Nick Cave is sitting—or rather holding court, in his usual stately manner—in a large, brown leather lounge chair at the top of the Greenwich Hotel, in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. Unbeknownst to him, as he looks over at me when I enter the room, silver streaks of afternoon rain make abstract patterns on the window behind his gloriously dark, pristinely combed hair. Not a lock is out of place. This could be Johnny Cash, or Elvis Presley—or God forbid, both—sitting there. But it’s “just” Nick, offering a warm hand and a warmer smile, awaiting a series of queries to unlock his endlessly thoughtful and considered answers to even the worst questions. In the final measure of things, it’s Nick Cave who needs other people. We all thought we needed him. Turns out, the feeling is mutual.

The assumption is, of course, that speaking with Nick Cave is serious business. He’s intimidating. He’s held conversations in cathedrals, backdropped by pipe organs. There is a book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, where he speaks over the course of over 300 pages with longtime friend and Irish journalist, Seán O’Hagan. There’s The Red Hand Files, a website and an emailed newsletter, where Cave ponders the often “big” questions sent to him by complete strangers. His answers pour out from the depths of his own experience and will likely inspire some readers to fire their own therapist.

If you’d like to see him discuss his recent foray into ceramics (The Devil—A Life; 2020-24), you can watch the project’s genesis in Andrew Dominik’s documentary, This Much I Know to Be True (2022), where Cave walks us through his process in a white artist’s smock, looking every bit the sinister Staffordshire craftsman he aspires to be. The film also captures the recording of Ghosteen (2019) and Carnage (2021). So why am I here? What else is there to say?

“Is it going to do alright, this record? What do you think?” I’ve barely lowered myself into the chair adjacent to his before he starts asking me about Wild God, the 18th studio album he’s recently completed with his band, The Bad Seeds. Nick Cave needs people (more on that below) and I’m the only one here. He’s eager to hear what I think about his new record, but I’m here to ask him about why he made it. It’s a meek standoff that ends when I press record, and we begin a process as old as Socrates—probing each other’s minds in search of some higher plane of understanding.

What do I think of Wild God? I think it’s brilliant, as in bright, glittering, and transcendent. Arriving, as it does, with open arms, as it were, with the orchestral embrace of “Song Of The Lake.” I tell him it sounds like I’ve walked into a work already in progress, that I’ve been invited to sit and stay for the remainder, that this album is the light after the dark suite of recordings he made, not necessarily consciously, in the wake of his son’s death: Skeleton Tree (2016), Ghosteen (2019), and Carnage (2021) with Warren Ellis.

Nick Cave seems happy with that brief assessment. Happy enough to vaguely gesture with his large hands that peek out of the sleeves of one of his ever-present, perfectly fitted suits. Those hands that I’m accustomed to seeing stab at the keys of a grand piano from afar, with myself cozy in a theater seat. But now, here he is, up close, and the pause along with the rain isn’t making me comfortable so much as eager to begin to find out whatever there is left to find out about this man, his music, and what compels him to keep working against his own better instincts.

You began writing what became Wild God on New Year’s Day. Can you describe that day, as it’s the closest we might get to understanding the origins of something you’ve made?

If it’s left up to me, I’ll never make another record again. My manager decides these things. When he says, “It’s time to make a record,” those are words that I really don’t want to hear, because it means stepping into a hole. It means stepping into quite a dark place. I make a date for the first of January, get Christmas out of the way, and I wake up in the morning, I sit in an armchair like this one, with books on top of me, and start to write. I haven’t had an idea about anything since the last record. I don’t collect lines in my mind. I don’t think, “Oh my God, I want to write a song about that,” or “This would be a great song to write about.” I don’t do any of that. I’m just happy to be free at this particular part of the creative journey.

I’m sitting there with nothing, really, but a sense of my own inadequacies. I start to just slowly put little words together. There’s just a feeling of doubt, terrible doubt, about whether I have the ability to get it up this time, shall we say. One last time! [Laughs] And as you get older, this doesn’t get any easier, right? I’m swimming upstream as the years come at me in this direction. I’m swimming against the tide. Most people in my business don’t manage to do that. They just go back somewhere downstream where it’s easier. I just start putting together tiny little lines. Most of the stuff that I’m writing is terrible, and there’s nothing about it but further evidence of my own inadequacies. And it’s a dark time. 

Creating something new is a dark time?

Yeah, it’s dark. I think it’s dark for most people. It is the beginning of the creative struggle, and the creative struggle is ultimately of massive value to one’s personal life, but also to society in general. In some way or another, that’s what most people are involved in, whether artistically or not, it’s the act of the creation of something. This is the heartbeat of existence, you know? To me, this is what it’s all about.

