Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Interview
Last seen out in public under the gleeful guise of Grinderman, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds are back with their fourteenth album, 'Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!', the follow-up to 2004’s gloriously compendious 'Abattoir Blues' / 'The Lyre of Orpheus' double.
Where and when the album was recorded?
The album “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!” was recorded at the State of the Ark studios over a week in the summer of 2007 in London. We booked a week, but by day 5 we’d finished.
Is the recording process becoming faster because there’s now a shorthand between you and the rest of the Bad Seeds?
Yeah, totally. I think within the Bad Seeds these days, more so than ever, everyone has permission to do whatever they like, you know, and there’s a sense of freedom about what people play and we can do that quite quickly.
Did you have a clear idea of the kind of music you wanted to make on the new Bad Seeds record, “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!”?
Yeah, I wanted to make, on the new Bad Seeds record, an acoustically driven record that was at the same time electric, so that it had the basis of the sound was acoustic guitar, drums and bass – that was the sort of thrust of the music - and over that there was a kind of heavily charged electric sound that went over it, so that there was underneath it there was the fragileness of an acoustic record, but it didn’t have the kind of heaviness of a rock record.
How did the Grinderman album inform “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!”?
The Grinderman record had a huge impact. We were able to go out somewhere, away from the Bad Seeds and create a bunch of music and we kind of could bring back ideas from that that kind of we thought worked and would work within the Bad Seeds, you know, and I mean one thing, obviously about the Grinderman record and “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!” that’s similar is the amount of people playing at any one time. On “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!”, it’s very much a pared down, basic band. I mean, there’s people doing percussion – overdubbed percussion stuff – but it’s a much smaller band than on the “Abattoir Blues” record, where there’s a lot of overdubbing – a lot of people playing at the same time – so it’s a smaller sound which we definitely were trying to do and we’ll try and do live as well.
Is it quite liberating to have less people playing on the record?
Yeah, it is. You know, I mean, it had gotten slightly out of hand, because our band’s grown bigger and bigger and I would go in with a song and play the song and everyone would just jump on an instrument, their instrument and start playing it, so it was very difficult to hear the song in any other way than everybody playing at once. It’s much harder to subtract instruments than to actually add them.
What was the appeal for you of using more percussion on this record?
Well, first of all, you don’t really need to know how to play it so you can just pick up something and start kind of making a noise with it, so I can be singing a vocal and just grab something and start rattling it and it’s… you can be like a child just making a racket and it sounds really good, so when we were… all of us, when we were playing, there was all this percussion stuff around us and people would just sort of start grabbing some sleighbells or a kind of Brazilian queaker or some kind of instrument and some of us didn’t even know how to use them or what sound they were supposed to make, but we just sort of… We were just finding out about things as we went, because there are certain tracks, on certain songs, where I’m credited with all sorts of different percussion, but they’re just being played at the same time, just running up to one thing and playing it and chucking that away and playing some other thing.
Was much of the album written on guitar or did you mainly write it on the piano?
Yeah, some of it was, yeah. I didn’t actually play that much guitar on this record. You know, Mick is the guitarist, so he’s playing most of the guitar and James plays really good guitar, so I did play guitar on a couple of songs, but I mostly played organ on this.
Would you say that it was quite a happy and easy recording experience this time?
Yeah, it was. I mean, by the time we get into the studio, in my opinion, the work’s done. The hard work is done and that’s writing the songs. The actual recording of them is just a kind of joyful thing. It’s everyone making as much racket as they can within the premise of that particular song and that’s just you know, incredibly exciting.
There wasn’t much of a gap between the Grinderman record and “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!” Was it easy for you to separate out Grinderman songs from potential “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!” songs?
This new record was really hard to write. It took a really long time. I mean, lyrically, it took a really long time. It took a month to sort of clear the decks and get rid of kind of Grinderman influences and old Bad Seeds or old kind of Nick Cave song style influences and try and write something that was a bit different, you know, and that’s not something I can do overnight. It’s a process of kind of exorcising the past and kind of hopefully stumbling on something different and that is just kind of suddenly writing a line that’s different, you know, it just doesn’t really sound like a line that I felt that I would have written and it’s exciting when that happens, because you attach another similar kind of line to it and suddenly you’ve kind of got a song that’s taking you somewhere quite different to anywhere you’ve been before. So something like, there’s a song on this record, “Today’s Lesson” and that was, I think, one of the early songs and there was something going on in that song, lyrically, that I found hugely exciting. I mean, it sounded like it came from me. It sounded true to me, but it sounded different as well and that informed some of the other songs.
