Grief, Guilt, and Goodbyes – Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree

Grief is a prominent theme found in the work of many Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ records, but nowhere is it clearer, more brutal, or truthful, than on their 2016 album, Skeleton Tree. The grief, guilt, and goodbyes found within mark a pivotal moment not just for the career of the band, but for the sanity of their songwriter.

With Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ prolific discography, their motifs are clear. They swoon in the face of death, cradle their way through the undignified ends at the heart of their music, and persuade themselves of Godlike figures, thwarting or thriving inside of their tightly written tracks. Here, on their 2016 release, they deal with suffering first-hand. Cave’s fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, passed away after falling from a cliff in Brighton under the effects of LSD. It marked what feels like a permanent shift in tone for the singer.

A formidable performer, Cave and his band of Bad Seeds have thrived comfortably in critical acclaim and rather niche surroundings. Their debut album, From Her to Eternity (1984) is as articulate and composed as their greatest works. Stringent timings, themes, and messages to muse upon throughout, for well over a decade, the band carved out a comfortable repertoire of post-punk, art rock blues.

That era of punk rock blues came to a rather sudden, unconventional end. The death of Arthur was the final push, and one of the determining reasons for this move away from the morbid outlooks, shifting to the inward self-reflection. Clear from Andrew Dominik’s documentary, One More Time with Feeling (2016), Cave burrows into a stoic, artistic mindset. One of the more poignant moments of the documentary offers up Cave’s inability to express grief without a backing track of crashing guitars, steady drum beats, and screeching viola. The loss of a child would clearly have permanent impact, but for Cave, it feels as if this loss has stolen something from his craft. “I was rattling on about time being elastic, and I think that’s what I meant, that we’re attached to this event, and that we move away, and we’re like on a rubber band, and life can go on and on and on, but eventually it just keeps coming back to that thing. And that’s… that’s some kind of trauma, I guess” (Dominik, 2016).

It’d be obvious to write this one off as an ode to his late son, but Skeleton Tree has all the initial hallmarks of a regular Bad Seeds record. The punk blues spur on barely forty minutes of high-strung material, Cave croons his way through eight spoken-word tracks as the punk rock wanes to emotional torture and conflicting emotions. The band toyed with this in earlier tracks, Love Letter from their album No More Shall We Part (2001) for instance, but that doesn’t feel like preparation or a testing of the waters. Skeleton Tree feels like an album that, although written before the events of his sons passing, feel like a spoken response to events out of his control. It’s grief in harmony with the dark, brooding ambience found in the symphonies of Warren Ellis.

A consistent artist regarding album releases, Cave never seems to falter when it comes to a congruous, scheduled release style. In an interview with The Guardian on 4th May 2017, Cave described the impact of his son’s death on his artistic abilities. “There’s just no room for the luxury of creation.” Intended as the middle piece of a discography trilogy, Skeleton Tree is a jarring change of pace, especially when compared to The Bad Seeds’ previous collection of work on Push the Sky Away.

Grief is no stranger to the lines of Bad Seeds songs; they often deal with mortality and impending dread. But the band and the singer at the heart of them always feel like bleak observers, rather than those actively involved. Recorded and mixed just some brief weeks after the death of his son, Cave’s reasoning for continuing to work is as morbid as his music. “It was not like an act of courage or anything, it was just that I didn’t know what the fuck else to be doing. All I knew is that what I do is work, and that kind of continues. I think I knew, fundamentally, that if I lay down, I would never get up again.”

The tragedy of Arthur’s death has left Cave with a void to fill. “I wrote a bunch of songs after Arthur died, but I felt they were somehow a betrayal of what we were all going through at the time or worse, a betrayal of Arthur himself; that they didn’t possess the required emotional reach, so I scrapped them.” With a three-year break between Skeleton Tree and his latest album, Ghosteen (2019), it does seem to have taken quite some time for Cave to hit his stride once again. The longest gap before this came only a few years prior, the four-year wait between Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004) and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008) could certainly be due to the double album nature of his 2004 release.

Born out of the failed group, The Birthday Party, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have crafted platonic indifference into bars and chords that scream with emotion. Their albums frequently top lists that look to shine a spotlight on the bleak tracks that offer up artistic nourishment but piteous messaging.

