Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Napcast 64: The Gift

John Cramer 4:26 AM

3 Comments:

Blogger The Unspeakable said...

That is a fucking AMAZING recording. It still blows my mind that we were both at that show. It was a pretty small crowd right? The House of Blues was a perfect space for them to play. perfect. Thank you so much for this one. I'm fucking dying up here.

April 22, 2008 4:13:00 PM EDT  
Blogger Carlos Anaconda said...

that is so cool that you have a recording of that show to go along with the story. Haven't heard it yet, but i'm looking forward to it.\

April 23, 2008 12:58:00 PM EDT  
Blogger stacey said...

A little write-up on Nick Cave's new album from WSJ:

"Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" (Anti) by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds is a terrific recording -- smart, literate, distinctive and hard rocking, witty and occasionally terrifying. Mr. Cave would be the first to agree. On stage at a recent show at Terminal 5 here, he called it a "monstrously good new album." The following morning, when I congratulated him on the disc over tea at a sleek yet nondescript hotel in midtown, he replied, with a sly grin, "Not bad, eh?" Urbane and self-possessed, glowing with the wry charm of a confidence man, Mr. Cave is too savvy to acknowledge that it's the best work of his lengthy career. You can judge for yourself by sampling the entire album at Mr. Cave's MySpace page.

The 50-year-old Mr. Cave, a native of Warracknabeal, Australia, is a successor to Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Bob Marley and other artists who used narrative techniques to expand our perception of a rock song. He's the writer Jim Morrison thought he was, or might have become had he not flamed out early.

"I've given myself license to find a new way to write a lyric," Mr. Cave said. "They're narrative in nature, but personal at the same time. Inventing characters is dead simple, but it's not so easy to create songs that operate on a subconscious level." Writing from his perspective -- fictional yet based on experience, stream-of-conscious yet organized -- "is making sense of disparate images. Once I write a song I can see how I view the world," he said. "It's a mysterious craft."

Writing songs doesn't come as easily to Mr. Cave. He lets it flow, and then the revising begins. "Self-editing is the way I write," he said. "Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting." The bluesy, hypnotic "Moonland" on the new album is an example of what such editing can achieve. The narrator is traveling in a car on a snowy night, listening to the radio, awash in his alienation.

"The action is kind of peripheral to the series of events," Mr. Cave said of "Moonland." "Something's happening; it's mysterious." And trimming the verses heightened the tension.

"The false things glare at you," he said of his lyrics. "But if you learn your craft, you know to get rid of them. Stealing of a line is a lesser thing than the false line."

I asked him about the song "We Call Upon the Author," in which a madman, caught in a whirlwind of grief, issues a litany of complaint toward the heavens. "Everything is messed up 'round here/Everything is banal and jejune/There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me." After the character demands that God edit his work -- "Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!" -- his diatribe soon descends into drivel.

Mr. Cave called it "a screed" and conceded it was not the customary stuff of rock lyrics. But he said "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" is about love and death, as is much of his work. "I'm not particularly concerned about changing my themes. Some writers force the hand, but I can't. You know what you can write about."

Despite his various writing projects, Mr. Cave said, "I consider myself a musician. It's the thing I'm least adept at. I can see that when I work with Warren and the band. But when you're working in rock 'n' roll, you can get away with it -- as long as you get that feeling in the back of your spine when you put one line next to the other and it feels like it's right."

April 24, 2008 11:01:00 AM EDT  

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