The Secret Life of a Love Song - Nick Cave

secret_life_of_a_love_song.txt

West Country Girl

With a crooked smile and a heart-shaped face
Comes from the West Country where the birds sing bass
She's got a house-big heart where we all live
And plead and counsel and forgive
Her widow's peak, her lips I've kissed
Her gloves of bone at her wrist
That I have held in my hand
Her Spanish fly and her monkey gland
Her godly body and its fourteen stations
That I have embraced, her palpitations
Her unborn baby crying, Mummy
Amongst the rubble of her body
Her lovely lidded eyes I've sipped
Her fingernails, all pink and chipped
Her accent which I'm told is 'broad'
That I have heard and has been poured
Into my human heart and filled me
With love, up to the brim, and killed me
And rebuilt me back anew
With something to look forward to
Well, who could ask much more than that?
A West Country Girl with a big fat cat
That looks into her eyes of green
And meaows, 'He loves you', then meaows again



That was a song called West Country Girl. It is a love song. It began, in its
innocence, as a poem written about two years ago in Australia, where the sun
shines. I wrote it with my heart in my mouth, listing the physical details that
drew me towards a particular person...the West Country Girl. It set forth my own
personal criteria of beauty, my own particular truth about beauty, as angular,
cruel and impoverished as it probably was. It was a list of things I loved, and,
in truth, a wretched excuse in flattery, designed to win the girl. And it worked
and it didn't work. But the peculiar magic of the love song, if it has the heart
to do it, is that it endures where the object of the song does not. It attaches
itself to you, and together you move through time. But it does more than that,
for just as it is our task to move forward, to cast off our past, to change and
to grow, in short, to forgive ourselves and each other, the love song holds
within it an eerie intelligence all its own - to reinvent the past and to lay it
at the feet of the present. West Country Girl began in innocence and in
sunshine, as a simple poem about a girl. But it has done what all love songs
must do in order to survive: it has demanded the right to its own identity, its
own life, its own truth. I've seen it grow and mutate with time. It presents
itself now as a cautionary tale, as a list of ingredients in a witches' brew, it
reads as a coroner's report, or a message on a sandwich-board worn by a
wild-eyed man who states, "The end of the world is at hand." It is a hoarse
voice in the dark that croaks, "Beware . . . beware . . . beware." Anyway, I'm
getting ahead of myself.



People Ain't No Good

People just ain't no good
I think that's well understood
You can see it everywhere you look
People just ain't no good

We were married under cherry trees
Under blossom we made our vows
All the blossoms came sailing down
Through the streets and through the playgrounds

The sun would stream on the sheets
Awoken by the morning bird
We'd buy the Sunday newspapers
And never read a single word

People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good

Seasons came, seasons went
The winter stripped the blossoms bare
A different tree now lines the streets
Shaking its fists in the air

The winter slammed us like a fist
The windows rattling in the gales
To which she drew the curtains
Made out of her wedding veils

People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good
To our love send a dozen white lilies
To our love send a coffin of wood
To our love let all the pink-eyed pigeons coo
That people they just ain't no good
To our love send back all the letters
To our love a valentine of blood
To our love let all the jilted lovers cry
That people they just ain't no good

It ain't that in their hearts they're bad
They can comfort you, some even try
They nurse you when your ill of health
They bury you when you go and die
It ain't that in their hearts they're bad
They'd stick by you if they could
But that's just bullshit
People just ain't no good

People they just ain't no good
People they just ain't no good
People they just ain't no good
People they just ain't no good



I performed a more conservative, lo-tech version of this essay at the Poetry
Academy in Vienna last year. I was invited to actually teach a group of adult
students about songwriting. But first they wanted me to give a public lecture.
The subject I chose was the love song, and in doing it - I mean, standing up in
front of a crowd of people and teaching, lecturing - I was filled with a host of
conflicting feelings. The strongest, most insistent of these was one of abject
horror. Horror, because my late father was an English literature teacher at the
high school I attended back in Australia - you know, where the sun shines. I
have very clear memories of being about 12 and sitting in a classroom watching
my father, who would be standing, up here, where I am standing, and thinking to
myself, gloomily and miserably - for, in the main, I was a gloomy and miserable
child - "It doesn't really matter what I do with my life as long as I don't end
up like my father." Now, at 41, it would appear there is virtually no action I
can take that does not draw me closer to him, that does not make me more like
him. At 41, I have become my father, and here I am, ladies and gentlemen,
teaching.

