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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.

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