Nick Cave was asked on his Red Hand Files blog, by a pew persons who never listened to his music, to list his best songs. He can't, however: "My relationship to my songs is too entangled with their personal history, and I have no clear understanding as to which are the good ones and which are not. For instance, I think that ‘Brompton Oratory’, which was recorded in one take on a Casio I found in a junk shop, is a way better song than ‘The Mercy Seat’, which took months to write, weeks to record and had multiple ‘producers’ mix it; for a whole lot of despairing reasons, I think 'Ghosteen' is, by any metric, the best album the Bad Seeds have ever made, however The Bad Seeds song I love the most is probably ‘Sad Waters’ from Your Funeral, My Trial' — I cried at its slippery beauty when I first played it to my then girlfriend, Elisabeth, as we sat on her bed in Schöneberg, Berlin"...No favourite chilkd

Rock icon Nick Cave talked with 'UnHerd' host Freddie Sayers to discuss his book, 'Faith, Hope and Carnage,' saying that he sees human beings in a completely different way than he did early in his career, and said he is now a "more complete person." Sayers noted that the punk rocker turned "church-going person" might seem unrecognizable, but Cave said he simply gets a delight by "f-----g with people" and "living outside the expectation" of others. Today, for Cave, an avid church-goer, it means "you go to church and be a conservative". Cave also talks a lot about cancel culture and censorship.

In a recent post on his Red Hand Files blog, Nick Cave answers a fan's question about breaking down after having lost his father. Deeply compassionate and positive: "We each have our reserves of sorrow that rise to the surface, provoked by one little thing or another, to remind us we are human and that we love and that we are a part of the great human story that flows along the ancient waterways of our collected and historical griefs. This breaking down is not something from which we need to be saved or cured, but rather it is the toss and tumble of life, and the occasional losing of oneself to the sadness of things is an honouring of life itself."

"When did you become a Hallmark card hippie? Joy, love, peace. Puke! Where’s the rage, anger, hatred?" - a fan named Ermine asked Nick Cave. He responded on his Red Hand Files blog - "things changed after my first son died. I changed... Sitting around in my own mess, pissed off at the world... contemptuous of beauty, contemptuous of joy, contemptuous of happiness in others, well, this whole attitude just felt, I don’t know, in the end, sort of dumb... I felt a sudden, urgent need to, at the very least, extend a hand in some way to assist it – this terrible, beautiful world – instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgement of it".

"ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend... Judging by this song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ though, it doesn’t look good, Mark. The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks" - Nich Cave writes on his Red Hand Files blog about a song the AI made in Cave's style. "Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value".

"My plan for this year is to make a new record with the Bad Seeds" - Nick Cave writes in his first post of 2023 on his The Red Hand Files site. "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 on to detail the difficulty of songwriting: "Writing lyrics is the pits. It’s like jumping for frogs, Fred. It’s the shits. It’s the bogs. It actually hurts. It comes in spurts, but few and far between. There is something obscene about the whole affair. Like crimes that rhyme."

"I’m happy to carry this remnant of my youth with me, not just as a reminder of two of the most beautiful people who walked the earth... but also that there was a time when I was both heroic and dumb enough to get a tattoo of a badly drawn skull with my girlfriend’s name on it" - Nick Cave answers a fan's questions on his Red Hand Files blog, whether he should get a tattoo. "I guess I am wiser now, but that folly of youth will always go with me, and when I am finally in the ground, the grinning skull will continue to mock and jeer at all the lofty pretensions and vanities and cautions of these, my latter years. So, should you get a tattoo, Chris? As a sage man of a mature age I would advise against it, which is why I think you should probably get one".

"Dear, sweet tinnitus — the musician’s curse. Mine is actually pretty manageable most of the time, it comes and goes, and only really kicks off when I am playing live music, which now I come to think of it is most of the time" - Nick Cave answers a fan's question about tinnitus in his Red Hand Files blog. "An ear specialist once told me there was not much I could do other than to ‘love my tinnitus’ — and then charged me three hundred quid" - Cave continue "but, you know, I don’t love my tinnitus, I don’t love my tinnitus at all, it’s a pain in the arse. So, I feel for you, Denise, sitting there in your solitude, with your tinnitus for company, and I don’t really have any advice for you, other than to say, if it is any consolation, that not only my cricket choir is singing, loud and very clear, but Warren’s is too, and Larry’s and Colin’s (Greenwood), and Wendy’s and Janet’s and T Jae’s — all our dreary crickets singing their moronic and endless serenade back to you".

