been trying out lots of di≠erent routes—loud,
quiet, angry, tender, obscene, manic, gentle,
direct, opaque, and on and on—to the same
kind of intense poetic truths. What you hear
when you hear these songs together is how
they share the same mission.
Even so, he’s one of the most unusual
arena performers you’ll ever see. Especially
during the more agitated songs when he
comes to the front of the stage, Cave performs
almost entirely to the 50 or so people clos-
est to him, most of whom reach at him with
their arms and claw at his legs whenever he
allows them the opportunity. Cave will later
tell me that there’s a banal, practical aspect
to this—his eyesight isn’t so good, so he
can’t see much detail beyond the first few
rows. But there’s something else too. “There’s
an energy I’m getting out of the people up
front,” he explains. “A kind of very immedi-
ate validation for what you’re doing. There’s
all sorts of things going on—there’s love,
and terror...I don’t know.” From the way he
says this, it’s clear the second emotion is at
least as useful as the first.¤¤¤ALTHOUGH ALMOST every frame and every
sound in One More Time with Feeling seems
to be in some sense about Arthur Cave’s
death, and although its last shot is of the
cli≠top, sea beyond it, where his life ended,
followed by the sound of Arthur and Earl
singing over the credits—a song they wrote
the music for with their father called “Deep
Water”—the film never directly addresses
what has happened. If you didn’t already
know, all you’d initially realize is that the
people on-screen are reeling in the wake
of a monumental but unspecified trauma.
Seventy-seven minutes pass before Arthur’s
name is spoken aloud.
To me, this only adds to the film’s dignity
and power and honesty. But others seem
to have felt di≠erently, even implying that
an obvious connection between the details
of Nick Cave’s lifethat are quite...I don’t know,” he says. “You
know, the great thing about these songs for
me is I can register their emotional impact
because they don’t even feel like they’re my
songs. They feel like they’re something that
just kind of occurred.”¤¤¤THE WAY THESE NEW Nick Cave shows work
doesn’t really make sense in theory. He
comes onstage and begins with three of the
most aching moments from Skeleton Tree;
the pulsing washes of music that carry them
are so desolate and stark that they’re almost
not songs at all but something much more
fragile. You can feel a sense in the room
that something mesmerizing is happening,
but it’s also hard to imagine where he can
go from here. Maybe there’s some scope for
songs from those Bad Seeds records where
beauty and space and melody come to the
fore, like “The Ship Song” from 1990’s serene
The Good Son, or “Into My Arms” from 1997’s
masterful song cycle of heartbroken piano
balladry The Boatman’s Call, or “Higgs Boson
Blues” and “Jubilee Street” from 2013’s Push
the Sky Away, a triumphant breakthrough
into a whole new kind of hypnotic, fractured,
meditative songwriting. But what about
the other songs, the ones where the anger
or disdain or sarcasm or malevolence or
aggression dominates, the ones that have
traditionally been performed by what Cave
will describe to me, somewhat wryly, as
the “deranged preacher”? How can that guy
possibly turn up now?
But somehow he does, and somehow it
fits right in. Even a song like the scabrous
“motherfucker”-strewn all-out assault of
“Stagger Lee,” from 1996’s Murder Ballads,
doesn’t seem jarring. Some artists evolve in
a way that leaves their past far behind them,
but though Cave has kept changing, it’s never
been in any one direction (not that long
ago he made some of the most direct, ribald,
and propulsive music of his career with the
two Grinderman albums), as though he’sGRINDERMAN
GrindermanNICK CAVE &
WARREN ELLIS
White LunarNICK CAVE &
THE BAD SEEDS
Push the Sky AwayNICK CAVE &
THE BAD SEEDS
The Boatman’s CallTHE BIRTHDAY
PARTY
The Bad Seed EPMUSIC
AN INDISPENSABLENICK
CAVE
PRIMER
And the Ass Saw
the AngelBOOKThe
PropositionFILM20,000 Days
on EarthDOCUMENTARYBOOK: COURTESY OF BLACK SPRING PRESS. FILM: PHOTO 12/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO. DOCUMENTARY: COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION. (continued on next page)