Early on, with Wild God, I had this picture in my mind of a kind of flying man that had this sort of hair flying behind him. I don’t know why, but it was moving across the world and looking down at the world and I attached the words “wild God” to him. That felt like some little thing and words started to find themselves around this image.

Do you recall the first words you wrote down?

The first lines I wrote down were for another song called “Frogs.” That was, “Ushering in the weekend, he knelt down and crushed his brother’s head in with a bone.” I wrote that and I thought, “Well, that’s something. That’s some way to start it.” That was going to be the first song. Let’s start the record with the first human act outside the Garden, right? The killing of one brother by another.

What made you settle on that image?

I don’t know. It just felt like a punchy way to start a record [laughs]. What could possibly go wrong after that? I didn’t have any real reason for it. It just felt like I could only go upwards from there. I don’t like writing lyrics. I really don’t like it.

If we’re talking about inspiration, where do you think it comes from? Chuck Close once said, “Inspiration is for amateurs— the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Picasso’s version is something like, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” You’ve said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Sometimes you just have to toss a few boxes of hair dye into a suitcase and go do your job.” All three of you are saying the same thing, really. 

[Laughs] Well, I prefer Picasso’s. That’s true. The idea of inspiration is overrated. It’s a kind of disinformation, or misinformation, that’s handed out to young people that think they only need to wander around the world to experience the world, and these wonderful ideas are just going to come into their minds. They’re going to flow through them and they’re going to be able to write beautiful songs about them or paint beautiful pictures, or whatever. It’s not true. That’s not what happens. For The Red Hand Files, I get people writing to me saying, “Look, I’m 55 years old. I’ve had this shit job most of my life, but I’ve decided I want to be a poet, or a painter, or something like that. Not quite sure which. What should I do?” And part of me just wants to say, “Don’t bother.” As if one has to become a poet, or a painter, or something like that, to get them out of the trap of a 9-to-5 job. It doesn’t. Art is a job. And it’s just as painful and debilitating and boring as any other job. But once I’m in the studio with The Bad Seeds or Warren [Ellis] it is pure joy, you know? There’s no artistic struggle in that whatsoever.

Is it always joyous? Watching Andrew Dominik’s documentaries, one doesn’t always get the impression that joy is being experienced.

[Laughs] You’ve got to understand what joy means to me. In some way, joy is a form of suffering, too. Joy is a sort of elevated feeling that fully understands the nature of what it is to be human. We are creatures of loss. That is what we are. Joy is the momentary leap that we make beyond that. We can make them artistically. We can make them in life. We can make these things happen to us when we see beauty in nature, when we spend time with friends. All of this sort of stuff. These are leaps beyond the default setting of suffering. So when I say “joyous,” I mean that quite literally. To be in the studio with the band, there are these feelings of intense elevation that come through making music with them. That doesn’t mean happy. Like we’re all slapping each other on the back and laughing. It’s not like that. But there are many, many moments of intense joy.

Without delving too deeply into politics or plague, or all of the things that have been ailing us these past few years, it almost feels as if joy has become a revolutionary act. That in the face of everything, as you once said about your own personal experience with tragedy, choosing to be joyful is...

It’s controversial. I’m not saying that we need to find something to distract us from what’s going on in the world. As we look at the world, with all of the horrors that are presented to us—whether they’re real horrors, or whether we’ve exaggerated them, I don’t know—but within that, the world continues to be beautiful. It’s really just a way of seeing the world. I guess what my controversial position might be is that I think it’s morally wrong to adopt a cynical or despairing position against the state of the world. That denies the world its essentialness, which is goodness and joy. We just need to look at the world in a particular kind of way, and if we cannot value the world, and we cannot value ourselves as human beings, then what’s the point of attempting to do anything of worth? What’s the point of attempting to save the world if we don’t see ourselves and the world as having intrinsic value? That’s what I’m trying to say within The Red Hand Files and in the music, to some degree.

Let’s talk about The Red Hand Files.

I am in this sort of wonderful position— even though I lead a fairly separate life from the world—because I’m like a rock star type of thing, a character. I have this river of information coming my way through The Red Hand Files. Part of what I see is a deep cynicism towards the world and a suspicion about everything—that at the center of everything is some kind of corruption, that there’s a sort of worm in the middle of every apple. That may be true, but it’s a deeply problematic way of looking at the world.