Looking back over the past 20 years, a certain clarity prevails. Amidst the
madness and the mayhem, it would seem I have been banging on one particular
drum. I see that my artistic life has centred around an attempt to articulate an
almost palpable sense of loss that laid claim to my life. A great gaping hole
was blasted out of my world by the unexpected death of my father when I was 19.
The way I learned to fill this hole, this void, was to write. My father taught
me this as if to prepare me for his own passing. Writing allowed me direct
access to my imagination, to inspiration and, ultimately, to God.

I found that, through the use of language, I was writing God into existence.
Language became the blanket that I threw over the invisible man, which gave him
shape and form. The actualisation of God through the medium of the love song
remains my prime motivation as an artist. I found that language became a
poultice to the wounds incurred by the death of my father. Language became a
salve to longing.

The loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words
began to float and collect and find their purpose. WH Auden said, "the so-called
traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child
has been patiently waiting - had it not occurred, it would have found another -
in order that its life became a serious matter". The death of my father was this
"traumatic experience" that left the hole for God to fill. How beautiful the
notion that we create our own personal catastrophes and that it is the creative
forces within us that are instrumental in doing this. Here, our creative
impulses lie in ambush at the side of our lives, ready to leap forth and kick
holes in it - holes through which inspiration can rise. We each have our need to
create, and sorrow itself is a creative act.

Though the love song comes in many guises - songs of exaltation and praise, of
rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss - they all
address God, for it is the haunted premise of longing that the true love song
inhabits. It is a howl in the void for love and for comfort, and it lives on the
lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of
their loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God. It is
the cry of one chained to the earth and craving flight, a flight into
inspiration and imagination and divinity. The love song is the sound of our
endeavours to become God-like, to rise up and above the earth-bound and the
mediocre. I believe the love song to be a sad song. It is the noise of sorrow
itself.

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call "saudade", an inexplicable
longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling
that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration, and is the breeding
ground for the sad song, for the love song. Saudade is the desire to be
transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is
not of this world. The love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting up
though our wounds.

In his brilliant lecture, The Theory And Function Of Duende, Frederico Garcia
Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that
lives at the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sounds has
'duende'," he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no
philosopher can explain." Contemporary rock music seems less inclined to have at
its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about.
Excitement, often, anger, sometimes - but true sadness, rarely. Bob Dylan has
always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically with it. It pursues Van Morrison
like a black dog and, though he tries to, he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and
Neil Young can summon it. My friends The Dirty 3 have it by the bucketload. But,
all in all, it would appear that the duende is too fragile to survive the
compulsive modernity of the music industry. In the hysterical technocracy of
modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class, where it sits, pissing
its pants in mortal terror. Duende, needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates
haste and floats in silence. I feel sorry for sadness, as we jump all over it,
denying its voice and muscling it into the outer reaches. No wonder sorrow
doesn't smile much. No wonder sadness is so sad.

All love songs must contain "duende", because the love song is never simply
happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of
love, without having within their lines 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.
These songs deny us our human-ness and our God-given right to be sad, and the
airwaves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the whispers
of sorrow and the echoes of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker
reaches of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder,
magic and joy of love, for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has
breathed the same air as evil, so within the fabric of the love song, within its
melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for
suffering.



Sad Waters

Down the road I look and there runs Mary
Hair of gold and lips like cherries
We go down to the river where the willows weep
Take a naked root for a lovers' seat
That rose out of the bitten soil
But bound to the ground by creeping ivy coils
O Mary you have seduced my soul
(And I don't know right from wrong)
Forever a hostage of your child's world

And then I ran my tin-cup heart along
The prison of her ribs
And with a toss of her curls
That little girl goes waddling in
Rolling her dress up past her knee
Turning these waters into wine
Then she plaited all the willow vines
Mary in the shallows laughing
Over where the carp dart
Spooked by the new shadows that she cast
Across these sad waters and across my heart



Around the age of 20, I started reading the Bible and found in the brutal prose
of the Old Testament, in the feel of its words and its imagery, an endless
source of inspiration, especially in the series of love songs/poems known as the
Psalms. I found the Psalms, which deal directly with the relationship between
man and God, teeming with all the clamorous desperation, longing, exaltation,
erotic violence and brutality that I could hope for. They are soaked in saudade,
drenched in duende, and bathed in bloody-minded violence. In a lot of ways,
these songs became the blueprint for many of my more sadistic love songs. Psalm
137, a particular favourite of mine, which was turned into a chart hit by the
fab Boney M, is a perfect example of this.



