CAVE ON CAVE
Edited highlights of the Red Hand Files, the songwriter’s Q&A site
THE good news is that in the last year I have felt intensely connected to my writing. For a year it had been difficult to work out how to write, because the centre had collapsed and Susie [Cave’s wife, Susie Bick] and I had been flung to the outer reaches of our lives. We were outlanders floating in deep space.
But what had collapsed? What is at the centre of our lives? In an artist’s case I would say it is a sense of wonder. Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach. We were surviving, but we were surviving in exile on the perimeter of our lives, way beyond anything that mattered.
We all needed to draw ourselves back to a state of wonder. My way was to write myself there. It also had something to do with community. Work was the key to get back to my life, but I also realised that I was not alone in my grief. I felt this in our live performances. I felt very acutely that a sense of suffering was the connective tissue that held us all together. These two things – community and work – showed Susie and me a way forward. Work became the lifelines thrown out to us as we floated lost in narcissism and self-absorption. It also became very clear to both of us that we were not alone! We could see there were many others out there, floating around in the dark, outside of their lives. It seemed to be everywhere we looked – people in search of meaning and wonder.
As to whether the lyric writing has changed, I would say that it has shifted fundamentally. I have found a way to write beyond the trauma, authentically, that deals with all manner of issues but does not turn its back on the issue of the death of my child. I found with some practice the imagination could propel itself beyond the personal into a state of wonder. In doing so the colour came back to things with a renewed intensity and the world seemed clear and bright and new.
THERE is always a temptation to take the position that one has no regrets. There is a death-row defiance to this notion that stares down the accusations of the past and says, “I am what I am and be damned.” We feel that to harbour regrets dishonours the very place to which we have arrived. But, it can be helpful to remind ourselves that these regrets are intimations informing us that we have developed sufficiently to perceive the nature of our past shortcomings.
Perhaps it is useful to see our lives as a series of failed or abandoned dreams, but to also recognise that these dreams are the very architecture of our humanity; to lovingly accept our shortcomings and lay them to rest in the knowledge that growth and regret go hand in hand, as do failure and potentiality. Over time I have learned that the opportunity to say goodbye is the ultimate privilege. It can serve as a sigh of remembered love, a reparative breath that precedes an adjournment, a pause of gratitude before you inhabit the next you.
IN the recording studio, when you multi-layer vocals, sometimes the more voices you lay down and the more varied they are, the more pure the tone of the chorus becomes, as all individuality is erased and a pristine collected sound flows forth. As you add more voices, a strange inverse reaction happens, and the smaller, more distilled and weirdly intimate the cascade of voices seems to become. Perhaps that is what God sounds like. Perhaps, God would have the combined voice of all the untold billions of collected souls, an assembly of the departed speaking as one – without rancour, domination or division; a great, many layered calling forth that rings from the heavens in the small, determined voice of a child, maybe; sexless, pure and uncomplicated – that says, “Look for me. I am here.”
“Growth and regret go hand in hand, as do failure and potentiality”