Nell Smith, a 14-year-old girl from Leeds, and psychedelic heroes The Flaming Lips have unveiled their new album 'Where the Viaduct Looms', with nine Nick Cave covers. It all started three years ago when Smith became an instantly-recognizable regular at Flaming Lips shows thanks to her penchant for wearing a parrot costume, Consequence reports.

Earl Sweatshirt shares ephemeral and groovy ‘2010’; a lovely folk rock song ‘How Could I Have Known’ by Companion; Ibeyi brings R&B, neo-soul, jazz, and Cuban folk music into 'Made of Gold' featuring Pa Salieu; Tokyo screamo band Lang shares a ripper ‘Forget me Not’; Eddie Vedder’s new song ‘The Haves’ is just - Pearl Jam singer singing those lovely songs of his!; Singapore's Naedr share an extended version of ‘Asunder’ with added strings; Nick Cave & Warren Ellis share ‘We Are Not Alone’ from documentary ‘La Panthére des Neiges’ which follows wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and novelist Sylvain Tesson as they explore the valleys of the Tibetan plateau for unique animals.

Nick Cave will publish a memoir 'Faith, Hope and Carnage' on life in the wake of his son Arthur’s sudden death in 2015, Pitchfork reports. The book, based on 40 hours of interviews with the journalist Sean O’Hagan, a longtime friend of Cave, is “a meditation on big ideas including, faith, art, music, grief and much more”.

Nick Cave shared some advice about aging in his latest blog post, with plenty of charm and wit: "Entering your sixties brings with it a warm and fuzzy feeling of freedom through redundancy, through obsolescence, through living outside of the conversation and forever existing on the wrong end of the stick. What a relief it is to be that mad, embarrassing uncle in the corner of the room, a product of his age, with his loopy ideas about free speech and freedom of expression, with his love of beauty, of humour, chaos, provocation and outrage, of conversation and debate, his adoration of art without dogma, his impatience with the morally obvious, his belief in universal compassion, forgiveness and mercy, in nuance and the shadows, in neutrality and in humanity — ah, beautiful humanity — and in God too, who he thanks for letting him, in these dementing times, be old".

"Hope too resides in a gesture of kindness from one broken individual to another or, indeed, we can find it in a work of art that comes from the hand of a wrongdoer. These expressions of transcendence, of betterment, remind us that there is good in most things, rarely only evil. Once we awaken to this fact, we begin to see goodness everywhere, and this can go some way in setting right the current narrative that humans are shit and the world is fucked" - Nick Cave wrote deeply humanistic on his The Red Hand Files blog.

"Everyone wanted to work with her but it was like trying to trap lightning in a bottle" - Nick Cave writes on his Red Hand Files blog about his Birthday Party and Bad Seeds colleague Anita Lane, after the news of her death was published. Cave describes Lane as “the smartest and most talented of all of us, by far”, and chooses 'Stranger Than Kindness' as his favourite Seeds song. Cave describes how "at my kitchen table drawing things, she had a quickness of touch and a clear, light line full of humour, throwing each drawing away and starting another, charged with a rampant, unstable, fatal energy that would follow her all her life. My line, amateur and ponderous... It was both easy and terrifying to love her. Leaves a big crying space".

Movie director Andrew Dominik is making a new documentary about Nick Cave and Warren Ellis "attempting to play 'Carnage' and 'Ghosteen' live", Cave has announced in his Red Hand Files blog. Cave also describes how he and Ellis recorded 'Carnage' while not really trying to make a record - "I had been sitting at my desk — suddenly and shockingly not travelling — writing lyrics and poems into a void, with no real objective other than to make sense of this stationary moment. The world felt weird. My body felt weird. I had been jet-lagged for forty-five years. Now my inner clock had begun to tick regularly. Some nights I even slept. I think Warren’s experience was not dissimilar. I think we both felt the enforced stasis, not just unnerving, but also strangely and fitfully energizing, and so, when we began working in the studio, Carnage came out fast and necessary, as proof of life".

A fan described Nick Cave on his Red Hand Files blog how he gave his father an Elvis-themed funeral, and wondered what Cave had in mind for his final hour. Cave answered he would "be very happy with one too - to be ushered into the next world by the voice of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll singer of them all. 'Kentucky Rain', that’s what I’d like, 'Kentucky Rain' and 'How Great Thou Art' - Elvis singing gospel, with heaven and all its angels listening".

