Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album features frogs as the unexpected bearers of tender moments of joy.
Frogs, the third track, starts as if it’s going to elaborate a grisly story of murder: “he knelt down / Crushed his brother’s head with a bone.” But the song turns away from this violent narrative, into a relaxed Sunday morning amble: it’s a “great privilege / Oh babe, to walk you home.” There are frogs jumping in the gutters, in the rain, on this walk home together.
Frogs get a bad rap in our cultural memory; they’re sent in plague proportions to punish Egypt in the scriptures. But this is a joyful plague; it’s not about judgment. Frogs are “leaping to God, amazed of love / And amazed of pain / Amazed to be back in the water again.”
Nick Cave’s personal tragedies hang over this song: he has experienced the world-stopping grief of losing a child, twice-over. But it seems that there can still be joy in “leaping to God”. Even consolation that the “children in the heavens” are also “jumping for joy, jumping for love”.
Frogs ends with other intimations of violence, not elaborated: “Take that gun out of your hand / Lord, kill me in the Sunday rain”. The song offers the invitation to “hop inside my coat”, suggesting that there is a divine, tender hand, offering pocketed comfort to those who mourn. This is a far cry from an earlier incarnation of Nick Cave and the “red right hand” of divine wrath.
Joy can spring up out of pain, defiantly, even when someone is being “frogmarched” home to “a bed made of tears”. Frogs shows how unexpected grace can rejuvenate the grief-weary on their way home.
