(Credits: Far Out / Ian Allen)
Sat 20 September 2025 7:00, UK
Nick Cave’s writing style has evolved a lot, but also kind of not at all. Long gone is the wild punk, but even now as the wise, aged poet, his songwriting is instantly recognisable.
It goes beyond just his songs even. In Cave’s written work, like his novels, his epic poem ‘The Sick Bag Song’, or even on his Red Hand Files newsletter, there is a certain quality to his work. It has a particular tone and feel, like all good writers have, that make it obviously his.
It’s almost impossible to adequately define. There’s a lushness to Cave’s scribing, found in his rich literary metaphors, like on a song like ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’, or the religious imagery in ‘Frogs’. But there’s also a flippancy that offsets it, like in ‘Song of the Lake’, the euphoric opening track to Wild God, where Cave toys with poetic phrasing before throwing it away with “oh never mind, never mind”.
It’s clearly a balance of skill, practice, inspiration and raw talent, a mix of the art he’s engaged with in his life and his natural inner voice. But Cave is aware of it. He knows how he writes, and he also knows exactly how he can’t seem to write, no matter how hard he tries. In particular, he knows he could never write like one of his idols, James Brown.
“I can’t write that ‘I love you, baby’, which are the songs I love, like a James Brown song, that just come and ‘get funky!’” Cave told Interview, well aware of his limitations.
While Brown was always busy declaring things like “I feel good!”, or “Take me home!”, simple statements for simple feelings, Cave can’t seem to allow himself that. Instead, he’s more likely to describe feelings of love or lust with some long-winded tale replete with mythical figures, a cast of characters, ten different references and a complete avoidance of the L-word itself.
“I’ve always found that that’s just the way I write. If I can’t visualise the thing on the page, it’s completely meaningless to me,” he said, as he feels the need to extend feelings into something that makes more sense to him. Those elusive emotions don’t, but stories do with clear motivations and plot points.
But actually, in his own listening habits, that’s not what he’s drawn to. As an audience, he’s all for simplicity, but as a writer, he can’t do it. “They’re the songs that I really respond to myself. But I’m a storyteller,” he explained, unable to ever access whatever his own musical heroes were.
On rare occasions that he has, admittedly, it’s very different to James Brown’s declarations of lust. Cave’s most devastating musical moment finally found simplicity when he merely sang “I need you” on the gut-wrenching Skeleton Tree track. Smothered by tragedy, he finally lost the words to obfuscate his feelings with narration and just laid it out, bones and all.
So it’s not that he’s fully incapable, but overwhelmingly, Nick Cave is a long word count type of writer who is far more likely to turn a song into a novel than a short, snappy pop hit.
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