The Wild God(s)

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds remind us how beautiful we are — and how important joy remains in times of despair.

The images were shot from my cell phone, so please forgive the low resolution.

On May 4, Nick Cave told a Minneapolis audience they were beautiful 43 times in a row.

He likely tells all his audiences this, but it felt hugely personal and important to hear. Cave’s cannon voice reverberated through the venue, his insistence that “you’re beautiful” repeated and flashed in luminous velvet pink tones from the screen behind the stage.

The Armory — an arched concrete auditorium built in 1936 in downtown Minneapolis — seemed to answer back, Cave’s intensely personal lyrics climbing up the backs our necks as his voice bounced off the opposite wall. The venue, which returned to hosting concerts and events in 2017 after a judge deemed the historic structure was worth preserving, is the same building where Prince shot his music video for “1999.”

That year, Australia’s Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were just emerging from a hiatus, releasing a couple of best-of compilations. Cave formed the Bad Seeds with Mick Harvey in 1983 after the breakup of The Birthday Party. The world’s cruelty did not spare Cave, who lived as a heroine addict for the better part of the 80s and 90s, but the hardest blows were yet to come.

“I told my friends that life was good, that love would endure if it could,” Cave wrote 25 years later when composing “Wild God,” the Bad Seeds’ 18th studio album and a magnificent exploration of death and love. The music feels made for this moment in America, offering a precious and pointed look at societal ills.

When Cave sang “Joy,” it was impossible not to feel the burn of injustices across the country. “We’ve all had too much sorrow; now is the time for joy.”

Grief has hung around Cave since he young. When he was 19, his father died in a car crash. Decades later when living in England, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling from a cliff near their home in Brighton, and in 2022 Cave’s oldest son, Jethro, died at the age 31 of undisclosed causes in Melbourne, Australia.

“I was unconscious of the effect of grief entirely when my father died,” Cave told David Marchese of New York Times Magazine in 2022. “…When Arthur died, I was thrust into the darkest place imaginable, where it was almost impossible to be able to see outside of despair.”

Cave has remained one of the world’s great watchers, a man whose gothic observances have made for some of the world’s most haunting and intensely beautiful songs. His live performances can shatter the viewer, while simultaneously making you feel closer to humanity and to the gods. A Nick Cave show is, for many of us, a place to worship and reflect on the ravages of time.

In their first Minnesota performance in 11 years, the Bad Seeds performed for nearly three hours and 18 songs (with a four-song encore). The 10-piece band includes a quartet of gospel singers along with bassist Colin Greenwood of Radiohead (who joined the tour due after Martyn Casey because ill), drummer Larry Mullins and guitarist George Vjestica.

Cave’s long-time collaborator Warren Ellis, who he described as “a shy, retiring, sensitive, conflicted, broken man” before launching into “Long Dark Night” from “Wild God,” has a way of weeping through his violin.

“Maybe a long dark night has come down. Maybe the sun don’t shine on everyone.”

Cave has his methods to bring humor and romance into his shows, which at times are arresting, if not overwhelming — there’s a viciousness to the music, layered and relentless. Every time, Cave brought us back with his humor, sandwiching such songs with fan favorites and love ballads.

Even when Cave is terse, he’s magnificent.

“Everyone shut the fuck up,” Cave eventually said to stop the crowd from yelling out songs they wanted to hear. “This is unbelievably difficult to stand in front of a whole lot of people and try and string a fairly simple story together.”

Cave also took some cues from “Spinal Tap” when he walked out on stage and greeted the crowd by saying, “Hello, Milwaukee,” where he played two nights prior.

Genuine slip or nod to the mockumentary? The Bad Seeds have been on a tear, and Cave said they’d played more than 100 shows since hitting the road on the “Wild God” tour (the math doesn’t add up, but I’m not going to quibble) with 18 stops in the U.S. that ended May 14 in San Francisco. Starting in October, Cave heads out solo across Europe.

In Cave’s nearly 50-year career, he has been a brooding and ever-present voice for suffering. After Arthur’s death in 2015, he began “The Red Hand Files,” a newsletter of in-depth reflection, a place of console with fans among the grief. His music has always felt like a communion with otherworldly gods, and his concerts are the highest form of spiritual communication.

Yet, Nick Cave is a prankster. He embodies the idea that joy is a form of resistance, the antidote to all this horrendous hatred in America.

Is the true freedom in laughing? In radiant beauty? In coming together in worship, a communion with fellow joy-seekers? A mass sermon abashed in anticipation and collective excitement. Perhaps tears of joy and laughter in a dark theater with others is the holiest form of contact.

“Yes, a fucking song written a long time ago!” Cave teased the audience who cheered when he announced he would play an older song, “O Children.”

“It's a mid-period Nick Cave song; a classic stage of my career. But I held a rather unforgiving view of the world and the people in it. And this song … is a critique of the way we adults go about our genders and our complete incapacity to be able to look after our children. And this song has followed me through my life, really, and it always seems to find its theme. And here we are again today, living in a world that cannot look after the children.”