Western girl
With his grim smile and his face of heart He comes from the west where the birds chirp grave
His great heart welcomes us all There he implores, forgives and advises
Drawing of the poster for the exhibition 'Stranger than kindness: the Nick Cave exhibition', which can be seen in the Royal Library of Denmark.
Her clear forehead, her kissed lips Her bone-gloved wrist That I've held in my hand
Your aphrodisiacs and shaves
The divine body and its Stations of the Cross That I traveled, its palpitations Its unborn baby that cries “mommy”. Among the remains of her body
Her adorable lids-eyes that I sipped Her broken pink nails
His accent "dragged" as they say That I heard, that poured
In my heart and it overflowed with love, and it killed me
But I rebuild myself
With something to aspire to
Can you ask for more?
A western girl with her fat cat who looks at her green eyes
And meows, "He loves you", and meows again
This you just read is a song called
West Country Girl
.
It's a love song.
It started, in its most tender innocence, like a poem, written in Australia, where the sun always shines.
I wrote it with my heart making its way through my jaws, consigning, as an inventory, the immeasurable repertoire of physical nuances that attracted me to one person in particular ...
Western Girl.
It helped me to outline my own aesthetic criteria about beauty, my particular truth about beauty;
despite how oblique, cruel and impoverished it may seem.
A list of things he loved, and, indeed, an uncomplicated exercise in flattery, concocted to win her over.
And truth be told, it worked and it didn't work.
But the peculiar magic of the Song of Love is that it lasts as long as the object of the song does not reach.
It sticks to you and accompanies you in time.
But it does more than that, because, just as it is our task to move forward, to discard our past, to change and grow —in short, to forgive ourselves and others—, the Song of Love treasures in its entrails a mysterious intelligence that it is own;
and allows you to reinvent the past and put it at the foot of the present.
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West Country Girl
came to me innocently and in full sun, like a poem about a young woman.
But she has achieved what every self-respecting love song must do to survive, she has claimed her right to exist with her own identity.
I have watched it grow and mutate over time.
It is now presented as a cautionary tale, a recipe for the ingredients for a witch's potion, it reads like a coroner's autopsy, or a message stamped on an easel sign hanging on the shoulders of a wild-eyed guy announcing: "The end of the world is within your reach."
A hoarse voice croaking in the dark: "Be careful ... be careful ... be careful."
People are not cool
People are not cool
There is little more to say
You can see it everywhere you look People are not cool
We got married under the cherry trees Under the flowers we promised each other And the flowers rained down on us Through the streets and parks
The sun was pouring on the sheets Awakened by the morning bird We bought the Sunday papers Without reading a word
People are not cool People are not cool People are not cool
The seasons come and go
Winter bare the branches
And other trees line the streets shaking their fists in the air
Winter shook us like a fist And the winds whipped the windows She drew the curtains
Her wedding veil facts People aren't cool
People are not cool People are not cool
Send our love twelve white lilies Send our love a wooden coffin
May our love the pink-eyed doves coo:
"People are not cool"
To our love return all the letters
Send our love an offering of blood Let our love cry, the hurt lovers cry, people are not cool
It is not that they are bad with desire
They can even comfort you, and they try They take care of you if your health suffers
They bury you if you go and die It is not that they are bad on purpose
If they could they would keep you companyBut baby, that's all bullshit
People are not cool People are not cool People are not cool People are not cool People are not cool
In retrospect, it could be argued that, over the past 20 years, some consistency has been maintained in my speech.
In the midst of the madness and chaos, it would seem as if he had been pounding on a single drum.
I can see, without blushing, how my artistic life has focused on the desire to articulate the chronicle of an almost palpable sense of loss that, to top it all, seemed to claim my own life.
The unexpected death of my father was going to leave a great void in my world when I was barely 19 years old.
The only thing I was able to concoct to fill this hole, this void, was to start writing.
My father, a literature professor, trained me to do so as if he was already trying to prepare me for his departure.
Writing was the safe-conduct to access my imagination, inspiration and, ultimately, God.
I discovered that through the use of language I was addressing a God of flesh and blood.
Language became the cloak I threw over the invisible man, giving him form and substance.
The transubstantiation of God through the Song of Love continues to be my main motivation as an artist.
I realized that language had become the best balm to alleviate the trauma suffered with the death of my father.
To rebuild Cave's office, artists Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard have used original objects by the artist.
Anders Sune Berg
The loss of my father left a void in my life, a space through which my words began to float and compile and find their purpose.
