The Complete Lyrics 1978–2022

by Nick Cave

'I walk into the corner of my room,
see my friends in high places
I don't know which is which and whom is whom,
they've stolen each other's faces'

Spanning Nick Cave's entire career, from his writing for The Birthday Party, through highly acclaimed albums like Murder Ballads, Henry's Dream and DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!! up to his latest release, Ghosteen, this is a must-have book for all fans of the dark, the beautiful and the defiant - for all fans of the songs of Nick Cave.

'Nick Cave is surely Australia's finest living songwriter' Mail

'He is an Australian artist like Sidney Nolan is an Australian artist - beyond comparison, beyond genre, beyond dispute' Evening Standard
'Cave's lyrics deal with passion on the edge, are peopled with mad bayou preachers, black-hearted lovers and killers. His language is rich, poetic, apocalyptic' Guardian

'Richly poetic creations which live a second life on the page. Essential reading' Vox

Genres: Music, Poetry, Nonfiction, Collections

640 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 2022

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

[Forrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read Delueze's Difference and Repetition (though it is on my list), but I am aching with curiosity to see if he has anything to say about song lyrics. Because, by and large, song lyrics suck. There are notable exceptions, but they are notable because they are exceptional. I'll restrain myself from quoting any, because that's not the point of my banal and overly jejune "observation". But really, when you rip lyrics from the context of the music in which they are couched, they most often come across as just plain stupid. I think this has something to do with repetition. Songs don't have to be repetitive, but it helps, especially if you're a music producer whose goal is to shove some catchy bit into the craw of as many brains as you can. Repetition sells when it's associated with a catchy tune. You don't have to think about such music, which is part of the joy of it all, singing inane lyrics at the top of your lungs: The easier, the better.

But this isn't about joy. Well, maybe a little. But we're talking about Nick Cave here. Talk about a man who has suffered. I'll spare the details, but go read about his life some time. Ugh. Yes, he's had fame and fortune and flamboyance, but, ugh, the things he's gone through, especially the death of two of his children - no thank you. It's odd, then, that many of his most poignantly sad lyrics were written before these losses. Or maybe it's not odd at all. Maybe Nick Cave is just good at putting to paper (and music) the inevitability of pain.

Now, Nick Cave is not innocent when it comes to rote repetition in lyrics. This is especially true in his more punk phase while he was with The Birthday Party. Yes, the seeds (pun intended) of brilliance were there, but, really, they were just a pretty good punk band full of, you guessed it, repetitive lyrics. Cave's outrageous energy carried the band's music, and there's something to be said for that, but if you're looking for poetry in his early lyrics, you're going to have to squint.

Now, I can't speak to this musically, but lyrically, the album The Bad Seed (1983) seems to be a watershed moment in Cave's writing. I don't know what exactly triggered this, but here Cave's poetics enter a new phase. From this point on, things are different, and noticeably so. In the past, sheer brute power carried the day, but now you can see that the work has been crafted more carefully. Yes, there is repetition (it's inevitable in music, I know), but that repetition only serves as punctuation marks to the poetry throughout, like lyrical exclamation points or, more often, lyrical question marks.

Song lyrics, like poems, are easy to read but not easy to process, especially if you are reading them. Without voice inflections and different points of emphasis, one must supply these variations oneself, whether audibly or just in one's head. Of course this can make the songs "yours," but you are bound to have to reinterpret upon hearing the singer's expression. And really, the music is an integral part of the lyrics. So, in some ways, The Complete Lyrics didn't resonate with me (no pun intended there, believe it or not). Again, that pesky repetition, when devoid of emotional context, was just plain irritating, at points. Every exception to this, for me as a reader, came because I had a close knowledge of the songs in which the repetitive lyrics were ensconced. Context is everything, in this case, and when I knew the context well enough, my irritation wore off, soothed by the melody (even if it was a raucous one).

I suppose every Nick Cave fan has a favorite album. Mine is No More Shall We Part. It's agonizingly beautiful. Let Love In marches a close second behind as less somber (but still morose) and more animated, sometimes cartoonishly so. There are songs intermingled in all the other albums that I greatly enjoy ("From Her to Eternity" - my introduction to Nick Cave's music back in the '80s by way of Wim Wenders' Der Himmel über Berlin , and "The Carny" both jump to mind), but these two are albums which, from start to finish, I can long and languish in.

Cave, along with the Bad Seeds, has like any good artist, evolved over the years. From punk to strange calliope rhythms to the blues, his music is nothing if not twisting along a path that is unpredictable. If I ever suspected a Nick Cave album to have been written under the influence of an epic dose of LSD, it would have to be DIG, LAZARUS, DIG. It's "way out there," as they say. Definitely the most experimental (whatever that means) album, lyrically speaking. And now, since the publication of this book in it's most recent incarnation, it appears that Cave and company have taken another turn, towards the ethereal and, dare I say it? Religious?

