driven ballads with lyrics about the dissolution of relationships and a more public embrace of faith-filled themes and explorations. The opening track “Into My Arms” (written in the dormitory of a rehab facility) has since gone on to become one of Cave’s live staples and fan favorites, and it is representative of Cave’s relationship to Christ up to the present day, buoying between faith, doubt, searching, and conviction:
I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms…
And I don’t believe in the existence of angels
But looking at you I wonder if that’s true
But if I did I would summon them together
And ask them to watch over you
To each burn a candle for you
To make bright and clear your path
And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love
And guide you into my arms…
But I believe in Love
And I know that you do too
And I believe in some kind of path
That we can walk down, me and you
So keep your candles burning
And make her journey bright and pure
That she will keep returning
Always and evermore
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms– “Into My Arms” (1997)
Cave’s relationship to Christ and faith is complicated and paradoxical. He has expressed in recent interviews his wariness of the label “Christian,” his disdain for the term “spiritual,” and his identification as a “religious” person: “The word ‘spirituality’ is a little amorphous for my taste. It can mean almost anything, whereas the word ‘religious’ is just more specific, perhaps even conservative, and has a little more to do with tradition. Religion is spirituality with rigour, I guess, and yes, it makes demands on us.” Cave has also expressed his love of attending Mass and prayer, yet maintains a measure of ambiguity: “Even though I go to church . . . I struggle with it. I feel the church I attend allows me a lasting structure that can contain my unbelief and belief both—that is to say, my love for the motion, direction, and energy of faith, albeit nested in a certain scepticism of its ultimate destination.” Cave’s relationship to faith calls to mind Dostoevsky in his unpublished diaries and notebooks (1881): “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.” It is the questioning and contradictory human heart that beats between doubt and faith at the center of Cave’s work that makes it so compelling and inspiring.
Although confessing a long-standing interest in Christianity, the Bible, and church attendance, it was the tragic death of Nick’s fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, in 2015 that deepened his religious convictions: “After Arthur died, the world seemed to vibrate with a peculiar, spiritual energy . . . so unbelievably rich are the benefits of a devotional life. . . . Stepping into a church, listening to religious thinkers, reading Scripture, sitting in silence, meditating, praying—all these religious activities eased the way back into the world for me. Those who discount them as falsities or superstitious nonsense, or worse, a collective mental feebleness, are made of sterner stuff than me. I grabbed at anything I could get my hands on and, since doing so, I’ve never let them go.” It was out of this unimaginable grief that Cave penned his twenty-first-century masterwork Ghosteen (2019), which built upon the initial grief of Skeleton Tree (2016), transfiguring despair into esoteric jubilance, best expressed by the opening words of the title track:
The world is beautiful
Held within its stars
I keep it in my heart
The stars are your eyes
I loved them right from the start
A world so beautiful
And I keep it
In my heart.– “Ghosteen” (2019)
From the outpouring of grief over Arthur’s death, Nick started one of his most ambitious projects to date: a blog called The Red Hand Files. The idea came from the flood of letters Nick received from strangers seeking to console, offer guidance, or extend a kind word to a father in the midst of grief, despair, and emotional carnage. Nick decided to initiate a question-and-answer portal where he could read and perhaps respond to the correspondence. He has since gone on to read every letter and has responded to over 300 (and counting) questions and comments ranging from the mundane, absurd, comical, tragic, and philosophical. The Red Hand Files has found Nick in the role of pastor or shepherd, attending to an appreciative and sometimes critical flock with humility, compassion, and wise insights often gleaned from personal experience, yet always with Christ as the guiding star of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Nick Cave has released eighteen studio albums with the Bad Seeds, ten books including And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) and The Death Of Bunny Munro (2009), and sixteen soundtracks to films like The Road (2010) and Blonde (2022). He has collaborated with Johnny Cash, Kylie Minogue, and Shane MacGowan and has been given the Order of Australia for “distinguished service to the performing arts as a musician, songwriter, author, and actor, nationally and internationally, and as a major contributor to Australian music culture and heritage.” Cave has won countless awards and has been called “the greatest living songwriter.” Recently, Bob Dylan—another of Nick’s heroes—went to his performance in Paris and appreciatively quipped, “I was really struck by that song ‘Joy’ where he [Nick] sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.’ I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.”
On a personal note, as a fellow Australian singer-songwriter, Nick and his work and his biography have left a remarkably deep and lasting impact on me since my earliest teens, when I first saw him on the late-night music video program Rage performing the song “Deanna” with that immortal refrain: “I ain’t down here for your money / I ain’t down here for your love / I ain’t down here for your love or money / I’m down here for your soul.” It was at that moment that Cave lit the spark to my own path in music, art, literature, and self-discovery. I’ll always be eternally indebted to him. I’d like to leave you with lyrics from Nick’s latest album, Wild God (2024), recorded with the Bad Seeds, which I believe provides a profound insight into Nick’s contemporary view of life, God, salvation, and grace:
She sits at the window
Her hands folded on her sleeping lap
As He steps from the tomb
In His rags and His wounds
Into the yellow light that streams
Through the window, He brings
Peace and good tidings to the land
Peace and good tidings to the land
And a the waters cover the sea
And as you wake and turn to me
Peace and good tidings He will bring
Good tidings to all things– “As The Waters Cover The Sea” (2024)