"Ostensibly the story of Nick Cave’s formative years, it is so beautifully constructed that one is not just delivered besides the young Cave, but also next to the modern version" - The New Cue says recommending Mark Mordue's new book 'Boy on Fire'. The writer also describes the difficult path he took while writing it - "basically the project just got bigger and bigger as the range and the depth of Nick Cave’s output kept rolling on. I ended up in a situation where I had long ago spent my advance. If I was working on the book, I was not earning money to live and support a family. If I was doing freelance journalism and teaching writing at uni, I was not working on the book. So nothing was right with anyone anywhere. Eventually my former publisher got tired of me. My relationship collapsed. I had nowhere stable to live. Depression, chaos, drinking … it was the full disaster as I tried to hang on to myself and put it all back together again. That is the other side to the book when people say it took me ten years. Well, really, five years to write it, yeah, and another five years to learn how to live again". Nick Cave also likes it.

Cave and Ellis' new album 'Carnage' comes out as a slightly more structured jam session, and critics really appreciate it. Alexis Petridis argues that "Cave and Ellis’s musical approach is still vividly alive, the dense, constantly shifting sound complementing the richness of Cave’s writing now". Pitchfork appreciates the lyricism of if - "As ever, Cave uses overtly religious imagery in ways both subversive and devout". Guardian's Kitty Empire loves the "immense grief and vast love" of the album, whereas Clash Music hears 'Carnage' as something "both beautiful and visceral, tender and blood-thirsty, wholly terrifying and completely absorbing".

Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis made a new album in lockdown - their first non-soundtrack album as a duo - called 'Carnage' and it was just surprise-released today. Warren says "making 'Carnage' was an accelerated process of intense creativity. The eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two-and-a-half days and then it was, ‘let’s just make a record!’ There was nothing too premeditated about it". Cave calls it "a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe". Read the lyrics here.

An amusing article in the Quietus about 'Nick Cave's Bar', a new book by Aug Stone about a bar in Berlin in the 1980s which was a "home from home" for many creative people - musicians, filmmakers, painters, poets, and punks. Risiko stood at 48 Yorckstraße in West Berlin, on the border between the Kreuzberg and Wilmersdorf-Schöneberg sections of the city. It wasn't really Nick Cave's bar (although some in Europe did call it that back then), but Blixa Bargeld bartended at Risiko during Einstürzende Neubauten’s early years, and Cave would come to visit it with the rest of The Birthday Party.

"The changing of the word ‘faggot’ for the nonsense word ‘haggard’ destroys the song by deflating it right at its essential and most reckless moment, stripping it of its value" - Nick Cave wrote on his blog after BBC announced that Radio 1 would be playing an alternate version of The Pogues' 'Fairytale of New York'. With this change "it becomes a song that has been tampered with, compromised, tamed, and neutered and can no longer be called a great song. It is a song that has lost its truth, its honour and integrity".

Nick Cave has announced a special online listen-along event of the breakthrough Bad Seeds album 'Murder Ballads' on November 26 via the Bad Seeds online TV station YouTube channel. The chat will also feature former Bad Seeds Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld.

Newcomers Red Fiction mix metal, jazz and Eastern European folk on 'Kerberos'; gospel meets psychedelia on 'Unity (It’s Up To You)' by Badge Époque Ensemble; Nick Cave has shared his unreleased track ‘Euthanasia’, written during the 'Skeleton Tree' period; composer Olafur Arnalds and producer Bonobo team up for atmospheric gem 'Loom'; death metal meets western American music in Wayfarer's 'The Crimson Rider'; a good indie-rock song 'Good Woman' by the Staves; Chamberlain, making their first album in 20 years, released just a straight rock song 'Not Your War'.

Nick Cave wrote a lovely tribute to his son Arthur, who tragically died in 2015 aged 15 after falling off a cliff. He wrote the letter on his The Red Hand Files blog, as an answer to a fan Richard who asked Cave whether he liked magic. He described how Arthur was a magician himself for about a year when he was around 14, and how good he became, and finished his response like this: "I am sorry that maybe in the end these words are not addressed to you. Maybe these words are projected beyond this world, as a wish, as a prayer, as a sleight of hand, hoping they may draw the attention of the spirits themselves. Our boy, our magician, our vanisher — we miss you".

