Adam Steiner is the author of Darker with the Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs of Love and Death, a detailed exploration of the history and deeper meaning behind Cave’s most celebrated songs. Steiner is one of the leading critical voices on the darker end of rock music and here he selects five essential Nick Cave tracks.
The Mercy Seat
If not Cave’s most iconic song, for me it is certainly his greatest creative achievement. Encompassing his core themes of murder, guilt, God and even love. From the tattooed knuckles of the convicted man facing down his death sentence and his imminent confrontation with God, or the devil. The track is built around a powerful and relentless drone, which shows the Bad Seeds at one of their most avant-garde Velvet Underground moments. So powerful It outshines the rest of the album Tender Prey and is played at almost every live show, also excellent when played solo on the piano!
Stranger Than Kindness
Borrowing from the mood of his earlier cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’, The Bad Seeds provide one of their weirdest most abstract songs. Built upon BLixa Bargeld’s shuffling tremolo guitar and largely written by Anita Lane, who Cave long-admitted was “the most talented of us all”, it gives a rare female perspective to Cave’s early musical world of lust and masochism. In its twisted poetry we hear the best of The Bad Seeds hitting a new creative drive that makes them stand out from other bands, reinventing rock and roll as they try to escape from under its shadow.
Girl In Amber
Skeleton Tree is massively underrated as a Bad Seeds album; it shows their great ability to step back, the quietened drums and bass are buoyed up by Cave’s piano and Warren Ellis synths. This song shows Cave in the midst of his grief, while Ghosteen explores its aftermath, I love the ambiguity within the track, watching images of a woman passing down a hallway, Cave presents the experience of grief at a remove, sleeping with ghosts and learning to live with loss, the song’s a beautiful elegy to the mid-point between grace and letting go.
Brompton Oratory
There are so many good songs to choose from The Boatman’s Call, a real outlier in the discography, it’s an album of great depth, and this song returns to Cave’s search for love, following his break-up with P J Harvey, we wanders into the church, coming down but also dreaming of the next fix, mired in heartbreak and addiction he finds solace in a holy place. The church itself gives the song shape as Cave makes a pledge between sips of wine and the smell of coital blood on his fingertips, mirroring the sacred and the profane in a single phrase, God offers him a moment of peace in the middle of a storm, he is that boatman far out, wondering if he can ever return to shore.
Higgs Boson Blues
A rollicking band improv which swells to a miniature epic Cave offers apocalyptic visions of wildfires to meet with Warren Ellis’ cycling guitar riff, combining Robert Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Miley Cyrus, and the devil himself breach the limits of the personal, the political, to meet with the universal, daring to split the atom in the shadow of God’s fragile existence. The song manages to embrace the raucous build and collapse of the Bad Seeds big songs, such as ‘Tupelo’ and ‘Red Right Hand,’ but transcends their narrow straight formula view with the widescreen jarring post-millenial collapse.
Further information
Adam Steiner is a writer, journalist and poetry film-maker. He has written a novel, Politics Of The Asylum, and three books of music criticism on Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie and Nick Cave. He runs a quarterly poetry-film screening Living With Buildings and in 2017 completed the Disappear Here poetry-film project about Coventry Ringroad.
Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death is out now on hardback, paperback and audiobook
