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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, Wild God, takes a serious theological turn. For many people familiar with Cave’s life and work, this is a shock. It doesn’t seem to be a shock to Cave himself, though. When he was interviewed for ABC’s Australian Story recently, he spoke about his lifelong “religious temperament” and his slow movement towards a “religious life”.
Cave didn’t, however, elaborate on his idea of what he meant by a religious life, and it’s understandable that we might be confused.
It’s 27 years since Cave first sang, “I don’t believe in an interventionist God”, a casual declaration of unbelief that introduced the love song Into My Arms. And over the years, there’s almost been an element of teasing in his ambiguous engagement with religious imagery: ironic, performative, or faith for real? Is this new album evidence of faith for real?
The answer is inextricably bound up in tragedy. For Cave, his creative expression has become part of the processing of profound loss in the death of two of his sons. It “became glaringly obvious,” Cave has said, “how religion, creativity and grief were entangled” in his world. Wild God is a window into that strange, intense mix. It is a loose series of connected characters, stories, and evocative symbols.
Cave notes on his website, The Red Hand Files, that the song Wild God is the “primary point of propulsion” of the album, which features “a series of complex and interlocking narratives”. Wild God is an old man with “long trailing hair”, who escapes from “his memory in which he was entombed”, flies out of a window and sails away and above scenes of human destruction. He flies around the world, moving “like a prehistoric bird”, and invites us to join in the joyful divine flight. The song wings into an ecstatic gospel choir chorus. Cave enthuses, Here we go! Yeah, here we go! as the choir pleads: Bring your spirit down.
The warm, diffused, divine energy at play on this album is a stark contrast to the throbbing agitation of old songs like Red Right Hand (1994), in which a sinister figure looms on the landscape, blending both God and Satan from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. God is the devilishly slippery character with the “red right hand” of wrath in his pocket.
Now we have something different in the songwriting pocket: frogs! Frogs is a song bookended with intimations of violence, but in between it describes a relaxed Sunday walk home in the rain with frogs a-jumping, frogs that are “the children in the heavens jumping for joy, jumping for love”. It includes a tender invitation for those in pain to “hop inside my coat”. It is an invitation from a loving and trustworthy hand. Now God’s priority is not to bring wrath or judgment, but to bring love.
Song of the Lake opens the album and describes the “golden light” as an old man watches a woman immerse herself in water. Even in our human brokenness and grief, there can be a moment where all things hold together in tremulous beauty, and Cave can sing of finding “Heaven / Such as described in the ancient scrolls”, even though he feels the “drag of hell”.
For Cave, this edginess seems to be the essence of religious life. He uses Christian imagery in a way that is perhaps uncomfortable for some. It’s not comfortable for Cave, either.
The album also ends with water: As the Waters Cover the Sea alludes to an Old Testament verse that hopes for the knowledge of God to spread over whole earth “as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). These hopes begin as He steps from the tomb/ In His rags and His wounds / into the yellow light that streams / Through the window. The capital letters for pronouns take us to the New Testament, making the clear link to the divine Jesus in ancient scrolls, the one who came alive again after being buried dead in a tomb. Jesus is the one who prompts a person to “wake and turn to me”, and the joyful album-ending chorus declares: Peace and good tidings He will bring / Good tidings to all things.
In his book with journalist friend Seán O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave reveals “my religious position kind of firmed up” as they conducted their extended series of interviews. But this “firming up” doesn’t involve any declaration of belief, or a retraction of any former unbelief. Rather, it involves attending church and feeling that somehow this “holds together all the feelings of uncertainty and unknowing that I have around these matters”.
In the interlocking narratives of this new album, we witness a holy trinity holding it all together: Wild God, Jesus and the spirit. It’s not suburban piety, but a wild, creatively religious mash-up. For Cave, this edginess seems to be the essence of religious life. He uses Christian imagery in a way that is perhaps uncomfortable for some. It’s not comfortable for Cave, either. He’s groping, grasping for meaning, captivated by the divine, having grazed the edge of hell.
Danielle Terceiro is a research fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. She is completing a PhD at Alphacrucis University College, in the area of literature and theology. This article was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