In November Nick Cave will release 'Idiot Prayer' live album and film made on his live-streamed solo piano concert back in June. The film is an extended version of the original stream featuring four "unseen performances". 'Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace' is a "prayer into the void—alone at Alexandra Palace—a souvenir from a strange and precarious moment in history", as Cave says. 

"Political correctness has grown to become the unhappiest religion in the world. Its once honourable attempt to reimagine our society in a more equitable way now embodies all the worst aspects that religion has to offer (and none of the beauty) — moral certainty and self-righteousness shorn even of the capacity for redemption. It has become quite literally, bad religion run amuck" - Nick Cave writes in the latest edition of his Red Hand Files blog, answering to what his idea of mercy is, and what he thinks of cancel culture. "Cancel culture’s refusal to engage with uncomfortable ideas has an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society... We are a culture in transition, and it may be that we are heading toward a more equal society — I don’t know — but what essential values will we forfeit in the process?".

Nick Cave has launched a Cave Things webshop where he is selling - porn wallpaper. It's naked ladies, quite simple drawings, with strategic parts - fully exposed. Next to that one, he is selling plenty of other "Cave things" - “an over-priced plectrum” i.e. a guitar pick with Warren Ellis’ face on it, a red right hand necklace charm, pencils, “motivational T-shirt No. 1″ which has a quote from Nick Cave’s mom, apparently, stating “Head High And Fuck ‘Em All”.

Stormzy, Dave, Nick Cave, Kate Tempest and Little Simz are nominated for this year's Ivor Novellos, the most prestigious songwriting awards in the UK and Ireland, Music Week reports. Four authors are nominated twice: Kate Tempest and producer Dan Carey are up for Best Album for the former’s ‘The Book Of Traps And Lessons‘ as well as Best Contemporary Song for ‘Firesmoke’; Jimmy Napes is nominated for his songwriting contributions to both Stormzy’s ‘Crown’ and Sam Smith‘s ‘Dancing With A Stranger’; Jamie Hartman is nominated for his work on Lewis Capaldi‘s ‘Hold Me While You Wait’ and Calvin Harris‘ Rag’n’Bone Man collaboration ‘Giant’; Stormzy and MJ Cole are also nominated for their songwriting on ‘Crown’. In the most prestigious category, for the best album, the nominated are ‘Ghosteen’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, ‘Grey Area’ by Little Simz, and ‘The Book of Traps and Lessons’ by Kate Tempest. See all the nominees here.

Nick Cave praised Nina Simone and her live recording of ‘My Sweet Lord’ in his latest Red Hand Files blog, calling her rendition of George Harrison song a "howl of spiritual abandonment and accusation". He explained: "In this extraordinarily bold statement, Nina Simone stands defiant in the face of spiritual oblivion, and a world (and God) that so readily allows war and senseless carnage to occur, he continued. “It is a protest song par excellence that serves as a form of transport, a vehicle that takes us on a complex and nuanced journey into transcendent rage".

A great text in Nick Cave's Red Hand Files blog where he replied with a lengthy reasoning to a fan's question about why he doesn't write about politics in his songs, and in doing so, explained the backbone of his lyrics:

“Perhaps the thing you enjoy about my songs is that they are conflicted, and often deal in uncertainties and ambiguities. My better songs seem to be engaged in an interior struggle between opposing outlooks or states of mind. They rarely settle on anything. My songs sit in that liminal space between decided points of view.

Songs with political agendas inhabit a different space. They have little patience for nuance, neutrality or impartiality. Their aim is to get the message across in as clear and persuasive a manner as possible. There can be great value in these sorts of songs, but they are usually born from a particular combination of rigidity and zealousness, which I personally do not possess.

My songs seem to be resistant to fixed, inflexible points of view. They have, as you say, a concern for common, non-hierarchical suffering. They are not in the business of saving the world; rather they are in the business of saving the soul of the world.

I have very little control over what songs I write. They are constructed, incrementally, in the smallest of ways, the greater meaning revealing itself after the fact. They are often slippery, amorphous things, with unclear trajectories — position-free attempts at understanding the mysteries of the heart.

I guess I could write a protest song, but I think I would, in the end, feel compromised in doing so, not because there aren’t things I am fundamentally opposed to — there are — but because I would be using my particular talents to deal with something I consider to be morally obvious. Personally, I have little inclination to do that. It’s just not what I do.”