Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have not appeared in front of audiences with new material since 2019. However, Cave gave the exciting news on his website, the Red Hand Files, and revealed that the preparations have begun for a new album. There is only one small problem: Nick Cave’s muses are not visiting him these days, making the process very difficult.
“Dear Fred,” the musician started his words before giving the good news. “My plan for this year is to make a new record with the Bad Seeds. This is both good news and bad news. Good news, because who doesn’t want a new Bad Seeds record? Bad news because I’ve got to write the bloody thing.”
He continued, “I started the process at 9 am on January 1. It is now January 6 – nearly a week has passed, and I’ve written a few things, but they aren’t very good, or maybe they are; it’s difficult to tell. A kind of doldrums has set in, perennial and predictable. It’s the same with every record; I feel that familiar feeling of lack, like I’m a big, dumb blank thing in a suit.”
The slow process pissed him off quite a bit. The singer added, “I’m grumpy as f*ck, and Susie has decamped for a week. Anything that resembles a creative impulse is burrowed way down in some mossy, froggy hole, asleep, I hope, not dead. I have to call it forth, provoke it from its slumber. It becomes a nasty, punishing, baggy-eyed business. I’m starting to get an infuriating sing-song voice in my head that actually rhymes, like a madness. Like sadness.”
Cave’s latest release with the Bad Seeds, ‘Ghosteen,’ arrived in 2019. The tracks of the band’s seventeenth studio album were written in the aftermath of the death of Cave’s son Arthur in 2015. As a great storyteller, Cave tried to deal with the feeling of loss and grief in the writing process. It is yet to be determined whether the upcoming one will follow this path.
There have been Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds albums before with such an extended writing and recording process. So we don’t have to worry, as Cave will come out of this creative blockade again and write the touching lyrics we are all used to hearing from him.
