Nick Cave: ‘Girl in Amber’ went some way toward releasing both my wife and me from the paralysis of our grief

Nick Cave has opened up on how the death of his son Arthur inspired the 2016 track ‘Girl In Amber’, and how the song relieved him and his wife of their pain. He described on his The Red Hand Files blog how he was "numbly sitting" in a studio a few months after “Arthur, my son, had died", existing "in a kind of fugue-state... and as I listened to the version of ‘Girl in Amber’, I was completely overwhelmed by what I heard. It was suddenly and tragically clear that ‘Girl in Amber’ had found its ‘who’. The ‘who’ was Susie, my wife - held impossibly, as she was at the time, within her grief, reliving each day a relentless spinning song that began with the ringing of the phone and ended with the collapse of her world". Cave goes on to explain that the early live performances of the track on the ‘Skeleton Tree’ tour made him feel like he was singing to his “wife, [who was] still trapped in the amber of her grief”, but he continued to perform it and that has “released" his wife Susie "at least in part, from the suffocating darkness that surrounded her”.