On his new album with his band The Bad Seeds, called Wild God, it’s that light that finally shines through. On Wild God, death is still present, but instead of grief shrouding the world with darkness, it illuminates life. In this session, Nick Cave joins us to talk about making Wild God; about life and death; fear and joy; and about frogs!

Interview Highlights

On getting started on a new project

“The way I do it is I set a date, and then I just go to work. I haven’t thought about a record for two or three years. I haven’t thought about any lyrics. I don’t have groovy titles written down in a notebook or anything.

“I just hate songwriting. I hate lyric writing. Lyric writing is the problem. I go about trying to create some songs on my own, sitting there, getting up at 9 o’clock in the morning and finishing about 5:30. This takes a few months. It’s a sort of weirdly dark, self-reflective, anxiety-ridden time. I’m not that pleasant to be around…

“Once I enter the studio and once I’m with my musicians and with the Bad Seeds, that whole thing changes into something that’s just pure pleasure.”

On “Frogs”

“There’s a sort of earned pleasure to it or joy to it. It’s not, like, a happy record. It’s a joyful record, and I think the idea of joy is that it sort of leaps out of an understanding of the world — the suffering, shall we say, of things. It’s a difference between that and a happy record…

“There’s a song called ‘Frogs’ on [the album], which I really love this song. It has these lines in it. People are walking through the rain, and it talks about frogs in the gutters leaping to God, leaping to love, amazed by pain and amazed by joy … It was that little, ecstatic leap of the frog that seems to sum up the feel of the whole record to me. It’s a sort of beautiful, spiritual lift that leaps and retracts.”

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