Psalm 137

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea,
We wept, when we remembered Zion
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof
For there they that carried us away captive required
Of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us
Mirth saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's Song in a strange land
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, Let my right hand
Forget her cunning
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to
The roof of my mouth: If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the
Day of Jerusalem; who said Rase it, rase it, even to
The foundation thereof
Daughter of Babylon, who are to be destroyed;
Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast
Served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little
Ones against the stones.



Here, the poet finds himself captive in "a strange land", and is forced to sing
a song of Zion. He declares his love to his homeland and dreams of revenge. The
psalm is ghastly in its violent sentiments, as he sings to his God for
deliverance, and that he may be made happy by murdering the children of his
enemies. What I found, time and time again in the Bible, was that verses of
rapture, of ecstasy and love could hold within them apparently opposite
sentiments - hate, revenge, bloody-mindedness - that were not mutually
exclusive. This has left an enduring impression upon my songwriting.

The love song must be borne into the realm of the irrational, the absurd, the
distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive and the insane, for it is the clamour
of love itself, and love is, of course, a form of madness. Whether it is the
love of God, or romantic erotic love, these are manifestations of our need to be
torn away from the rational, to take leave of our senses, so to speak. Love
songs come in many forms and are written as declarations of love or revenge, to
praise or to wound or to flatter - I have written songs for all these reasons,
but ultimately the love song exists to fill with language the silence between
ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.

But within the world of pop music, a world that deals ostensibly with the love
song, true sorrow is just not welcome. There are exceptions: occasionally, a
song comes along that hides behind its disposable plastic beat a love lyric of
truly devastating proportions. Better The Devil You Know, written by Stock,
Aitken and Waterman and sung by Kylie Minogue, is such a song. The disguising of
the terror of love in a piece of mindless, innocuous pop is an intriguing
concept. Better The Devil You Know contains one of pop music's most violent and
distressing love lyrics.



Better the Devil You Know

Say you won't leave me no more
I'll take you back again
No more excuses, no, no
'Cause I've heard them all before
A hundred times or more
I'll forgive and forget
If you say you'll never go
'Cause it's true what they say
Better the devil you know

Our love wasn't perfect
I know, I think I know the score
You say you love me, O boy
I can't ask for more
I'll come if you should call
I'll be here every day
Waiting for your love to show
'Cause it's true what they say
It's better the devil you know
I'll take you back
I'll take you back again



When Kylie sings these words, there is an innocence to her voice that makes the
horror of the chilling lyric all the more compelling. The idea presented within
this song, dark and sinister and sad, that love relationships are by nature
abusive, and that this abuse, be it physical or psychological, is welcomed and
encouraged, shows how even the most seemingly harmless of love songs has the
potential to hide terrible human truths. Like Prometheus chained to his rock,
the eagle eating his liver night after night, Kylie becomes Love's sacrificial
lamb, bleating an earnest invitation to the drooling, ravenous wolf to devour
her time and time again, all to a groovy techno beat. "I'll take you back, I'll
take you back again." Indeed, here the love song becomes a vehicle for a
harrowing portrait of humanity, not dissimilar to the Old Testament psalms. Both
are messages to God that cry out into the yawning void, in anguish and
self-loathing, for deliverance.

As I said earlier, my artistic life has centred around the desire or, more
accurately, need to articulate the feelings of loss and longing that have
whistled through my bones and hummed in my blood. In the process, I have written
about 200 songs, the bulk of which are love songs. Love songs, and thereafter,
by my definition, sad songs. A handful of them rise above the others as true
examples of all I have talked about.

Sad Waters, Black Hair, I Let Love In, Deanna, From Her To Eternity, Nobody's
Baby Now, Into My Arms, Lime Tree Arbour, Lucy, Straight To You, I am proud of
these songs. 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 reasons I feel compelled to write love songs are legion. Some of these
became clearer to me when I sat down with a friend of mine. We admitted to each
other that we both suffered from the psychological disorder that the medical
profession terms "Erotigraphomania".

Erotigraphomania is the obsessive desire to write love letters. He shared with
me the fact that he had written, and sent, over the past five years more than
7,000 love letters to his wife. My friend looked exhausted, and his shame was
almost palpable. We discussed the power of the love letter, and found that it
was, not surprisingly, very similar to that of the love song. Both serve as
extended meditations on one's beloved. Both serve to shorten the distance
between the writer and the recipient. Both hold within them a permanence and
power that the spoken word does not. Both are erotic exercises in themselves.
Both have the potential to reinvent, through words, like Pygmalion with his
self-created lover of stone, one's beloved. But more than that, both have the
insidious power to imprison one's beloved, to bind their hands with love-lines,
gag them, blind them, for words become the defining parameter that keeps the
image of the loved one imprisoned in a bondage of poetry. "I have taken
possession of you," the love letter, the love song, whispers, for ever.