Is that why you are compelled to continue answering these big questions from strangers, to push back against that cynicism?

I guess so. If The Red Hand Files are anything, to me, they are the antidote to despair or cynicism.

Why do I sense that you weren’t always of that opinion? Have you ever experienced prolonged cynicism about the world?

I actually wonder, you know? As a young man, I characterized myself as holding the world in contempt. I’m not sure that’s true. My friend Anita Lane [a one-time close collaborator with Cave, The Birthday Party, and early Bad Seeds compositions who passed away in 2021]— one of the new songs was written about her. I was talking to her about this on one of our phone calls, and she said, “You have to remember that you always loved your mother.” And I said, “What do you mean by that?” And she said, “I always took this as an indicator that you were okay on some level.”

I didn’t quite understand what that meant until I was in my archive, and I opened up a box that my mother had left behind after she died. A trunk, not a box, and it’s just full of letters that I wrote to my mother as a young man. I had just left Australia and gone to London. There were 50 or 60 letters, long letters, to my mother talking about where I’d traveled and what I was doing. Because I know what was actually going on at that time, this was an attempt to make my mum feel okay about things. Although if I had gotten some of those letters from my kids, when they were at that age, they would have me completely freaked out, because it was pretty clear to read between the lines. But anyway, that idea I had of being completely contemptuous of the world, I don’t think it is actually true. Things certainly changed when my son died.

The usual question put to a musician with a new collection of songs would be, “What are you trying to say with this album?” I’m not even certain you were entirely aware of what you were making when you recorded Ghosteen. So, what is this new record saying to you? What did you learn from making Wild God?

That’s a beautiful way of putting it. I can tell you what I think these songs are about now, but I know that their true meaning will be revealed later on. Their true meaning will be revealed through repeated performances of the songs in a live situation. I don’t really know anything about what this record is actually about. Right now, it seems to me to be a record about things changing from one thing into another, centering around a song called “Conversion.” I don’t sit there and think, “This is going to be my recovery record. This is my deep grief record.” I wish I could sit down with a plan and just write it, but it’s not like that at all.

Why do you think so many animals appear on Wild God? Where did they come from, where are they going? 

Someone else pointed that out to me. I don’t know.

Maybe it’s an ark. Nick’s Ark.

It’s an ark! Yes! You’re fucking awesome. [Laughs] In the next interview, I’m going to say that. “Well, you know, it’s an ark.” I fucking said that!

Well, I’m thinking of the song “Frogs” and how they are “jumping for joy,” followed by the rabbit in the song “Joy” that “jumped up” and “fell down to my knees.” I couldn’t decide if you were both the frog and the rabbit, or neither. Who are these creatures?

“I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees.” Yeah, maybe it’s me. It’s a very beautiful song, “Joy.” The way that lyric goes—the first four lines are an old blues song. “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head/I felt like someone in my family was dead.” I can’t remember where I heard those lines. I just grabbed them and stuck them in my book and then started to write further on. I love that line—that I jumped up like a rabbit and dropped down to my knees, because it’s so animated. It’s partly joyful, partly despairing. The frog is a similarly beautiful animal in that it’s leaping. Its sort of posture is one of perpetually attempting to leap towards God, then landing back on the lily pad. It’s beautiful, beautiful. I was very pleased with that.

Earlier, I brought up the idea of joy as a kind of revolutionary spirit. I can hear it in these particular songs too.

I’m glad you said that, because that’s what it feels like. It feels weirdly controversial to love the world. How have we gotten to this place? I don’t think it’s because I’m older, although age has a lot to do with the way I think about things. I just think the world has changed. I think the way that we see ourselves as human beings through the influence of social media, and when we see what we’re doing to the planet.

Since 2019’s Ghosteen, you’ve worked on film scores and released the record Carnage (2021) with Warren Ellis. You also embarked on a solo piano tour with Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood on bass, who also appears on Wild God. Why make a Bad Seeds record now?

I wanted to make a Bad Seeds record. I didn’t want The Bad Seeds to come along and decorate a cake that was already baked, shall we say. They were there with me building the record, more or less, from the ground up.

You already have a great bass player in Martyn Casey, so how long does it take for someone like Colin Greenwood to qualify as a Bad Seed? 

The reason Colin plays a lot of bass on this record, is because after three months of writing, I rang Warren and said, “Look, I want to go into the studio, I’ve got some lyrics, let’s go and write some songs.” He’s like, “All right, mate! Fuck yeah!” And so we made a date to do two or three songs. We went in, and the first day we started playing together—and I’m just singing stuff and playing—and it sounded familiar. 

