DB's Song of the Day (day 263): "PUSH THE SKY AWAY" (2013) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Today’s almost birthday boy (the 22nd) is Nick Cave. I’ve already posted on three Cave songs—one from early in my listening to him—1986’s “Sad Waters”—and two from the two albums of his I still like best: “Brompton Oratory” from The Boatman’s Call (1997) and “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” from Abbatoir Blues (2004)—so I feel I should do something from his most recent album, particularly as I caught him over the summer on tour for Push the Sky Away (2013).

I went with the title track which had become the “can’t get it out of my head” song by the time I saw him in Philly in July. It’s a song that’s suitable to the moment on this blog because it’s following Leonard Cohen’s “Tower of Song.” Cave covered that song in a raucous, shambolic, irreverent version on 1991’s I’m Your Fan, a tribute album to Cohen with a great range of contributors and songs chosen. Cave also covered “Avalanche,” a fearsome and uncompromising Cohen song from his fiercely uncompromising album Songs of Love and Hate (1971) which Cave has called a longtime favorite.

So, in a way, any Cave song would be fitting due to his acknowledged admiration for Cohen—in Cave’s version of “Tower” he says, “I said to Lenny Cohen ‘how lonely does it get?’ Lenny Cohen hasn’t answered me yet—a million floors above me, in the Tower of Song.” Today’s song, with its very lowkey approach and those background girls that almost equal or dominate the lead vocal in the mix, is very Cohenesque in its approach, its sound, in Cave's almost spoken intoning, and in the simplicity of its lyrics. Very direct, very deliberate.

From a vision of the sun rising over a field while “riding, riding,” Cave chooses not to take away the hopefulness of the first rays of the new rising sun, but rather seems to see it as a breaking light suggesting time is nearly up. The refrain “you’ve got it, just keep on pushing, keep on pushing, push the sky away” is a way of saying you want to remain earthbound for the near future, not go rapturing your way to heaven any time soon.

“They don’t let a woman kill you, not in the tower of song,” Cohen says in “Tower,” and Cave seems to be meditating on the other things that might make you want to say the jig is up. “If you feel you got everything you came for / If you got everything and you don’t want no more.” That’s the sort of surfeit that suggests “I’ve had enough.” Not so much a plea for something else or better, just a “no more of this, please” vibe. Something to hold at bay with that sky, Cave says.

Likewise if your friends say you should do it different or if they say you should do it the same. No offense to your friends, but . . . what the fuck do they know? It’s not so much that they’re wrong but that they just always have some comment, so if you can let those comments fall about you like the inevitable descent of leaves then . . . maybe, you can push the sky away. Otherwise, it might become a consummation devoutly to be wished.

And some people say it’s just rock and roll / Aww, but it gets you right down to your soul.  Ay, there’s the rub that makes calamity of such long life, for who would bear the whips and scorns of time if not for the fact of . . . rock’n’roll.

Happy birthday, Nick, keep on pushing.

DB's Song of the Day (day 206): "SAD WATERS" (1986) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Tonight I’m going to see Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in Philadelphia at the Mann Music Center. It’s interesting to me, in light of my comment yesterday about the parallel between January and July, that I saw a concert in the dead of winter—sub-zero temps as I recall—around this time of the month in January and posted about Neutral Milk Hotel accordingly. Now it’s sum-sum-summer time, and Nick’s turn.

I’ve posted already about two Nick Cave songs—one from 2004, the other from 1997.  I thought about posting on the song I would most like to hear at tonight’s show but then thought, “Nah, how about a song I know I won’t hear—the song that first got me into Mr. Cave, way back in the late 1980s.”

The album was Your Funeral, My Trial (1986), not that I heard the album at the time—or even shortly thereafter. In fact, I didn’t hear it till my daughter Kajsa (who will be at the show with me, and was with me both previous times I saw Cave live) got interested enough to get the CD. I was a bit sluggish on picking up on Nick, you might say. But I never doubted the quality of today’s song. And on the same album is “The Carny,” but that’s too much to go into now.

“Sad Waters” was on a tape my friend Tim gave me and it stayed with me. I still find it one of Nick’s most haunting songs. The double vocal is part of the reason, and that high whine in the background (no version online I found does it much justice, aurally). The strum is insistent too

Mainly, though, it’s the fact that I heard in this song a very poetic lyricist, and Cave’s double vocal does the lyric full justice. The background voice sounds more plaintive and ghostly; the forward voice, in Cave’s deep register, sounds profoundly troubled. The troubling aspect: the beauty of innocence, the heart-captivating quality of a “child’s world.”

Down the road I look and there runs Mary / Hair of gold and lips like cherries—It opens with two lines cribbed from “The Green, Green Grass of Home,” that song of a felon dreaming of returning home before he is awoken, in prison, to be hung.  Cave keeps that association alive with the song’s most striking image: “And then I ran my tin-cup heart along / The prison of her ribs.” The ribcage of children or of child-like (in stature) women is, in that vulnerability that exposes all structure, quite arresting. The idea of a tin-cup heart scraping along it the way men in prison scrape their tin cups along the bars—where, here the bars are her ribs, not the speaker’s—is a bit unsettling, but fully within the frame of reference the song exploits. Is this a man in prison remembering (as in “Green, Green Grass”) or is it a scene of watching the girl with the kind of sadly chastened associations that make one think of prison?

Mary, we may hope, isn’t really a child, but is childlike. We can say she’s a girl on the verge: “O Mary, you have seduced my soul [that line alone made this song leap out to me] / And I don’t know right from wrong / Forever a hostage to your child’s world.”  Yes, this could be about the attractions of an underage girl, and so prison might be a real consideration for pursuing that forbidden love. But there’s poetry aplenty: “Take a naked root for a lovers’ seat” is beautifully delivered (in both voices with a wonderful overlap) and “Bound to the ground by creeping ivy coils”—the delivery on the last three words is chilling.

