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I have been listening to a lot of Nick Cave recently, kicked off by this year’s great Grinderman album. Apparently Grinderman was kicked off by Nick Cave asking Warren Ellis what he should write about, and Ellis replied “how about something other than love and God”, which are Cave’s mainstays. I found this fantastic essay of his about love songs, and I adore this sentiment:

…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.

I have been asked many times why I find the most beauty and wonder in songs and stories that have sad and dark elements, and I Cave does a better job of articulating it than I ever have.

I frequently refer to Nels Cline as ‘my favorite guitarist’. I have been a fan of his playing for over a decade, ever since I saw him take on Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brian’ as part of Mike Watt’s band. Since then I have seen him play with The Geraldine Fibbers, Glenn Kotche, Jenny Scheinman and her band, and his own Nels Cline Singers. (I still haven’t seen him play with Wilco, but I hope to one of these days.) He plays with many other fine bands, but generally only in LA. So I am thrilled that two bands that feature him (The Nels Cline Singers and The Scott Amendola Band) will be playing The Triple Door in Seattle as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival.

I saw Nels at the Triple Door earlier this year, where he played a couple of songs with Glenn Kotche as a duo. Thirty seconds into the first one I recognized the song and broke into laugher. It was an instrumental cover of the Sonic Youth’s ‘Karen Koltrane’. This was a great choice, because generally when people cover Sonic Youth songs, they pick ones that were released between 1987 and 1995 and do not pick anything sung by the fearsome Lee Ranaldo. This is probably (and reasonably) because it is easier to simulate and interpret the pieces of the Sonic Youth catalogue that resemble pop songs than it is to take on their distinctive style of musicianship. But Nels plays the guitar lead in a way that both sounds authentically like the original and makes it his own, and Glenn was able to turn the vocal line into a xylophone riff.

After ‘Karen Koltrane’, they played another song, which also sounded familiar, but I could not place it. I saw Glenn after the show and asked him where I knew it from, and he assured me that I didn’t. It was a new song of Nels’s called ‘Caved-In Heart Blues’. Since then the song was released as the first track on Draw Breath, the latest Nels Cline Singers album. I tried to listen to the album on a plane ride, but I ended up listening to ‘Caved-In Heart Blues’ on repeat for the entire flight.

Now I know why this song seemed so familiar. The song has a melody that is so pretty and elegant it seems like it feels familiar. I have listened to it at least 20 times in the past week, and I still don’t know exactly why I like it so much.

Anyway, the song is available as a free download, so feel free to listen: Caved-In Heart Blues.