Nick Cave Seeds

Nick Cave is a singular figure in contemporary rock music; he first emerged as punk rock was making its presence known in Australia, but though he's never surrendered his status as a provocateur and a musical outlaw, he quickly abandoned the simplicity of punk for something grander and more literate, though no less punishing in its outlook…

Nick Cave has always seemed misplaced, of another era. An Australian whose ‘60s-retro skinny suits and 19th century face have lived all over Europe, Cave looks and sings like an old soul. His macabre rock ballads of murder and sorrow might be sung by an Edgar Allen Poe narrator stuck in a Flannery O’Connor story. Where his contemporaries have plowed the ruts left by the Beatles and the Stones, Cave has always been more interested in the American blues and country/folk traditions of John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash: religion, sorrow, murder, insanity, alcohol, lust, and depression. I’ve often wondered what kind of personality the author of such lyrics as “this is a weeping song/ a song in which to weep” (“The Weeping Song”) exudes in day-to-day life.

The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is a compilation album by Australian alternative rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, released on May 11, 1998.In order to decide the track listing, Cave asked each of the Bad Seeds, past and present, to choose their favourite tracks from the ten albums—their lists would then be discussed until a final list was produced. In the end, only guitarist and founding Bad Seed Mick Harvey bothered, and it is his listing, unchanged, that makes up The Best Of.

This music documentary weaves together performances from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 2016 album Skeleton Tree with candid footage of Cave opening up about the death of his 15-year-old son. Directed by Andrew Dominik (Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).