How would you characterise the difference between these songs and those you’ve written previously?
Perhaps I’ve done this to a degree (in the past), but I allowed myself to sort of digress and start to pursue a thought for a while, for a verse or something, and then veer off in a different direction and kind of allow that to happen, so that by the end, you’ve got a whole bunch of songs together that are all kind of moving off in different places. As soon as you kind of know what the song is supposed to do, they seem to veer off in another direction. As soon as you’re comfortable with what the song’s about, it turns out to be about something else or it goes in a different place or there’s a kind of “Allow me to digress” type of thing going on and so to me, that challenges the notion of a song and a song having to be about something in particular. You know, I’ve been asked, “Well, I don’t really know what that song’s about. What is that about?” and to me, writing these songs has challenged that idea in some kind of way and that felt pretty exciting to me.
How did your work in film music affect “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!”?
It’s had a big effect, mostly because it connects me to Warren quite a lot. Me and Warren are just working together all the time and so he’s become a large influence over the way the songs actually get made, because he’s always at hand. With some of the songs, the very kind of basic nuts and bolts of the thing are done with me and Warren and they’re done, rather than with a kind of a bunch of chords, starting off with a bunch of chords, they’re starting off with a certain kind of musical dissonance, so they’re starting off at a non-chordal kind of place, more of an atmospheric place. I mean, he can sometimes send me a loop which is just this sort of sound and I’ll have it on my computer and listen to it and I can write with that sound going on and it creates a different sort of thing. [On] the soundtracks, he’s using a lot of loops and stuff like that and we’re using a lot of loops on both Grinderman and this record.
Has writing film scores had any other direct impact on this record?
Yeah. I mean, we’ve worked with John Hillcoat on “The Proposition” and Andrew Dominik on the Jesse James film and both of them, at the start, made a point of saying that they didn’t want what they meant as manipulative music, in that if there was a sad scene, they didn’t want to hear sad music. If there was a kind of action scene, they didn’t want action music. They kind of wanted the opposite to be going on and John Hillcoat has done this throughout his career and in the Jesse James film that’s used to great effect. In the killing of Jesse James, which is the big, visceral sort of highlight of the film, there’s this lovely kind of piano being played while Jesse James is being shot, so it’s using the opposite music than you’re actually seeing and I think that that has had an effect on this record. The lyric is very emotional at times, but the music isn’t necessarily pandering to the emotion of that particular lyric. There’s a song called “Moonland”, which has a pretty kind of devastating lyric on it and by virtue of a lot of percussion being put on that, it’s turned it into something that just… a kind of funk thing, which is deceptive – pleasantly deceptive.
Is Lazarus a figure who has some fascination for you?
Well, you know, I mean, a lot of the figures in the Bible have. I used to sit in Bible classes - Sunday School - in the church in the town that I grew up in when I was a kid, you know, and the figure of Lazarus always worried me. There was kind of Christ’s miracle, but it kind of traumatised me a bit, about Lazarus and how he would feel and this guy being raised up from the tomb and wandering around. You never really find out what happened to him or even if he particularly liked the experience, so it felt kind of nice to pursue that idea, but you know, I mean, I just also like Lazarus. I don’t know why. I like the name and he just felt like a kind of a nice sort of guide to move from song to song. The characters in the record are kind of asleep and hypnotised and in states of apathy and in comas and kind of generally not functioning particularly well and some are dead and the kind of the Lazarus figure seems like the right figure as the guide through a kind of dream world, a neurotic dream world, which this record seems to me to be.
The song “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” is followed on the record by “Today’s Lesson”. What can you us about this song?
