Nick Cave thanked Bob Dylan on his website, The Red Hand Files, for bringing joy to his life.
“Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song ‘Joy’ where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now it the time for joy,'” Dylan wrote in a tweet on X. “I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.”
A fan recently asked Cave on his website, “Have you ever imagined that Bob Dylan would be attending your shows and writing nice tweets about them?” Cave wrote in his reply, “I hadn’t known Bob was at the concert and his tweet was a lovely pulse of joy that penetrated my exhausted, zombied state.”
The singer continued, “I was happy to see Bob on X, just as many on the Left had performed a Twitterectomy and headed for Bluesky. It felt admirably perverse, in a Bob Dylan kind of way.”
“I did indeed feel it was a time for joy rather than sorrow. There had been such an excess of despair and desperation around the election, and one couldn’t help but ask when it was that politics became everything,” Nick added.
‘Joy’ is a song from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ latest album ‘Wild God,’ released in late August. In April, Cave wrote a blog post about artists, including Dylan, who have ‘disappointed’ him in some way.
He said, “They have often not travelled in the direction I would have hoped or wished for, instead following their own confounding paths (damn them!) to their own truths.”
“In the course of this I have sometimes been discomforted by things they have done, disagreed with things they have said, or not liked a particular record they have made. Yet there is something about them that keeps me captivated, and forever alert to what they might do next,” Nick also shared.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds will go on a North American tour next April.
