Throughout most of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 35-year career, death served as a karmic plot device for the characters in Cave’s songs. Death was justice meted out to bad people who did bad things, a well-deserved emotional catharsis for the cast of Cave’s mythical world where good and evil regularly clashed.

This lyrical relationship with death took a turn when Cave’s own teenage son passed in the summer of 2015. Death no longer made sense. It was irreconcilable. Through the wake of this tragedy, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released “The Skeleton Tree” the following year. The album was a chattering and droning ode to grief, with Cave delivering particularly pained vocal performances, his voice often cracking under the weight of the subject material. 

If “Skeleton Tree” was Cave embroiled in the throes of grief, “Ghosteen,” his recently released double album, presents a father finally coping with that grief. In the first issue of The Red Hand Files, a series of emails and letters where Cave eloquently answers questions from fans, he wrote about the loss of his sense of wonder after his son’s death. “Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder. Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach,” he writes. From the outset, it is clear that Cave is attempting, and succeeding, to reclaim this very sense of wonder. The album cover features a fantastic landscape of lambs and lions alike peacefully grazing in a kaleidoscopic field of flowers and rivers and waterfalls. Cave’s lyrics reflects those fantastic images as he sings of horses with manes of fire galloping through the plains and a baby bear who rides a boat to the moon, an allusion to his son’s passing. 

The album offers some of the most gorgeous production the band has done throughout its 18-album discography. The bleak electronic tape loops of “The Skeleton Tree” are replaced by a pearlescent river of synths which pulls Cave’s lyrics along in its undertow. Despite being renowned for the gritty rumble that he delivers his songs with, Cave reaches into his upper register in “Spinning Song,” and “Waiting For You,” while being lofted by glittering piano and violin arrangements.  

The album is separated into two discs, with eight tracks on one disc and two long tracks sandwiching a three-minute spoken word piece on the other. “The songs on the first album are the children. The songs on the second album are their parents,” Cave writes in issue 62 of The Red Hand Files. This characterization seems to ring true as the first half features warmer textures and conjures fantastical imagery. “Before the daylight comes/A thousand galleon ships would sail/Ghostly around the morning sun,” Cave sings on “Galleon Ship.” Children are also a motif that appears in multiple songs throughout the first eight tracks. On “Sun Forest” he delivers these lines, “I lay in the forest amongst the butterflies and the fireflies / And the burning horses and the flaming trees/ As a spiral of children climb up to the sun.” Cave is desperate to find that sense of wonder he lost and invokes these fanciful scenes to do so. 

The second disc, the “parental” part of the album, makes a shift in tone, with lyrics of trying to escape from his pain. “And we hide in our wounds and I’m nearly all the way to Malibu/And I know my time will come one day soon/I’m waiting for peace to come,” he sings in “Hollywood.” Though Cave may have rediscovered wonder, it is only a coping mechanism and it does not erase his grief. 

In issue six of The Red Hand Files, Cave has this to say about grief, “It seems to me that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves.” Although a renewed imagination may offer some reprieve for Cave, this album is one of enduring grief, not overcoming it, and he, understandably, has yet to find closure over his    son’s demise. 

Image from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds via YouTube