By Patricia Johnson
Elm Staff Writer
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds recently released their eighteenth studio album, “Wild God,” which has shaken the musical world. In this album, Cave captures an authentic confrontation of grief, finding his way out of a dark place through his music.
The 66-year-old singer has made a decorated musical career for himself, with several Bad Seeds songs featured in major motion pictures such as the “Scream” films and “Peaky Blinders.” Unfortunately, while Cave has seen professional success, life leading up to the creation of “Wild God” have been a series of one life-altering tragedy after another.
In 2015, his 15-year-old son Arthur fell from a cliffside near his home in Brighton and died. Cave said in an interview for The Guardian, “Even when I’m trying to use art to escape certain feelings and sorrows I have, everything just seems to fall into the slipstream of the loss of my son.”
For a long time, Cave had to work through the wreckage left in aftermath of Arthur’s death. Cave’s pain, reflected in 2016’s bruised and brittle “Skeleton Tree,” was written and recorded directly following Arthur’s accident.
2019 found the band trying to pick up the pieces with “Ghosteen.” According to Pitchfork, “‘Ghosteen’’s ambient synth soliloquies were conceived as a means of communicating with his late son.”
Then, just as Cave was learning to live again, his bandmate and partner Anita Lane suddenly passed away in 2021, and his oldest son, Jethro, died the following year in 2022.
Cave wrote in a letter to his fan project, The Red Hand Files, “You think you know grief, you think you’ve worked out its mechanics, you think you’ve become grief-savvy — stronger, wiser, more resilient — you think that there is nothing more that can hurt you in this world, and then Anita dies.”
Though “Wild God” began as an album about joy and piercing through the blackness it lapsed into a search for connection and healing from all-consuming grief.
The album’s self-titled track follows Cave’s emotional journey as he sings, “He was a wild God searching for what all wild Gods are searching for,” a line that portrays his grief in the aftermath of these cutting losses.
Then, in the second verse, he sings behind a swelling choir of voices, “The people on the ground cried, ‘When does it start?’ / And the wild god says, ‘It starts with a heart,’” an ode to Cave’s fans who supported him in moments of darkness.
According to Atwood Magazine, “This album feels like a return to living, as though Cave has awakened from a grief-induced sleepwalk and learned to love life again.” After losing the people closest to him, Cave uses this album as an outlet to create joy in his life again while also commentating on the ways grief fundamentally changes a person.
“Wild God” is a unique and experimental outlet for grief. It shows a new perspective on how music and song can transcend someone out of the darkness and into the light.
Cave said in a podcast episode of On Being, “I think humanity itself is a club and that we are all feeling these senses of loss, whether it’s directly personal, it is bred into us, that sense of yearning. And that’s not a failure. It’s a condition.”
Cave explains that feeling these different emotions is part of humans being honest with themselves and accepting the ways community can dim the worst of sorrow.
“Wild God” contains a rollercoaster of emotions yet focuses mainly on the liminal spaces between joy and grief. In this album, Cave shows listeners that joy and sadness can be at harmony with one another and that they can be felt together.
“Wild God” is crafted with such intention that it is impossible not to admire its artistry and ripping production. Cave’s work should be widely acknowledged. It can also be used as an outlet for people going through grief to find connection and healing.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo Caption: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released their new album “Wild God” on Aug. 30.