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“What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe… A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.” “All truth is comprised in music and mathematics,” Margaret Fuller proclaimed as she transfigured…

via Music, Feeling, and Transcendence: Nick Cave on AI, Awe, and the Splendor of Our Human Limitations — Brain Pickings

The singer opens up over the tragic death of his 15-year-old son, airing his raw grief in this unconventionally directed documentary

„Trauma is extremely damaging to the creative process,“ says Cave in one of many matter-of-fact but heart-rending interviews in the film, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Monday. „I try to not allow myself to sink down, to keep looking forward, but sometimes I feel it like a physical depression.“

Source: One More Time With Feeling review – undeniably moving contemplation of loss | Film | The Guardian

Aus dem Schmerz über den Verlust seines Sohnes hat Nick Cave ein grossartiges Album geschaffen. «Skeleton Tree» ist düster aber voller Kraft. Im Dokumentarfilm «One More Time With Feeling» sinniert Cave über das Weiterleben nach dem Schock.

Ein Porträt von Nick Cave.

«Songs sind wie Träume, manchmal können sie Dinge vorhersagen.» Eine der Aussagen des Kultmusikers Nick Cave im Dokumentarfilm «One More Time With Feeling» (Trailer), die hängenbleibt.

Aus den Studioaufnahmen, die der Film dokumentiert, entstand «Skeleton Tree» – das bereits 16. Album mit seiner Band «The Bad Seeds». Es ist voller tiefschwarzer Bilder und besticht durch seine Kraft und schlichte Menschlichkeit, exemplarisch dafür steht der Song «I Need You» (Video), der noch lange nachhallt.

Ein Prophet im eigenen Leben

In «Jesus Alone» (Video) fällt gleich zu Beginn ein Mensch vom Himmel. Wie eine ferne Ahnung des tödlichen Sturzes seines Sohnes Arthur von den Kreidefelsen bei Brighton. Nick Caves Wahlheimat.

Im vergangenen Sommer war es passiert, mitten in den Aufnahmen. Arthur hatte mit Freunden erstmals LSD probiert. Den tiefen Sturz überlebte er nicht. Zurück blieben sein Zwillingsbruder und seine Schwester. Und die Eltern, Nick Cave und Susie Bick.

Sie schirmten sich von der Öffentlichkeit ab, einzig der Filmemacher Andrew Dominik hatte Zugang mit seinen Kameras. Geplant war ursprünglich eine reine Dokumentation der Studioaufnahmen, doch man kam überein, dass es mehr sein sollte. Ein Ventil für Nick Cave, seine Gedanken, seinen Schmerz. Gedreht in Schwarzweiss und 3D – aber so flüchtig, wie das Glück: nur an einem Abend in den Kinos zu sehen. Bis jetzt jedenfalls.

«Ich trage Arthur in meinem Herzen – aber er lebt nicht mehr»

Wie darüber sprechen, ohne dass das Geschehene zur Plattitüde verkommt? Der Survivor, der schon viele eigene Schicksalsschläge überstanden hat, kommt hier ins Wanken.

Er berichtet von unbekannten Menschen, die ihn im Supermarkt und auf der Strasse ansprechen. Gutgemeinte Worte des Trosts. Dass der Sohn doch im Herzen weiterlebe. Trotzig wehrt sich Cave gegen solche hilflosen Versuche. Er trage seinen Sohn sehr wohl im Herzen, aber leben tue dieser nicht mehr.

«Ich glaube, ich verliere meine Stimme, meine Erinnerung, mein Urteilsvermögen», sagt Cave einmal. Und er macht sich Sorgen um seine Erscheinung. Seine Tränensäcke im Spiegel, der Regisseur sage, er sehe aus wie ein ramponiertes Denkmal. Mal fragt er seinen Mitmusiker, ob die Frisur auch richtig sitzt. Mit einer der komischsten Momente, die der Film glücklicherweise auch hat. Sonst wäre er wohl ziemlich schwer zu ertragen.

Der Mann in Schwarz trägt dunkelschwarz

Denn Cave ist zwar stets in feinem Gewand gekleidet, steht aber doch entblösst vor seinem Publikum: «Wann bist du ein Objekt des Mitleids geworden?» Nie hätte er zu einer Kamera über seinen Schmerz sprechen wollen. Nun tut er es trotzdem.

Diesen Widerspruch muss man aushalten können. Dann eröffnet sich einem die innere Welt eines der grössten Songwriters unserer Zeit.Was ihm jetzt aber widerfahren ist, das lasse ihn und seine Familie nie mehr los. Wie ein Ring oder ein Zaun, der sie straff umfasst. Das Leben geht weiter, es kann okay sein, aber das Geschehene lässt sie nie weit weg kommen.

Was Cave als «extrem schädlich für den kreativen Prozess» beschreibt, wird letztlich aber zum Gewinn für die Musikhörer. «Skeleton Tree» ist sein alles überdauerndes Zeugnis dieser Zeit – Nick Caves grosses Traueralbum.

Australian anthems: Nick Cave – Into My Arms | Music | theguardian.com.