Nowhere is this clearer than their first 1990s effort, The Good Son. Opening with Foi Na Cruz, its melody is enough to describe the enchanting, brooding tones of desire and the need to move on. Cave’s lyrical sense throughout this album is similar to that of the advice he’d receive from loved ones almost twenty years later. Combatting grief, no song displays this emotional turmoil and spiral better than Sorrow’s Child, closing with the lines “And just when it seems as though / all your tears were at an end / Sorrow’s child lifts up her hand / And she brings it down again”. The crashing waves of emotion, the highs and lows of grief, perspective, and another wave of grief, is seen in just four lines, closing out an album that caused such fermenting horror for Cave’s personal life.

Seeming to admit that The Good Son was written and recorded as a healing process after the tumultuous times and stress of their previous album, Tender Prey (1988), Cave spoke in detail about his experience with the record. Reflecting on this time, he stated in a 1988 interview that Tender Prey was “one long cry for help.”

Cave is no stranger to the healing powers music can have; he had already experienced it once with the leap from Tender Prey to The Good Son. Replicating that is, clearly, not something on his mind, but he does so well. The rather underwhelming setlist of Push the Sky Away is blown out of the water with an album that feels tender, and disarmed. Skeleton Tree isn’t a simplistic elegy and remembrance of a lost loved one, it punches higher than that, and harder too. It’s finally a place where Cave can give honest thoughts on themes he has sung of for decades, and he utilises this opportunity well.

Beautiful and true words about death from Nick Cave, on communicating with his son Arthur after his passing: https://t.co/cDVQS9suU2 pic.twitter.com/vOOuOCyslE

— AndrewTrendell (@AndrewTrendell) November 2, 2018

These albums all converge on how Cave deals with grief. The healing process, but also a desire to continue working, he channels his emotions into his work with relative ease at times. “I am not interested in anything that doesn’t have a genuine heart to it. You’ve got to have soul in the hole. If that isn’t there, I don’t see the point.”

Album releases found after The Boatman’s Call offer up a break away from the conventional gospel-blues and punk-rock ballads The Bad Seeds usually crafted, instead they took the time to experiment, and change their sound. From the spoken-word nature of Ghosteen, the shifting modernity of Push the Sky Away, or even the recording changes found on No More Shall We Part, which had Cave performing the lyrics alongside his bandmates’ instrumentals.

His ability to construct grief in his songs comes, perhaps, from Cave’s belief that there are few topics worth singing about. “There aren’t that many themes in the world. There’s love and death, God, and some variations of that.” Spirituality certainly isn’t uncommon within Cave’s work. “Performances like this pull it firmly back to where it belongs—in the realm of spiritual experience.”

Spirituality and God is a key topic for Cave, but we as an audience are missing perhaps the key reason Cave makes music. Although The Bad Seeds may stand strong in the face of death, I do believe Cave fears the end. Nowhere is this clearer than in the first documentary on his life, 20,000 Days on Earth, where we receive a flutter of insight into what he hopes to achieve as an artist.

At the end of the documentary, Cave surmises his reasons for making music are linked with that of a need for remembrance. “My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory. (Forsyth & Pollard, 2014)” Perhaps, then, the reason for Skeleton Tree isn’t just to cope with the grief of such a tragic loss, but also to spark the fire of remembrance, to keep Arthur’s “soul” and “reason” alive. He articulates this further in the follow-up documentary, talking of how his friends told him to cope with the death. “’He lives in my heart,’ or something like that. People say it all the time to me, ‘He lives in my heart,’ and I go, ‘Yeah, yeah, no, I know,’ but he doesn’t.” (Dominik, 2016).

Cave’s mannerisms, how he constructs music and the sound he provides are relatively unchanged, but it’s the meaning and depth of his words and an understanding of his audience that has changed. To put it in his own words, “musically and lyrically … chained to the same bowl of vomit.“ Cave tackles grief in his lyrics now with first-hand experience. Rather than a morbid observer, he finds himself entrenched in his own affairs. A taxing, toiling ethic to his work under regular circumstances, the tragic passing of his son seems to have spurred something inside of Cave. He adapts the lyrics of Skeleton Tree, which were written before the death of his son, to include personal reflections. The grief, guilt, and the final goodbye.