These stolen souls we set adrift, like lost astronauts floating for eternity
through the stratospheres of the divine. Me, I never trust a woman who writes
letters, because I know that I, myself, cannot be trusted. Words endure, flesh
does not. The poet will always have the upper hand. Me, I'm a soul-catcher for
God. Here I come with my butterfly net of words. Here I catch the chrysalis.
Here I blow life into bodies, and hurl them fluttering to the stars and the care
of God.

I'd like to look finally at a song I wrote for The Boatman's Call album. It is
called Far From Me.



Far From Me

For you, dear, I was born
For you I was raised up
For you I've lived and for you I will die
For you I am dying now
You were my mad little lover
In a world where everybody fucks everybody else over.
You who are so
Far from me
So far from me
Way across some cold neurotic sea
Far from me
I would talk to you of all manner of things
With a smile you would reply
Then the sun would leave your pretty face
And you'd retreat from the front of your eyes
I keep hearing that you're doing your best
I hope your heart beats happy in your infant breast
You are so far from me
Far from me
Far from me
There is no knowledge but I know it
There's nothing to learn from that vacant voice That sails to me across the line
From the ridiculous to the sublime
It's good to hear you're doing so well But really, can't you find somebody else
that you can ring and tell?
Did you ever care for me?
Were you ever there for me?
So far from me
You told me you'd stick by me
Through the thick and through the thin
Those were your very words
My fair-weather friend
You were my brave-hearted lover
At the first taste of trouble went running back to mother
So far from me
Far from me
Suspended in your bleak and fishless sea
Far from me
Far from me



Far From Me took four months to write, the duration of the relationship it
describes. The first verse was written in the first week of the affair, and is
full of the heroic dreams of the new love, describing the totality of feeling
while acknowledging its parallel pain - "for you I'm dying now". It sets the two
lover-heroes against an uncaring world - "a world where everybody fucks
everybody else over" - and brings in the notion of physical distance suggested
in the title. Verse One, and all is well in the garden. But Far From Me had its
own agenda, and was not about to allow itself to be told what to do. As if
awaiting the inevitable "traumatic experience", it refused to let itself be
completed until the catastrophe had occurred. Some songs are tricky like that,
and it is wise to keep your wits about you when dealing with them. More often
than not, the songs I write seem to know more about what's going on in my life
than I do. I have pages and pages of final verses for this song, written while
the relationship was still sailing happily along. One such verse went: "The
Camellia, the Magnolia/ Have such a pretty flower/ And the bell from St Mary's/
Informs us of the hour." Pretty words, innocent words, unaware that any day the
bottom was about to drop out of the whole thing. As I wrote the final verse, it
became clear that my life was being dictated by the largely destructive
ordinance of the song itself, that it had its own in-built destiny over which I
had no control. In fact, I was an afterthought, a bit player in its sly,
mischievous and finally malicious vision of how the world should be.

Love songs that attach themselves to actual experience, that are a poeticising
of real events, have a beauty unto themselves. They stay alive in the same way
memories do and, being alive, they grow up and undergo changes and develop. If a
song is too weak to do that, if it is lacking in sufficient stamina and the will
to endure, sadly, it will not survive. You'll come home one day and find it dead
in the bottom of its cage. Its soul will have been reclaimed and all that will
remain is a pile of useless words. A love song such as Far From Me demanded a
personality beyond the one I originally gave it, with the power to influence my
own feelings and thoughts around the actual event itself. The songs that I have
written that deal with past relationships have become the relationships
themselves, heroically mutating with time and mythologising the ordinary events
of my life, lifting them from the temporal plane and blasting them way into the
stars. As the relationship itself collapses, whimpering with exhaustion, the
song breaks free of it and beats its wings heavenward. Such is the singular
beauty of songwriting. Twenty years of songwriting have now passed, and still
the void gapes wide. Still the inexplicable sadness, the duende, the saudade,
the divine discontent, persists, and perhaps it will continue until I see the
face of God himself. But when Moses desired to see the face of God, he was
answered that he may not endure it, that no man could see the face of God and
live. Well, me, I don't mind. I'm happy to be sad. For the residue cast off in
this search, the songs themselves, my crooked brood of sad-eyed children, rally
round and in their way protect me, comfort me and keep me alive. They are the
companions of the soul that lead it into exile, that sate the overpowering
yearning for that which is not of this world. The imagination demands an
alternative world, and through the writing of the love song one sits and dines
with loss and longing, madness and melancholy, ecstasy, magic and joy with equal
measure of respect and gratitude.