Grief is the sneakiest of animals, especially when it comes to joy. Joy was what the Australian singer songwriter Nick Cave was trying to channel when he and his longtime musical collaborator Warren Ellis began working on the songs that comprise his new album “Wild God.” “We’ve all had too much sorrow,” he sings in the song “Joy,” and in our collective moment, this feels acutely true.
The trick of grief, however, is that it is always lurking on the other side of joy. Cave, whose son Arthur died in an accident in 2015, was parceled out more shares of grief than some people will receive in a lifetime. His mother died in 2020, his ex-girlfriend and former bandmate Anita Lane passed away in 2021, tragically followed by the death of his son Jethro in 2022. In the song “Long Dark Night,” he paraphrases St. John of the Cross, telling us that “my poor soul was having a long dark night of it.” This might be a bit of an understatement.
Since 2020, Cave has regularly answered letters from fans at his website The Red Hand Files, and many of those questions are about how we live with grief. What Thomas Merton called “the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine” and many of today’s self-appointed self-help gurus would tell us to spiritually bootstrap or CrossFit our way out of it, but Cave instead spends much of “Wild God” and many Red Hand Files missives offering a less comforting but necessary truth. Weeping, contrary to what the Psalmist said, doesn’t always last for just one night, and joy doesn’t always come in the morning. On the contrary, they weave in and out of one another throughout our lives.
But surviving that interweaving of joy and grief is the undercurrent of developing spiritual maturity. Cave has long talked about the feeling of being pursued and haunted by God while resisting being defined as a Christian artist. Earlier this year, Cave told a journalist that the feeling “Wild God” tries to capture is the “acute joy that’s in-built within sorrow.” For many years, Cave held the Anglican beliefs of his childhood at a very long distance while confessing to a lifelong fascination with God, Jesus and the Old Testament. Biblical themes have been pervasive in every era of his long career as a musician, and this album presents us with a wild god shouting “where are my people?” from the ends of the earth.
Cave has been attending church again since the deaths of his sons, but still doesn’t call himself a Christian “because [he’s] just too uncertain.” He is willing to embrace that uncertainty as the price we pay for being alive. But “Wild God” is very much an album about being pursued by God, even through grief and its aftermaths.
Throughout “Wild God,” Cave’s songs look for consolation as an escape from grief in many forms: the ghost of a teenager in “giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head.” The laughing voice of the late Anita Lane appears as a ghostly voicemail in “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” reminiscing about a young Cave and Lane writing songs together. A biblical rain of frogs gives way to a chorus saying “all will be well, say the bells.” And in “Conversion,” a baptism by fire leaves Cave on the other side of a transformational spiritual experience, repeating the phrase, “I never saw you so beautiful again.”
‘Wild God’ may not be a Christian album, but it is an album of prayer, even if not the kind of prayers we might neatly package into a devotional. Cave, instead, tells us to pray into the space between grief and joy.
Themes from liturgical music consistently surface throughout the album as well. A choir appears on the very first track, “Song of the Lake,” and resurfaces on several other tracks. Church bells ring, rock and roll chants startle and soothe, and horns, strings and woodwinds slide in alongside the alternately propulsive and swirling guitars, bass and drums of The Bad Seeds, Cave’s longtime backing band.
“Wild God” may not be a Christian album, but it is an album of prayer, even if not the kind of prayers we might neatly package into a devotional. Cave, instead, tells us to pray into the space between grief and joy. Pray to the frogs jumping in and out of the water, pray to the wild god relentlessly searching for us all over the world. Pray to the dead teenager laughing in your midnight room, pray to the dead girlfriend singing on the phone. Pray to the lady in the lake, and pray to the woman who holds your hand on Sunday morning. Pray, and sometimes, someone will answer.
So is this a Christian album? The answer, like everything else about Cave’s late in life re-conversion to Christian practice, if not Christian identity, isn’t that simple. In Shakespeare’s Richard II, a king who has lost everything speaks to us from prison and says, “I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends.” That’s what “Wild God” reminds us of: the prayers we offer in the shattered aftermath of pain, often inchoate and desperate, which can be prayers to anything.