The great WH Auden said: “The so-called traumatic experience by many is not an accident, but the opportunity that the child has been patiently waiting for;
Had it not been this, he would have found another one so that his life would become a serious matter ”.
My father's death was, no doubt, the traumatic experience Auden tells us about, the one that left the void that only God could fill.
How beautiful is the notion that we ourselves illuminate our own personal catastrophes and that our own creative forces are, in turn, instrumental in making it so.
Our creative impulses linger on the fringes of our lives, ready to ambush us, ready to assault us and plant pike on the scene, piercing our consciousness — blasting gaps through which inspiration can emerge.
Each of us has the need to create, and the assimilation of pain is, in itself, a creative act.
Reconstruction of Nick Cave's office, created by artists Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard.
Anders Sune Berg
Although the Song of Love manifests itself in many and very varied forms - songs of exaltation and praise, of rage and despair, erotic, of abandonment and loss - in all of them the Creator is invoked, since it is in the bewitching premise of longing that the true Song of Love dwells.
It is a howl in the void that cries out to heaven for love and consolation, and it survives on the lips of the child who cries for his mother.
It is the song of the lover who despairs for his loved one, the delirium of the suppliant lunatic invoking his god.
It is the heartbreaking lament of the one who, chained to the earth, yearns to take flight, the flight towards inspiration, imagination and divinity.
The Song of Love would therefore be the materialization of our vain efforts to become divine beings, to rise above the earthly and the banal.
I believe that the Song of Love is, by definition - and par excellence - the song of sadness, the true sound of grief.
We all experience in the depths of our being what the Portuguese happily called
saudade
, a term that translates as a kind of inexplicable longing, the unnameable and enigmatic longing that nests in the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration;
and it is, in turn, the breeding ground from which the song of sadness emerges, the Song of Love.
Saudade
is the desire to be transported from darkness to light, to be caressed by what is not of this world .
The Song of Love is the divine light, from the depths of our entrails, bursting through our wounds.
Reconstruction of Nick Cave's office, created by artists Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard.
Anders Sune Berg
In his brilliant lecture entitled
Game and Theory of the Duende,
Federico García Lorca is about to outline a plausible explanation of the strange and inexplicable sadness that lies at the heart of certain works of art.
"Everything that has dark sounds has a duende."
To immediately add: "That mysterious power that everyone feels but the philosopher cannot explain."
In contemporary rock music, the underworld in which I earn my living, the music seems less inclined to shelter in its soul, restless and fearful, the sadness that Lorca speaks of.
Emotion, often;
anger, not infrequently, but true sadness is rare.
Bob Dylan always suffered from it.
Leonard Cohen focuses specifically on his treatment.
He chases Van Morrison like a mad dog, and even though he tries, he can't escape his shadow.
Tom Waits and Neil Young can, on occasion, invoke it.
My friends The Dirty load it in bulk but, by way of epitaph, it might be ventured that the goblin seems too fragile to survive the compulsive modernity of the record industry.
In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, grief is forced to crowd into the last row of the classroom, where he takes a seat, pissing his pants with fear.
The sadness or elf needs space to breathe.
Melancholy detests urgency and floats in silence.
I feel sorry for the sadness, as we jump all over the place, denying it its voice and trying to verbalize it and propel it towards other ends.
It's no wonder sadness doesn't smile often.
Nor is it surprising that sadness is still so sad.
All Love Songs have to have duende because the Love Song is never, simply and simply, happiness.
You must first embrace the potential to express pain.
Those songs that speak of love, without having among their verses a lament or a single tear, are not Love Songs at all, but rather Hate Songs disguised as Love Songs, and they do not deserve even our slightest attention.
These songs strip us of our humanity and of our God-given right to be - and to feel - sad, and the airwaves are infested with them.
The Song of Love must resonate with the whispers of sadness and the echoes of pain.
The writer who refuses to explore the darkest regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the power of enchantment, magic, and the joy of love, for just as he cannot trust the good unless he has breathed the same air as evil —the metaphor of the Only Begotten crucified between two criminals comes to mind here—, in the structure of the Song of Love, in its melody, in the lyrics, one must feel that one has savored the capacity for suffering.
This text is an extract from a conference collected in the volume that brings together the lyrical work of Nick Cave.
The
Stranger Than Kindness
exhibition
.
The Nick Cave Exhibition
can be seen at The Black Diamond, the Royal Library in Copenhagen, until October 3