Nick Cave catalogue is certainly no stranger to deep issues. Lately, more than ever, detaching the graveness of his work from his personal life feels like misinterpreting. In 2015, Cave’s teen son, Arthur, died as he fell from a cliff. One year after the accident, Skeleton Tree was released. Yet in that record his loss was merely the icing on the already serious cake. Ghosteen is the first album entirely written and recorded since this tragedy.
Ghosteen is a double album. In the first part we find Cave wrapped in all the questions raised with this death, having a hard time accepting the son’s passing and even denying it. The second disk features a more serene Cave, one that has come to terms with the lifetime consequences of the tragedy (or at least has the tools to).
“Spinning Song”, the opener, is a perfect sample of the album. Sonically, the track is intense, almost mesmerizing. From the beginning, we follow Elvis’ and Priscilla’s story. “But the feather spun upward, upward and upward / Spinning all the weathervanes / and you’re sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the radio”, he sings. This death will live on for this father and he is about to immortalize it with the album. Around the three-minute mark, it unfolds into a more spacious picture and, just like in the second part of Ghosteen, the singer hopefully sings “Peace will come for us” and “Time will come for us”. Similarly, in the last track “Hollywood”, Cave repeats “I’m just waiting now for my time to come, for peace to come”.
However, it wasn’t always like that. In “Waiting For You”, an intricate piano ballad, the artist bitterly moans “Sleep now, take as long as you need, ‘cause I’m just waiting for you”. The chorus of the song smothers our hearts with just three repeated words, due to the gorgeous, suspended melody. It ends in a perfect cadence, which basically means it should give us the sense of ending, of harmonic and melodic closure. Yet, in this particular song, it doesn’t feel like solid ground at all. Even though it ends in the tonic, we feel restless and uncomfortable. Throughout the album, Cave drops lines we’ve for sure already heard, such as “My baby’s coming now, on the next train”, in “Bright Horses, or “I love my baby and my baby loves me”, in the Eastern-influenced “Leviathan”. It is the delivery and the instrumental that make lines like these work. Sung with no expression it would sound really corny, even though we know what they’re referring to in this case. But Cave sings with grieve in his broken voice. On top of that, the instrumental is so haunting that suddenly those lines become somber. In fact, at least half of the lyrics’ meaning in Ghosteen lies in these two aspects.
The formula of the compositions on this record is basically creating a beautiful, paradisiac landscape and then undermine it with dissonant instruments and electronic disruption, being the paralyzing “Sun Forest” its pinnacle. This may be suggestive of the before it and Arthur’s death itself, some out of tune sounds that appeared to disturb this family’s stability. However, this can also be an addition to Cave’s aim to find peace, something else is saying with it. To find this balance, he must learn how to deal with these dissonances and incorporate them in that desired peaceful place. With the instrumental, Cave is saying that the right way to overcome this tragedy is to face their pains, and don’t avoid them or deny the son’s departure. He only puts it into words later in the album though.
In the first track of the second part of the album, the title track, Cave sings “He has gone to the moon in a boat” and “There’s nothing wrong with loving things that cannot even stand”. One track forward and the phrase “I am here and you are where you are” is repeated multiple times in his “Fireflies” monologue, contrasting with the words “I am beside you” heard in both “Galleon Ship” and “Ghosteen Speaks”, in the first part.
At the end of the album, Nick Cave sings in his falsetto “It’s a long way to find peace of mind” and it couldn’t be more representative of the complex journey we followed on Ghosteen.
Pedro Picoito frequenta o 12º Ano e escreve sobre música no website Magazine.HD. Podes consultar aqui os seus artigos.