The music of Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave has been central to my life, and so has his writing. In his 2015 book, The Sick Bag Song, so named because he wrote it on airplane sick bags, he writes about a song in which he conjures up an image of himself pushing Elvis Presley’s belly up a hill, a reference to the myth of Sisyphus.
In this passage, he alludes to living with what he calls the burden of our influences. This is the shadow that falls across our lives in the shape of those we admire, follow, and seek to emulate. Cave has called himself king-sized in song, but ultimately he knows Elvis is the only real king in rock music. This passage is all poetic and tongue-in-cheek, but it does get at the idea of how we seldom transcend those who influence us, as hard as we might try.
Cave is one of my influences. You’d never know it, and I couldn’t come close to his giftedness. But almost every time I pick up a guitar or think about a lyric, his image floats into my mind. I’ve been pushing him uphill for years. Other than AC/DC, I have seen Nick Cave in concert more than any other artist.
In 2004, I was standing at the bar in the back of the Brixton Academy, a music venue in London, with my brother. Onstage, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were conjuring up music of epic proportion—wailing instruments and pounding drums, mania flowed off the stage like a fever and infected the audience. Stark white lighting threw long shadows of the band along the venue walls, making them look like vampiric creatures in an F. W. Murnau film. My brother, who is not known for his religious interests, leaned over to me and shouted, “Bloody hell, it’s the house band in hell—or heaven!” He meant it in the most complimentary way. This music was transcendent, rapturous, a sound that only angels might make—if they were angels of the apocalypse, perhaps.
Cave has mined the Bible throughout his musical career, filling his songs with imagery drawn from its pages. Like Leonard Cohen, Cave has crafted a personal interpretation of Scripture. He once said that God lives in his songs but not outside of them. “Life is not a story. It’s often one event piled on top of another event,” Cave said in the lovely and poignant 2016 documentary One More Time with Feeling, which was released to promote Skeleton Tree, his latest album with the Bad Seeds. The documentary was intended as a buffer, a way of promoting the album without having to face the press in the wake of his fifteen-year-old son’s tragic death. Making both an album and a documentary in the wake of immense loss is an accomplishment alone, but these two works are more than just admirable efforts at confronting life’s tragic curveballs; they are perhaps the most honest and beautiful confrontations with grief I’ve encountered in a long while.
Skeleton Tree released in 2016 just months after David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, which came loaded with meditations on what turned out to be Bowie’s own fast-approaching death. That year, pop music gave us rich tools with which to face mortality, works that resonated with deep honesty and offered no easy answers to life’s challenges. You might think a film shot following Cave’s immense tragedy would be voyeuristically morbid, but One More Time with Feeling isn’t heavy-handed or leaden. It simply breathes and aches as you breathe and ache with it. The film hints at the tragedy from the beginning, but it draws us deeper and deeper into the film before telling that story. The film’s 3-D effect might seem like an odd choice given its content, but the camera spirals through everything, gently drawing us into the heart of things. Its greatest gift is its offering of something rare in these days of platitudes and rehearsed answers to all of life’s complexities: it faces grief in all its rawness, and doesn’t overcome it.
Much like the writer Christopher Hitchens, who challenged the language of “fighting” cancer, Cave faces the loss of his son not by crying out to God or overcoming the demon of loss, emerging as the conqueror of grief. Instead, with candor and deep pain, Cave acknowledges that certain life events can change you forever. “Time has become elastic,” he says. In healing from traumatic loss, you might stretch away from the event, but you can always snap back to that moment when your life changed forever. The challenge, Cave offers, is to remember that surviving such loss is about figuring out, again and again, how to live with the unfamiliar person it has turned you into.
Seven of the eight Skeleton Tree songs featured in the film were recorded before his son’s death, but all of them are somehow weighted with the grief. The resulting work of art is a sublime meditation against the tragic unfairness of life. Toward the end of the documentary, each person featured in it is shown portrait-like against a gray wall—the film crew, the band, Nick’s wife, his surviving twin son Earl, and then an empty frame—the portrait of a missing son. Cave’s voice explains that he and his wife have decided to be happy as an act of revenge against death.
When tragedy strikes, we must find a way to live again—without answers, because there are none. Cave’s path of revenge might just be the way to go.