A plangent piano ballad played at the funeral of Michael Hutchence, this ode to loss and sorrow has comforted generations of listeners

Nick Cave writing lyrics.
Nick Cave writing lyrics: ‚the offspring of complicated pregnancies and difficult and painful births‘.

Nick Cave understands the love song. His can be hopeful or angry, loud or raucous, but they press down on your chest, pick you up briefly, and then dump you right back down again. They explore – as Cave says himself – the darkest regions of the soul.

Sorrow has always formed a part of Cave’s songwriting. In his lecture The Secret Life of the Love Song, he traces the genesis of his own artistic expression and identifies the one event that catalysed the process – the death of his father when he was 19. „I see that my artistic life is centred around an attempt to articulate an almost palpable sense of loss that laid claim to my life,“ he says.

The songs became his emissaries, drawn from that desire to explore the sorrow, the pain and the anger that he says „have whistled through my bones and hummed in my blood“.

Into My Arms, which opens the album The Boatman’s Call, is Cave’s most haunting love song. A quiet piano ballad, its plangent melody mournfully hymns the end of two relationships. Full of beautifully limpid songs, the 1997 album was a world away from Cave’s more confronting earlier work with the Birthday Party and the Boys Next Door. In the process, it opened up his music to a new audience.

Cave has became revered in Australia, although some have found this strange. While he grew up in Melbourne, he spent many years wandering, living in Berlin, London andSão Paulo. His songs don’t yearn for his home country. But his voice has a coarseness that is unmistakably Australian, and he is a standard-bearer for a darker side of the country’s artists who are boldly unafraid to explore and experiment.

Cave counts Into My Arms among his most treasured creations. In The Secret Life of the Love Song he says: „Mostly, they were the offspring of complicated pregnancies and difficult and painful births. Most are rooted in direct personal experience and were conceived for a variety of reasons, but this rag-tag group of love songs are, at the death, all the same thing – lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man.“

The song at its heart is about loss and the sorrow that flows from it, whether it’s the end of a relationship or the death of a friend or family member – Cave sang the ballad at the funeral of Michael Hutchence. Evocative, emotional and stirring, Into My Arms reminds us that even at the darkest times we’re not alone, truly conjuring of the elusive spirit of duende.

Should it be called an Australian anthem? It was written by an Australian and has captured the souls of many Australians. But it goes beyond that. The love song speaks to people in a way that is universal, and that is surely one of Cave’s most enduring qualities.

Love this song: [youtube=http://youtu.be/anXQvf8i0Wc]

Lyrics:

Can’t remember anything at all
Flame trees line the streets
Can’t remember anything at all
But I’m driving my car down to Geneva

I’ve been sitting in my basement patio
It was hot
Up above, girls walk past, the roses all in bloom
Have you ever heard about the Higgs Boson blues
I’m goin‘ down to Geneva baby, gonna teach it to you

Who cares, who cares what the future brings?
Black road long and I drove and drove
I came upon a crossroad
The night was hot and black
I see Robert Johnson,
With a ten dollar guitar strapped to his back,
Lookin‘ for a tune

Well here comes Lucifer,
With his canon law,
And a hundred black babies runnin‘ from his genocidal jaw
He got the real killer groove
Robert Johnson and the devil man
Don’t know who’s gonna rip off who

Driving my car, flame trees on fire
Sitting and singin‘ the Higgs Boson blues,
I’m tired, I’m lookin‘ for a spot to drop
All the clocks have stopped in Memphis now
In the Lorraine Motel, it’s hot, it’s hot
That’s why they call it the Hot Spot
I take a room with a view
Hear a man preaching in a language that’s completely new, yea
Making the hot cots in the flophouse bleed
While the cleaning ladies sob into their mops
And a bell hop hops and bops
A shot rings out to a spiritual groove
Everybody bleeding to that Higgs Boson Blues

If I die tonight, bury me
In my favorite yellow patent leather shoes
With a mummified cat and a cone-like hat
That the caliphate forced on the Jews
Can you feel my heartbeat?
Can you feel my heartbeat?

Hannah Montana does the African Savannah
As the simulated rainy season begins
She curses the queue at the Zoo loo
And moves on to Amazonia
And cries with the dolphins
Mama ate the pygmy
The pygmy ate the monkey
The monkey has a gift that he is sending back to you
Look here comes the missionary
With his smallpox and flu
He’s saving them, the savages
With his Higgs Boson Blues
I’m driving my car down to Geneva
I’m driving my car down to Geneva

Oh let the damn day break
The rainy days always make me sad
Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake
And you’re the best girl I’ve ever had
Can’t remember anything at all

This new documentary of Nick Cave fits to this post: http://www.20000daysonearth.com/. The film is an exploration of the artistic process as Forsyth and Pollard filmed the early stages of Cave writing his 2013 album “Push The Sky Away” with the directors structuring the film around a fictional narrative of his 20,000th day.

And one last song, also from the terrific recent album ‚Push the Sky Away‘ (2013): ‚Jubilee Street‘

[youtube=http://youtu.be/G6rTZe6gtS8]