“Last summer when I was here, I was crawling all over your heads,” said Nick Cave to the crowd at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Saturday (October 7). “This is a slightly different event, sorry to say.”
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Within the next two hours, Cave plunged back to his first band The Boys Next Door and added Grinderman, with the majority of the 25-song set funneling through his more extensive catalog with the Bad Seeds. The run of intimate shows kicked off on September 19 and complemented the paperback release of Cave’s book Faith, Hope and Carnage, a compilation of conversations with Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan.
Sat at the piano and backed solely by Radiohead‘s Colin Greenwood on bass, Cave broke between each performance, probing his lyrics more than he ever would have playing with the Bad Seeds. “We’re going to try to get inside these songs in some kind of way or go on an adventure,” said Cave. “When I perform these songs and sit at the piano, I start to work out what these songs are really about in some kind of way, so it’s been quite special to do this.”
After opening the night with “Girl in Amber,” Cave transitioned into the brooding “Higgs Boson Blues,” a song he said he’s always asked about. “I keep thinking I should explain it in some kind of way,” said Cave of the track off his Bad Seeds’ 2013 album Push the Sky Away. “It’s some perpetual cyclic journey from innocence to experience. That’s why there’s ‘Hannah Montana’ in it, who turns into Miley Cyrus.”
Pausing to re-examine the Hannah Montana lyrics, Cave chuckles to himself, repeating “that turns into Miley Cyrus.”
Before moving into “Jesus of the Moon,” Cave informs the crowd that his wife, Susie, asked him to dedicate the song to someone named “Pud” or “Puddy.”
“I asked her ‘Who is Pud? And she said ‘None of your fucking business, just dedicate the song,'” he said. “Wherever you are, Puddy, this is for you. It comes from my heart.”
Dancing around anecdotal backdrops and ink-black humor, the concert was more a musical sermon. The evening was a series of vignettes of Cave’s songs and songwriting.
Yelling “New York” for the first of several times throughout the night, Cave cued the lights to go on and joked that the next song had “some good words in it,” and cited the lines For we are not alone it seems / So many riders in the sky / The winds of longing in their sails / Searching for the other side. “I thought that was pretty good,” joked Cave of Ghosteen track “Galleon Ship.” He added “The rest is okay. You don’t always get a full song. Sometimes four lines is enough.”
Early into the set, Cave shared a new song, “To Be Found,” which he said was derived from “fragments of ideas.” He added, “To write a song is a very vulnerable time.”
He shared that his son Earl also helped compose the song by coming up with its chords. “It’s like a Cave and Cave,” he said before singing through the piano ballad and lyrics And when the waters cover the ocean / And when the waters cover the ground And the sun, it rises, and turns to you / In order to be found. “To Be Found” is the first new music since Ghosteen in 2019 and Cave’s 2021 collaborative album, Carnage, with Bad Seeds cohort Warren Ellis.
Slipping down a rabbit hole of more Bad Seeds songs, Cave delivered a moving “O Children” and “I Need You,” the latter pulled from Carnage and one of the first songs Cave performed solo with Greenwood giving him enough space to emphasize its I need and just breathe.
“At that time I wrote many beautiful, lovely songs, and this is not one of them,” joked Cave before going into “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry.” Recounting his time living in Brazil in the early 1990s, he said he’d play the more brooding track, off the 1992 album Henry’s Dream, to help rock his son Luke to sleep. Calling it a “typical Nick Cave song” he said it’s the first of its kind where he goes “out walking and a cascade of terrible things happen to me, that start, generally, with the personal and end with the apocalyptic. In the center of this is an attempt to try to rock my child to sleep and the general anxiety of a parent trying to protect their child from this cascade of events.”
Encouraging some audience participation, Cave shared back-to-back Carnage tracks, beginning with “Balcony Man,” which had the balcony-seated crowd roaring whenever the word balcony resurfaced in the song. “Carnage” followed for the audience on the floor. “This one needs you to shut the fuck up,” joked Cave of the second before reverting to the Bad Seeds Tender Prey-era with “The Mercy Seat” afterward.
Spending some time with his 1997 album The Boatman’s Call, Cave shared a soulful rendition of “Black Hair,” likely written for then-girlfriend PJ Harvey, followed up by “(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?” which he joked had more “good words” in it.
Closing out the first 18 songs, Cave finished crisscrossing different eras with the Bad Seeds sharing “The Weeping Song” without Greenwood. “This song is a conversation between a young man and his father,” shared Cave. “The father tries to explain the nature of the world,” said Cave, who paced slowly through the lyrics—Father, why are all the women weeping? / They are weeping for their men / Then why are all the men there weeping? / They are weeping back at them.
The more stripped back, the more penetrating the songs were, like the hymnal “Into My Arms” and stirring “Jubilee Street,” which led to one of several standing ovations for Cave throughout the evening. Cave kept the intensity of the end songs closing on “Push the Sky Away” but not before praising a forthcoming cover of the song by classical pianist Harriet Stubbs and former David Bowie pianist Mike Garson.
Returning, Cave and Greenwood shot into “Idiot Prayer.” As the crowd gathered closer to the stage, he went back to No More Shall We Part offering “Love Letter” before retrieving one of his earliest songs with The Boys Next Door (later The Birthday Party), “Shivers.”
Written by guitarist Rowland S. Howard and the close of the band’s 1979 album Door, Door, Cave said his late bandmate was just 16 when he wrote the moving ballad. “He was just a kid,” said Cave. “It’s really something quite extraordinary.”
Before revisiting another Boatman’s Call track “Brompton Oratory,” Cave shared that the song contained some of his favorite lyrics that he’s written. “It’s extraordinarily problematic in its own way,” said Cave, “but it’s really, really good.”
Both closed with “The Ship Song” and once Greenwood bowed out, Cave stayed for one final send-off.
“I’ll sing this before I leave,” he said before closing the intimate affair with one more Boatman’s track “People Ain’t No Good.”
Cave is scheduled to wrap up his intimate run of shows with two nights at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, California on October 27 and 28.
Setlist: Nick Cave at Beacon Theatre, New York City, October 7, 2023:
- “Girl in Amber”
- “Higgs Boson Blues”
- “Jesus of the Moon”
- “Galleon Ship”
- “To Be Found”
- “O Children”
- “I Need You”
- “Waiting for You”
- “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”
- “Balcony Man”
- “Carnage”
- “The Mercy Seat”
- “Black Hair”
- “(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?”
- “The Weeping Song”
- “Into My Arms”
- “Jubilee Street”
- “Push the Sky Away”
____Encore
- “Idiot Prayer”
- “Love Letter”
- “Shivers”
- “Palaces of Montezuma”
- “Brompton Oratory”
- “The Ship Song”
- “People Ain’t No Good”
Photos: Sacha Lecca / Courtesy of The Oriel
