How Nick Cave Weathered Tragedy and Returned With ‘Wild God’

Two years ago, on an idyllic summer night in Oslo, Norway, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were holding a revival. Ostensibly, it was the long-running group’s headlining set at the Oya Festival, but any Cave experience these days is much more than that.

It wasn’t just because of the four gospel-style backing singers, the hymn-like quality of the slower songs, or Cave’s omnipresent sleek suit and stentorian speak-singing style, which has been compared to that of a preacher for so long that it’s become a clichéd descriptor — even as it has grown closer in tone to the Faulknerian fire and brimstone that influenced so much of his early work. The concert was a rapturous release — from COVID lockdown, yes, but it was also a vivid living symbol of Cave’s return from beneath the dark clouds surrounding the deaths of two of his children as well as his ex-girlfriend and collaborator, Anita Lane.

On this night in Oslo, Cave spent more than half the show at the very edge of the stage, shouting his lyrics directly into the audience’s faces as they grabbed his legs and shook his hands. The 10-member Bad Seeds — several of whom have been with him since the ’90s or even the ’80s — roared and soared and soothed with precision along with him, led by the wild-haired violinist Warren Ellis, Cave’s chief collaborator for the past decade. And after a series of understandably muted and at-times gloomy albums, his latest, “Wild God” — out today (Aug. 30) — continues that openness, unfurling a huge, full-band sound and rousing, almost anthemic choruses about redemption and release, beauty and sadness.

“It’s a joyful record,” he says. “Musically, it’s bursting with life, with vigor, with a kind of rapture.”

Few would have expected anything fitting that description from him a decade ago, let alone in the anarchic early years of his career. After all, Cave, now 66, is one of the most intimidating musical figures to arise in the past 40 years — a tall, deep voiced singer-songwriter-poet-novelist with a famously menacing demeanor and songs filled with even more ominous characters. But it all changed in 2015 after he suffered every parent’s worst nightmare: the death of his 15-year-old son Arthur after a fall during a hike. (His eldest son, Jethro Lazenby, from whom he was initially estranged, died in 2022 at the age of 31.)

Since then a very different Nick Cave has emerged — one who still creates challenging and soul-searching work but who also has become a sort of psychologist-minister to an audience he’d formerly worked hard to keep away. It began with his weekly “The Red Hand Files” newsletter (named after his popular 1994 song, featured in “Peaky Blinders”), where he answers often-intense and existential questions from fans, many of whom are in mourning, and continued with his 2018-19 “Conversations With Nick Cave” tour, a sort of live version of the newsletter wherein he’d play a song and then answer unmoderated, unfiltered questions from audience members. The shows often stretched past three hours.

It’s all spawned a dramatically different kind of fame for Cave, and it’s hard not to see the emails, the conversations, the tours and now the “Wild God” album as a gradually increasing process of opening up and outward.

“You might be right,” Cave says, leaning forward in his chair in a downtown New York hotel. “I guess the band and I move closer to that [revival] sort of thing all the time. We’ve been making complex records about complex things, but when we get onstage, it does feel like we’re in direct communication — direct communion, I would say — with the audience. It sort of washes away some of that complexity and turns it into much more of a kind of pure emotional uplift.”

While he describes his writing process with Ellis as largely improvisatory, Cave says the songs take on a new life with the Bad Seeds in a concert setting. “I feel that music isn’t just entertainment,” he continues. “It’s possibly the last authentic opportunity for transcendent experience we have left to us in the secular world. I think that music is a moral force for good — that’s embedded within the nature of music itself: It can make things better, so I take that really seriously.”

That connection with his audience — and his trust in it — becomes even more evident when Cave bats away any notion that such intimate encounters with fans, especially on his “Conversations” tour, were brave things to do. He’s genuinely puzzled by the word at first — “Why? What’s brave about it?,” he asks — even when it’s clarified to describe the courage it takes to lay oneself so open to virtually any verbal or physical interaction, all in an effort to help people.