In a good way, or...

No! In a bad way. It was sounding like Nick and Warren. We needed some rhythm going on. Our bass player, Marty—he’s a fucking amazing bass player, but he lives in Perth. We’re friends with Colin Greenwood, and so we just rang him and said, “Look, come to the studio tomorrow. We need some bass.” And so he came on and he played within the songwriting process. He was just sort of playing around and ended up on a bunch of these songs.

You also did a brief tour with Colin on electric bass, with just you on solo piano. How did you feel about those performances?

I loved it. People liked it. And I love to play those songs. We did three dates in Finland during the summer. We’d swim around in lakes and shit, and then we’d play some gigs in the night, which are really easy to do. Easy in the sense that they’re not unbelievably taxing and exhausting. It’s a beautiful scenario and it’s an absolute pleasure to play. So it’s a thing. It will be a continuing thing, I hope.

I read somewhere that you don’t consider yourself to be a naturally empathetic person. How does one be an artist without empathy?

I don’t know where you read it, but I would say that it’s sort of true. What I’m trying to say by that is, to do The Red Hand Files requires me to access a part of me that doesn’t necessarily come naturally.

Is that why you do it?

It comes a lot more naturally to me now than it did early on. But compassion is a sort of practice, you could say. And I can now read a question and know, “Oh, okay, I can answer that one.” It’s easier to arrive at a compassionate response than perhaps it used to be. Well, you know, I mean, there’s a part of me—I’m Australian. Australians don’t complain. We just get on with things. We’re stoic. We don’t really do public displays of emotion. The Red Hand Files run very much against those impulses that are bred into me. Sometimes I read a submission and it’s someone talking about how they’re suffering in some way. Part of me is just like, “Hey, just fucking get your shit together and get on with life.” But this is an unhelpful response. Then, I read it again and find myself arriving at a more compassionate position.

Do you ever feel burdened by continuing to answer these questions in The Red Hand Files? You’ve mentioned that you read up to 100 per day. Can you stop doing something like this? Does it have an ending? What do you do with someone who says to you that you’ve saved their life with a song, or a letter?

I don’t feel like I’m in the business of saving lives, that’s one thing. But I do feel that I am a musician, and like other musicians, I have the opportunity to give people a kind of spiritual experience. That’s not me, in particular. It’s just something that I am able to do as a musician. So, I take that really seriously. I also take The Red Hand Files really seriously too, because it’s a similar thing. It’s an opportunity to improve matters. I think that’s the implicit nature of music. It’s morally good. It’s a good thing. There’s no such thing as destructive music, in my view. Even The Birthday Party’s music was essentially transcendent and took people from one place to another. When I go on stage, I feel I have a duty and an opportunity to give people that. I put everything I can into that. And it’s a little bit the same way with The Red Hand Files. Even though The Red Hand Files are a complete pain in the ass most of the time [laughs]. A pain in the sense that I get to the end of the week, and I think, “Oh fuck. I’ve got to write a Red Hand File!” I can’t remember which questions I highlighted that I think I can answer, and this thing takes time. It takes its toll in the sense that I could sort of do without it. But I could also do without songwriting. I could do without the whole lot, right? On some level. 

But it’s the same as songwriting. Once I’ve written a reply, I get it where it’s looking good, you know? I give it to my assistant Rachel, who edits, and who is absolutely brilliant. She sends it back, I knock it a bit more into shape, and it rather quickly unfolds week after week into this rather lovely thing. That’s incredibly meaningful for me, in the same way as all the ugly stuff that goes along with songwriting. You eventually end up with a song, and the song’s a beautiful thing, and of enormous value in its own way. In my view, the creative struggle is the essence of what it is to be alive. And I think that we all do it, whether we’re creative or not, or whether we’re doing artistic work or not. It’s part of being human.

We spoke earlier about what Wild God revealed to you as you made it, and how you won’t really know until you bring these songs out into the world in a live performance. Does it matter to you how people respond? When does the listener become important, if not when you are actually making these songs?

Probably in a live setting, where I can see them—when I can see their faces. It’s a pretty abstract thing, putting out a record. You want people to like it. You hope the reviews are good. I’m not arrogant enough to think that stuff doesn’t matter. I guess, at the end of the day, it’s playing this stuff live and looking into people’s faces and seeing the relationship that they have with the songs, and how much they mean to people. Then, I might think, “This is good stuff.” 

Illustrated by Dóra Kisteleki

Written by Gregg LaGambina

Concert Photo by Megan Cullen