Wild God

A new Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds song was released last Wednesday. It took me a few listens to fully get it but now I can't stay away from it. Wild God starts out slowly with what sounds like the end of another song, then begins to gather pace and oomph, the musicians setting out slowly and quietly and swelling as the song moves onwards. Nick's words seem to tell of a man looking back from his life in a retirement home, a wild god, but there are plenty of obtuse and currently unexplained lines as well as a reference to Jubilee Street (from 2013's Push The Sky Away) and a girl who died in a bedsit in 1993. The explosion just after three minutes in as the choir kicks in and Nick sings, 'bring your spirit down', packs a powerful punch, lifting the song and the listener- well, this listener for one. The sound becomes big and orchestrated but it's clearly Bad Seeds too, with the drums shifting things away from the synth oriented music of his recent albums with Warren Ellis. Wild God's long ending is full of passion and joy, an ecstatic finale with Nick still singing, 'here we go', as it fades out, the song sounding like it could go on. 

A while ago, being interviewed for a film, Nick said that after several years of grieving the loss of their son Arthur in 2015 and all the awful trauma that came with it, Nick and Suzie made a conscious decision to be happy. 

'It's strange reading those scripts back, those lyrics from my son brought back. And, you know, they're ok, they're actually kind of beautiful, really. But at the time they never revealed themselves as such. I just thought that I was writing a lot of rubbish. 

That was one of the things I lost. That was one of the things I lost hard, a sense of belief in myself, like I'd fucked up bad, that me and Susie had looked away for a terrible moment, and this reflected savagely on everything else. A belief in the good in things, in the world, in ourselves evaporated. But you know, after a while, after a time, Susie and I decided to be happy.

This happiness seemed to be an act of revenge, an act of defiance. To care about each other and everyone else and to be careful, to be careful with each other and the ones around us.'

That's what Wild God sounds like to me- a conscious decision to be happy, to record the joy and euphoria that can be found in music. I'm sure the album will tell more. At the Red Hand Files this week he said that Wild God (also the title of the album) is  a 'series of complex and interlinking narratives' and that 'an acutely vulnerable and mysterious 'event' resides at the heart of the album's central song, Conversion'. Wild God is also a song that seems to reveal a little more each time I play it, something new seeping out with each play. The album isn't out until the end of August which seems a long way off from here.