The Secret Life of the Love Song/The Flesh Made Word: Two Lectures by Nick Cave

by Nick Cave

The Secret Life of the Love Song is Nick Cave's highly original take on his personal artistic muse, and on the genre as a whole. Originally conceived for the Vienna Poetry Festival (1998) and performed to great success and a capacity audience at The Royal Festival Hall, London earlier in 1999, this is a special studio recording. It includes five new and unique recordings of his songs 'West Country Girl', 'People Ain't no Good', 'Sad Waters', 'Love Letter', and 'Far From Me'. The Word Made Flesh is a wholly spoken-word piece, re-recorded, originally conceived and executed for the BBC Religious Services Department in 1996.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Literature, Words, Religion, Essays, Biography

Audio CD

Published January 1, 1999

About the author

Nicholas Edward Cave is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, and occasional actor. He is best known for his work in the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and his fascination with American music and its roots. He has a reputation, which he disowns, for singing dark, brooding songs which some listeners regard as depressing. His music is characterised by intensity, high energy and a wide variety of influences. He currently lives in Brighton & Hove in England.

Cave released his first book King Ink, in 1988. It is a collection of lyrics and plays, including collaborations with American enfant terrible Lydia Lunch.

While he was based in West Berlin, Cave started working on what was to become his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). Significant crossover is evident between the themes in the book and the lyrics Cave wrote in the late stages of the Birthday Party and the early stage of his solo career. "Swampland", from Mutiny, in particular, uses the same linguistic stylings ('mah' for 'my', for instance) and some of the same themes (the narrator being haunted by the memory of a girl called Lucy, being hunted like an animal, approaching death and execution). A collectors' limited edition of the book appeared in 2007.

Cave wrote the foreword to a Canongate publication of the Gospel according to Mark, published in the UK in 1998. The American publication of the same book contains a foreword by a different author.

Reviews

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

'But the peculiar magic of the love song, if it has the heart to do it, is that it endures where the object of the song does not. It attaches itself to you, and together you move through time. But it does more than that, for just as it is our task to move forward, to cast off our past, to change and to grow, in short, to forgive ourselves and each other, the love song holds within it an eerie intelligence all its own - to reinvent the past and to lay it at the feet of the present. West Country Girl began in innocence and in sunshine, as a simple poem about a girl. But it has done what all love songs must do in order to survive: it has demanded the right to its own identity, its own life, its own truth. I've seen it grow and mutate with time. It presents itself now as a cautionary tale, as a list of ingredients in a witches' brew, it reads as a coroner's report, or a message on a sandwich-board worn by a wild-eyed man who states, "The end of the world is at hand." It is a hoarse voice in the dark that croaks, "Beware . . . beware . . . beware." '

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

READ THIS. BETTER YET, GET THE AUDIOBOOK READ BY CAVE.

[Magnus Huth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever read. If not the most beautiful one.

[thinkingape · Rating 5 out of 5]

詩歌的存在是為了填補人與神之間的沉默。當我看到這個句子的時候，我就驚呆了。

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

again, Nick Cave... seriously people...

[Cail Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man is one of our greatest treasures.