“Well, there’s two reasons why you could be brave about these sorts of things,” he says. “One is to stand up and speak openly about matters of grief and things like that. I don’t see that as bravery; I see that as …” He pauses, then resumes: “Because [‘Conversations’] wasn’t that long after my son [Arthur] had died, I had a sort of madness. I didn’t really know what I was doing. Some people were saying, ‘You’re taking your grief on the road?,’ and others said, ‘You can’t go onstage unmoderated because people will ask things that are dangerous to answer; there are certain things you can’t talk about,’ or whatever. But the thing for me was, what could possibly go wrong that hasn’t gone wrong already? What could anyone ask me?” that might hurt more than what he’d already endured. “I didn’t feel brave at all, just mad with grief, and also bold and emboldened to do whatever I wanted, because what’s the worst that could happen?

“I don’t know whether it worked,” he concludes, “but it certainly felt necessary for me to do at the time.”

Fair enough — but what, one might ask, did he get out of that tour?

“I think I learned how to articulate these matters of grief,” he replies slowly, “and I also learned, very much, that I’m part of a larger humanity and connected to people, and that I was not alone in grief — that was very apparent to me once I started. I mean, the number of questions that were like, ‘This empty seat next to me is where my husband should be sitting, but he died two weeks ago,’ and things like that. People may have come explicitly for that reason, but there was so much of it. And so I felt like I was able to turn my insular, inward view of the world — which was very much a self-absorbed kind of place that I’d always inhabited as an artist — and switch it around and look out at the world.

“Now, there’s nothing to suggest that I would know anything more about some of these things than any other person on the street,” he continues. “But [with the Red Hand Files], I’ve been asked the question, so I give it a go. There’s a sort of agony-uncle aspect of it,” he laughs, “and I guess some of it is a kind of sermonizing. But there’s also a sense of duty.”

Why?

“Well, that’s a really good question,” he sighs. “They’re really difficult to do — they’re not just one-word answers. They have to be crafted in a way so that they sort of resonate. It gets to the end of the week and I say, ‘Oh fuck, I have to write a Red Hand File.’ But then I read the questions, and eventually one sort of presents itself — ‘I can answer that’ — so I sit down and do it, and I send it to my assistant, who has turned out to be a great editor, and she fixes up bits of it and it goes back and forth. There’s a kind of delight to it — I really enjoy it. Once I’ve got the letter ready and I’m putting it out, there’s a really good feeling about that, too. But the larger motive? I’m not really sure what it is, to be honest. I just feel that I was helped a lot, initially, by people writing to me, and now I can sort of give something back.”

Surprisingly, with such deep and intense subject matter constantly at hand, Cave says the creation of his lyrics is actually quite mundane. “I never really know how to answer that question,” he says. “It feels like inspiration has not much to do with anything — rather, it’s just sitting down, day after day, starting at nine o’clock in the morning and getting on with it. Inspiration is way too unreliable.”

So there are no epiphanies in the shower or while out for a walk or anything?

“No, that doesn’t happen,” he says. “My mind just doesn’t work like that, unfortunately. It’s… craft sounds cold, but a great song for me feels like a kind of confluence of small, even bad ideas. I just write lots of things, most of which aren’t very good, and I fill up my book in that way. Some lines just kind of hang around, and they seem to collect meaning as you keep going back to them. And then you find you can take this line here and this line from over here that has nothing to do with the other line, and put them together, and suddenly it’s like, wow, that’s sort of vibrating in some kind of way. And then I put this other line with them, and songs grow in that way. But I don’t ever sit down with a idea of writing about something.”

Having unleashed “Wild God” on the world, the Bad Seeds will launch a tour in September that begins in Germany and sprawls across Europe for two months, with North America and Australia and New Zealand to follow. And as untamed as the shows can get, as dark or unsettling as the music might be, Cave’s work is now about letting the sunshine in.

“If anything, it’s an attempt to turn people away from an embittered, cynical view of the world,” he says. “It’s moving in the direction of God, let’s say, rather than in the other direction. It’s somehow, I guess, promoting an idea that that we are of some value as human beings, that the world has some implicit meaning, and that the world is not shit — it’s beautiful! This has become a deeply controversial position on some level: A lot of people that write in are like, ‘No, you’ve got this wrong. This world is not that way at all, and I’ve arrived personally at this position through being damaged,’ or through a catastrophe or devastation of some kind.

“But I think the cynical view of the world is a sort of luxury that you can afford to have prior to the devastation,” he concludes. “And the devastation either breaks you — or it turns you around to look at the world as something of extreme beauty.”