LOS ANGELES — As a general rule, Nick Cave advises against “attaching a strict life narrative” to the records a musician puts out. Songwriters are storytellers, after all, and few have demonstrated more interest in ancient themes and dramas — justice, violence, sex, betrayal, redemption — than Cave has in the nearly half a century since he emerged from his native Australia, first with his band the Birthday Party and later with the Bad Seeds.
Yet Cave, 66, acknowledges that his work over the last few years “almost exactly” reflected the events of his real life — namely, the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, in an accidental fall from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton, England, in 2015. Albums like the next year’s “Skeleton Tree” and especially 2019’s spectral “Ghosteen” “track a development through grief,” Cave says, “because that’s simply what happened to me.” In 2022, the singer lost a second son when 31-year-old Jethro was found dead of unspecified causes.
“Wild God,” Cave’s new album with the Bad Seeds, “has at its core a fundamental understanding of the suffering we go through as human beings,” he says. “But it’s also a joyful record”: a vibrant set of muscular and poetic rock songs that showcases the sympathetic interplay between Cave and his backing band (which here includes Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood). Cave called from New York to discuss the LP, his attraction to church and the illusory promise of his own sex appeal.
Q: You and your wife, Susie, moved to Los Angeles from Brighton for a spell after your son Arthur died. I get the need for a change of environment. Why L.A.?