The song “Today’s Lesson” has a fairytale quality. But it’s an evil fairytale. It’s an evil song. The male attention in that song has crossed a kind of line and it’s evil. It’s malign and destructive but the song kind of bops along, you know. There’s a fair amount of, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional kind of counterpoint that’s being used between the music being a certain way and the lyrics being another way, which is interesting.
Who was the author in “We Call Upon The Author To Explain” and why is the narrator so angry?
It’s an old-fashioned screed, which is an actual form of writing, where you sit down and make a longwinded complaint about something. You know, Rock and Roll’s littered with that sort of thing. That was my attempt at a screed, asking why certain things happen, from the tiny, tiny things to the big things and I guess there’s a certain playfulness about which of the kind of two universes, my creative one, me being the author, or God’s creative one are we actually talking about and stuff sometimes. But me and God are the authors... God and I.
Do you have a favourite song on this album?
Well, I like “Moonland” a lot. I’m really pleased with that song, because it started off nothing like it ended up being. It was a slow, kind of bluesy number with this sad kind of lyric on it and it never felt right. It felt kind of that it didn’t have the right kind of focus and I think we even tried it in different ways and it never felt right, but there was something about this particular version that was nice and then one day we just put on a very fast hi-hat thing that went on it and then started loading on this percussion and Warren played some sort of lead stuff on it and totally transformed the song, as far as I’m concerned, into something really, I don’t know, it just gets me, that song, in a way that a lot of Bad Seeds records don’t get me. You know, I find it very difficult to listen to my own music, mostly because my own part in a Bad Seeds song is so large and it’s being the singer and writing the words and music and stuff like that and often the lyrics themselves are very kind of personal sorts of lyrics and I just find it difficult. It’s the last thing I kind of want to hear. It’s like looking in the mirror or something like that, which is not one of my favourite things to do and to listen to some of these songs, like “Moonland” or something like that, I can really stand back and just hear it as a piece of music, a surprising and beautiful piece of music and I love that, to be able to do that.
The album ends with “More News From Nowhere”. Can you tell us more about that song?
That particular song I’m kind of walking through a party and running into people from the past and they seem impossible to relate to any more and I’ve tried to do that in a kind of comic way. That seems a sort of maudlin note to end on.
Are you planning to tour “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!”?
Yes, we are planning to tour. We’re doing a European tour and an American tour and an Australian tour at some point, no doubt, and quite an extensive one, as far as Bad Seeds tours go and hugely looking forward to it. I mean, really, we are.
Do you intend to keep working at the same pace as you have been in the last year or so?
Yeah. I’ve kind of got a partner in crime and that’s Warren and Warren has the same possibly slightly unhealthy attitude towards work, or healthy, depending on which way you look at it, but he just never stops either and the kind of two of us sort of egg each other on and there’s almost a perverse sort of race to the finish line.
There’s currently a Nick Cave exhibition running in Melbourne. How involved were you in this?
I’ve donated all my sort of stuff to this museum. They have all my lyrics and all sorts of shit from as far back as I go and they’ve exhibited this and I was in Australia helping out with this exhibition and I’ve had to look at a lot of stuff. I mean, I’ve been forced to look at photographs, footage, which I’ve never looked at, live footage. I’m totally superstitious about that and it’s not that bad. You know, the feelings that come up are uncomfortable, but they’re actually not that bad and some of the early, early stuff I can look at and really enjoy. It’s like, I was into something then and it’s kind of nice to sort of see that, in some sort of way, so time has a way of kind of healing those sort of feelings, giving you a sort of sense of nostalgia about things.
How does it feel to be the subject of an exhibition?
Oh, it was incredible, actually, I mean, because the thing is great. It’s really great. I kept going through it, thinking, if I was actually kind of interested in this person, if it was someone I was a fan of, it would be really an exciting thing to see, because it has everything. I mean, it’s so detailed and you kind of go into a different room and it’s around one song, like the kind of Mercy Seat room and you go in there and for some reason I kept everything. I’ve kept all the notes and the drawings and everything that’s been put on paper, pretty much. There’s all the kind of peripheral information about the song and photographs and oh, pieces of art and the influence of that particular song and all sorts of stuff. It’s pretty great, actually.