Wherever he goes, I'm along for the ride. While I can't count myself as a member of his cult of personality, I will say that I continue to be interested, even touched deeply, from time to time, as I was when I first read the lyrics to "Nature Boy," which I'll end with here:

Nature Boy

I was just a boy when I sat down
To watch the news on TV
I saw some ordinary slaughter
I saw some routine atrocity
My father said, don't look away
You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now
He said that in the end is a beauty
That is going to save the world, now

And she moves among the sparrows
And she floats upon the breeze
She moves among the flowers
She moves something deep inside of me

I was walking around the flower show like a leper
Coming down with some kind of nervous hysteria
When I saw you standing there, green eyes, black hair
Up against the pink and purple wisteria
You said, hey, nature boy, are you looking at me
With some unrighteous intention?
My knees went weak, I couldn't speak, I was having thoughts
That were not in my best interests to mention

And she moves among the flowers
And she floats upon the smoke
She moves among the shadows
She moves me with just one little look

You took me back to your place
And dressed me up in a deep-sea diver's suit
You played the patriot, you raised the flag
And I stood at full salute
Later on we smoked a pipe that struck me dumb
And made it impossible to speak
As you closed in, in slow motion
Quoting Sappho, in the original Greek

She moves among the shadows
She floats upon the breeze
She moves among the candles
And we moved through the days and through the years

Years passed by, we were walking by the sea
Half delirious
You smiled at me and said, babe
I think this thing is getting kind of serious
You pointed at something and said
Have you ever seen such a beautiful thing?
It was then that I broke down
It was then that you lifted me up again

She moves among the sparrows
And she walks across the sea
She moves among the flowers
And she moves something deep inside of me

She moves among the sparrows
And she floats upon the breeze
She moves among the flowers
And she moves right up close to me

[Andy Horton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely present from my partner who found this in the local indie bookshop, Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace and treated me to it. I read it - or as much as you can read something like this in one sitting - in the pub after our afternoon in town.
Great stuff. Great songwriter, prophet and -as is clear reading his lyrics on the page like this - poet. You can se his writing develop over time, see how his lyrics reflect his life experience.
The dark and edgy lyrics are throughout offset by his sincere love songs of wonder and devotion. Am I of an age to lose my edge, or to see that both aspects of the man are equally valid. Or am I just a big softy at heart? I dunno.

[sarah ౨ৎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

12/30/2024: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️


12/29/2023: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I fucking love Nick Cave. I would die for Nick Cave. He is the only musician I trust to write poetry, and I hope he lives to be 200 years old.

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

wish there'd been more space allotted to Cave's reflections on writing, the genesis of his Love Songs, the manner songwriting ebbs and flows and morphs/stops/resumes following one's life. Still wonderful though!

- "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 of its own - to reinvent the past and to lay it at the feet of the present." (3)

- "I found that through the use of language I was writing God into existence. Language became the blanket that I threw over the invisible man, which gave him shape and form. The actualizing of God through the medium of the Love Song remains my prime motivation as an artist. I found that language became a poultice to the wounds incurred by the death of my father. Language became a salve to longing." (6)

- "The great W.H. Auden said 'the so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting - had it not occurred, it would have found another -in order that its life become a serious matter.' The death of my father was the 'traumatic experience' Auden talks about which left the hole for God to fill. How beautiful the notion that we create our own catastrophes and that it is the creative forces within us that are instrumental in dong this. Here our creative impulses lie in ambush at the side of our lives, ready to keep forth and kick holes in it - holes through which inspiration can rise." (7)

[gonçalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

a different breed

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“With my voice, I am calling you”. I’ve spent the last week immersed in Nick Cave’s work — while reading three of his books, I was also reading, and listening along to, The Complete Lyrics 1978 - 2022: 282 songs total, over 20hrs of listen (I’d even made a Spotify playlist so I could read and listen along). Cave’s lyrics are masterful, moving from early masterpieces like ‘The Mercy Seat’, ‘Straight To You’, ‘Red Right Hand’, ‘The Weeping Song’ and ‘Do You Love Me?’, through ‘Into My Arms’, one of the best love songs, and ‘People Ain’t No Good’, the first Nick Cave song I ever heard, to later favourites ‘Hiding All Away’, ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’, ‘Jubilee Street’, all the way to Cave’s latest, most transformative works in the wake of his son’s death: ‘Jesus Alone’, ‘Magneto’ on Skeleton Tree, and on ‘Ghosteen’, ‘Spinning Song’, ‘Sun Forest’, the long title track, ‘Fireflies’, the epic ‘Hollywood’ with my favourite lyrics (“a terrible engine of wrath for a heart”, “The kid drops his bucket and spade / And climbs into the sun”). I also enjoyed the extra Ghosteen lyrics, including ‘Wife With Eyes Closed’: “I can see a moment in between / The waking horror and the sleeping dream”. The book ends with recent albums Carnage, with ‘White Elephant’ and the perfect ‘Balcony Man’ (“This morning is amazing and so are you / You are languid and lovely and lazy / And what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier”), and his latest work, Seven Psalms. I could write forever about what Cave, in his lecture from 1999 ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’, calls “the songs themselves, my crooked brood of sad-eyed children”. Among the greatest songwriters of all time, truly.

[Tanya Mardirossian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this collection and wonder if a new edition with Wild God will be released. My only wish reading through this was for it to be a bit more like a diary. The beginning lecture was a great start and I wish such musings were in between the lines of the lyrics. After all, “My name is Nick Cave, and I’ve got a few things to tell you” (p. 3).

A great book to have handy for poetry/music/Cave fans. All the lyrics you know. And even the *little* snippets tend to stick: “I’m sitting on the balcony/ Reading Flannery O’Connor/ With a pencil and a plan…” (Carnage). <3

[Martyna · Rating 5 out of 5]

piękne i poruszające

[f · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think they're signing to be free

[Dorian Holmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest lyric writers of our time.