There’s a simple message at the heart of Ghosteen, the new album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. We hear it over and again through each of the ten songs, but it is only in the record’s penultimate line that it finds its clearest expression: “Everybody is always losing somebody”.
It’s not a radical thought, but one that is entirely appropriate to an album that deals almost exclusively in the familiar. Told in the first person, at its heart the record is the drama of a family lost in the vastness of a universe. In July 2015 Cave’s teenage son Arthur fell to his death from the clifftops near their Brighton home. Skeleton Tree, the band’s previous record, and the accompanying film, One More Time with Feeling, were Cave’s response, a harrowing account of a man staring into the darkness of grief. As its portmanteau title suggests, Ghosteen is a continuation of that story: the darkness abides, but at last the light might start to get in.
If Skeleton Tree was the sound of the sky falling in, Ghosteen is its opposite. The songs on this album are shot through with a profound sense of wonder: Cave now feels the presence of something, or someone, else. In the Red Hand Files, an ongoing collection of letters addressed to fans, he has written explicitly about this: “I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there.”
Sonically, too, things have changed. Where Skeleton Tree was drenched in menacing synth and repetitive, oppressive percussion, the latest record is closer in texture to ambient music: long-time collaborator Warren Ellis has created a suite of songs touched with sublime, immense, sparse soundscapes against which Cave pits his signature baritone. The result is something of at times astonishing beauty, as on standouts such as Bright Horses and Sun Forest.
Cave has applied the same process of paring-back to his lyrics. The long, narrative-led songs that made his name are no more, at least for the moment. Instead, we are faced with a coalescing, revolving group of phrases and motifs which recur throughout the album, forming a semantic framework that binds the songs together. It’s as if Cave is extemporising, revising and refining in an almost oral-tradition manner.
Certain among these phrases stand out: “the past with its undertow”, “children climbing to the sun”, and perhaps most affectingly, “I am here and you are where you are”. It’s almost as if Cave is using these phrases as a form of echolocation, mapping his grief in an attempt to fix his position in this newly empty world.
Images of the familiar sit side-by-side with a stream of deeply resonant cultural archetypes. We see snapshots of family life – a woman “in the back room washing his clothes” and “sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the radio” – juxtaposed with Elvis, the Three Bears, the Buddha, and, most frequently, “Jesus lying in his mother’s arms”.
The Pieta, the image of the crucified Christ in his mother’s arms, has a symbolic valency that is near universal. Indeed, it far outdates its Christian connotation – the so-called Sarpedon krater, which depicts the death of the eponymous son of Priam of Troy, dates from 515 BC. By juxtaposing the semantic shorthand of this image with deeply personal snapshots of family life, we cannot help but elide the two: the private pain of Cave and his wife is transmuted into something common to all.
Rendered in these terms, we too can begin to understand Cave’s pain. The Pieta speaks to the essential truth of humanity: we all must die, and thus, at some point or another, we all must grieve for something that we have lost. The knowledge that we are all equally part of the community of suffering is that something in the darkness from which we can all draw solace, even in the face of catastrophic loss.
It is in this communion that Cave himself has found comfort. The bond that the singer has with his fans has long been unique, but in the last year it has changed into something extraordinary. Through the Red Hand Files project, he has taken on an almost shamanic role, dispensing wisdom and advice, much of which derives from his own loss. In response to a fan’s letter detailing the loss of his wife, the singer wrote: “We are alone but we are also connected in a personhood of suffering. We have reached out to each other, with nothing to offer, but an acceptance of our mutual despair”.
The past will not let us go. There is, as his film One More Time with Feeling made clear, no moving on from such loss. But that is not to say that there is not beauty, and wonder, and joy. Ghosteen is the sound of a man coming to terms with this truth. Everybody is always losing somebody, but that’s exactly where we can begin to find the strength to lift our eyes again.