Nick Cave Eulogizes His Son

“Most of us don’t want to change,” Nick Cave says in One More Time With Feeling, the documentary that accompanies his latest release, Skeleton Tree. “But what happens when an event occurs that’s so catastrophic that you just change from a known person to an unknown person? When you look at yourself in the mirror, do you actually know the person you really are, that the person inside the skin is a different person?”

That’s not just some existential musing. Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died last year when he fell off a cliff after taking LSD. Skeleton Tree is Cave’s attempt to deal with that tragedy. It‘s the work of a man eviscerated by grief, trying to get some answers by self-medicating with a musical prescription.

Sounding like Leonard Cohen with David Bowie draped around him like a cape, Cave opens with “Jesus Alone,” b-movie sci-fi sound effects swirling around him as he tries to work through the depths of his loss, get some reassurance about his personal tragedy by evaluating how faith and the illusion of life stacks up against the reality of death: “You believe in God, but you get no special dispensation for this belief now,” he moans softly. “You’re a distant memory in the mind of your creator, don’t you see?”

Cave sought refuge in the music, but realized he couldn’t bear to discuss the circumstances that drive the album endlessly with the press, so he allowed filmmaker Andrew Dominick to document the recording sessions, adding some voice-overs and limited access for a few on-camera interviews to discuss the process. The document is available as a companion piece to the record.

Cave is a shape–shifter throughout, a shaman slipping in and out of personas, trying on Lou Reed’s skin for “Rings Of Saturn,” inhabiting Jim Morrison for “Magneto,” murmuring darkly “Oh, the urge to kill somebody was basically overwhelming/
I had such hard blues down there in the supermarket queues.”

He walks around in Bruce Springsteen’s boots for “I Need You,” the prettiest song on the record, evoking the Boss’s “Born to Run” tone with the lyric  “On the night we wrecked like a train/Purring cars and pouring rain/Never felt right about, never again…. Nothing really matters when the one you love is gone.”

But on the album’s closer, the title cut offers some redemption. Against the stark backdrop of a skeleton tree pressed against the sky on a bleak winter morn, Cave calls out “nothing is for free, And it’s alright now.. it’s alright now.”

You can’t critique this stuff. The best you can do is recommend it to someone suffering the loss of a loved one and offer up a prayer- for all of us.