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Nick Cave has discussed why he doesn’t write political songs in a new edition of his Red Hand Files newsletter.
Replying to a fan on the website, which he regularly updates with musings and answers to fan questions, Cave was asked: “I love your music and its ability to relate common suffering, as you have discussed in the past.
“Do you ever look back at your anthology and wish you had been more overtly politically outspoken – referring to activism rather than politics per se – in your art?”
Cave replied with a lengthy reasoning for his aversion to bringing politics into his lyrics, writing: “Perhaps the thing you enjoy about my songs is that they are conflicted, and often deal in uncertainties and ambiguities. My better songs seem to be engaged in an interior struggle between opposing outlooks or states of mind. They rarely settle on anything. My songs sit in that liminal space between decided points of view.
“Songs with political agendas inhabit a different space. They have little patience for nuance, neutrality or impartiality. Their aim is to get the message across in as clear and persuasive a manner as possible. There can be great value in these sorts of songs, but they are usually born from a particular combination of rigidity and zealousness, which I personally do not possess.
He added: “My songs seem to be resistant to fixed, inflexible points of view. They have, as you say, a concern for common, non-hierarchical suffering. They are not in the business of saving the world; rather they are in the business of saving the soul of the world.
“I have very little control over what songs I write,” Cave reasoned. “They are constructed, incrementally, in the smallest of ways, the greater meaning revealing itself after the fact. They are often slippery, amorphous things, with unclear trajectories — position-free attempts at understanding the mysteries of the heart.
“I guess I could write a protest song, but I think I would, in the end, feel compromised in doing so, not because there aren’t things I am fundamentally opposed to — there are — but because I would be using my particular talents to deal with something I consider to be morally obvious. Personally, I have little inclination to do that. It’s just not what I do.”
Elsewhere on the Red Hand Files, Nick Cave recently shared a list of his 50 favourite books, labelling the selections “a rather formless and incoherent grab bag”.
Cave’s UK and European tour with The Bad Seeds in support of last year’s ‘Ghosteen’ album was recently postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak – see the rescheduled list of tour dates for 2021 here.
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