And if you want an image that will stay with you (if you’re that type) the way it stays with the speaker, go for: And then with a toss of her curls / That little girl goes wading in / Rollin her dress up past her knee [and listen to how he draws that out] / Turning these waters into wine / Then she platted all the willow vines.  That’s the story of, that’s the glory of, folks.

If this guy hasn’t wrung your heart enough, if you can’t imagine how delicate his touch is on this image/memory, push it a little further: Mary in the shallows laughing / Over where the carp dart [ohhhh] / Spooked by the new shadows that she cast / Across these sad waters and across my heart. This guy is a goner.

Why so sad? What can ail thee, knight-at-arms? Is it Margaret you mourn for? Is it for Mary in the shallows laughing, her dress up past her knees, bearing platted willow vines? Do you need a more poignant image of doomed youth—not because she’ll die (though she will, eventually), but because her youth will. And the speaker will, and so he presses his prayer into these images.  As we saw in “Brompton Oratory” and “Till the End of the World,” Nick’s the kind of guy who prays to images of women/girls. And why not, I’d like to know. They used to paint perfection and call it a Madonna, or sculpt it as a nymph. Is it coincidence that the mater dolorosa lends her name to this nymph of the reeds, this naiad?

OK, off to see the wizard, aka Mr. Cave. The song I most want to hear? “More News from Nowhere.” But, whatever, Nick, bring it on.

DB's Song of the Day (day 159): "BROMPTON ORATORY" (1997) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

It’s Pentecost Sunday. Which, if you don’t know, is the day, in the words of Nick Cave from today’s song, “when Christ returns to his loved ones.” After death, he appeared in the locked upper room, and thereafter the apostles were able to “speak in tongues”—which means: in the language of whomever they were addressing. Nice bit, there.

Anyway, “Brompton Oratory” suits the day because it’s a song in which the singer attends Mass on Pentecost at the church in London known by the song’s title. It’s an interesting example of Cave—who likes to use religious imagery—combining what is sometimes called the sacred and the profane. The album, The Boatman’s Call, is something of an anomaly in Nick’s oeuvre, being piano-based tunes, mostly somewhat morose. Which is probably why it’s almost my favorite Nick Cave album. Not only that, but his lyrics tread close to Leonard Cohen terrain, and that’s no small compliment.

The song begins with the speaker entering the “great shadowed vault” to hail the Pentecostal morn. Just another guy going to church, I guess. There he hears the Gospel reading from Luke 24, the description of Christ appearing after death to his faithful (but somewhat wavering) disciples; it’s interesting that Nick describes them as “his loved ones”—which stretches the meaning of the reading beyond the Gospel story itself, to consider the personal meaning of the story. After death, the departed appears to those who are mourning him. The return is at issue here, much like a “return” to church or faith or, which it would be for me, a return to the youthful disposition to such things, long gone. We’re in the mood to take another look, arguably. “Think that it’s alright for some.”

The speaker wishes he were made of stone (like the stone apostles) so that he would not have “to see / A beauty impossible to define”—which could be the mystery of faith—and “a beauty impossible to believe” (so much for faith). “A beauty impossible to endure / The blood imparted in little sips.”  Here’s the moment of Eucharistic communion, drinking the wine/blood, where the beauty one can’t endure is the beauty, we assume, of sacrifice, of the death that begets eternal life. If you believe it. And Nick has us wondering whether he does or not, whether he’s going to experience the epiphanic moment that makes it all true.

Then he gives the profane moment: “the smell of you still on my hands / As I bring the cup up to my lips.” Here, at the moment of sipping from the chalice filled with wine/Christ’s blood, the speaker is thinking—reminded by the sexual scent of his lover—of sipping nectar from her labia, a different kind of “cup.”  Then comes the kicker: “No god up in the sky / And no devil beneath the sea”—the latter line going up in register, drawn out to indicate the tension and breaking out of the religious trance—“Can do the job that you did, baby, / Of bringing me to my knees.” And with that Nick gives us the ol’ “religion of the body” bit, in which the woman’s very physical charms promise salvation, which makes the idea of a beauty impossible to define and endure suddenly shift from the transcendental to the very, very worldly. In another song from the early Nineties, “(I’ll Love You Till) The End of the World,” Nick kneels and actually prays “not to the Lord above, but to you, waiting in your dress of blue.” It seems sincere and, well, let’s hope that works for him.

In the end he sits on the stone steps of the Oratory, “with nothing much to do / Alone and exhausted, baby, / By the absence of you.”  And that is the final jab that really abides with me. While we might suppose that a religious person who substitutes faith in his babe’s beauty for faith in his God would be perhaps downtrodden by the “absence of God” in his life, and, if he never believed, then that absence has been all the more mortal and essential as a lifelong lack, but, instead, he’s bluesing over the absence of the woman he can still taste and smell but can’t have. She exists (God might not), but she ain’t here.  As Woody Allen’s character says in Manhattan, “We don’t know if there’s a God, but there are girls, not in some heavenly domain but right here on earth.”

The heaven of her sex? Perhaps, and perhaps the Pentecostal message is that one must speak with tongue at that particular cup, but, even if so, there’s a deep melancholy to the song, a story of a man alone returning to the familiar story of Christ, a figure betrayed, returned to speak of keeping the faith, a story ignored or betrayed again by not quite a refusal of communion but rather a complication of it, extending the gesture of salvation to the out of body experience that sex, oddly enough and paradoxically enough, can sometimes be.  I believe Nick knows about that and so this song, in its subtle evocation of the apostasy of a believer, is one of the best on the album. But only if it matters.

Hail this joyful day’s return.