Nick Cave: The art of the love song

In 1999 Nick Cave delivered The Secret Life of the Love Song at a poetry festival in Vienna. The love song, according to Cave, “has been at the very heart of my particular artistic quest."

Years before Cave’s son tragically died, the role of loss had always been central to his work after losing his dad at 19. “I see that my artistic life has centred around an attempt to articulate the nature of an almost palpable sense of loss that has laid claim to my life."

Religion and love songs go hand in hand. “I found through the use of language, that I wrote God into existence," Cave says. "The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist.”

The Song of Solomon from the Old Testament Cave says is “perhaps the greatest love song ever written”. Psalms was also revelatory for him and “teeming with all the clamorous desperation, longing, exultation, erotic violence and brutality that I could hope for."

Cave references what the Portuguese call saudade - “an inexplicable sense of longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul” - as well as duende. He says: “All that has dark sounds has duende. That mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.”

Cave says that sadness, or duende, needs space to breathe. “Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.” He cites the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and PJ Harvey all as masters of this approach.

Love songs need pain but not hate. “Songs that speak of love without an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather hate songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted." They require “the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief."

He says Kylie Minogue’s Better The Devil You Know “is one of pop music’s most violent and distressing love lyrics" and that “occasionally a song comes along that hides behind its disposable, plastic beat a love lyric of truly devastating proportions.”

Of his own love songs he picks out Far From Me, Sad Waters, Black Hair, I Let Love In, Deanna, From Her to Eternity, Nobody’s Baby Now, Into My Arms, Lime Tree Arbour, Lucy, and Straight To You as ones he’s proud of. “They are my gloomy, violent, dark-eyed children.”

Cave closes the lecture thusly: “Through the writing of the love song, one sits and dines with loss and longing, madness and melancholy, ecstasy, magic, joy and love with equal measures of respect and gratitude."