I’ve spent my life butting my head against other people’s lack of imagination.
NICK CAVEI’ve spent my life butting my head against other people’s lack of imagination.
NICK CAVEMoving to the country is a very bold thing to do. You can have vague romantic notions about doing that, but in actuality, it can be a terrifying thing.
NICK CAVEThe way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don’t have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all.
NICK CAVEIf you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.
NICK CAVEI write songs in batches and then record them and then can’t write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.
NICK CAVEAnd I kissed away a thousand tears My lady of the Various Sorrows Some begged, some borrowed, some stolen Some kept safe for tomorrow.
NICK CAVEGuns are part of the American psyche, aren’t they? This is collateral damage for having a Wild West mentality. It’s intrinsic to the American psyche. It’s never going to change.
NICK CAVEI see it as my duty in some way is to be out in the world as an Australian putting forward what I consider to be authentic Australian music.
NICK CAVEIf I’m hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, ‘Hey, why don’t you go downstairs and start a new novel?’
NICK CAVEWhen I’m singing “Deanna,” for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.
NICK CAVEI’m a big fan of teatowels and am always on the lookout for a good one.
NICK CAVEThe band is a living, breathing thing. It grows in the same way we do as human beings and if it doesn’t, it dies. It’s important to feed the organism, and one way of doing that is to set musical challenges that keep it alive.
NICK CAVEI know when I sit with my band members and we’re playing back a song that we’ve done, I know that they’re experiencing it in a completely different way and hearing stuff that they’re alerted to because the way the interpret the world is through their ears. Mine is through my eyes.
NICK CAVEI’ve always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging.
NICK CAVEJesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists – second rate Christianity.
NICK CAVEI am not interested in anything that doesn’t have a genuine heart to it. You’ve got to have soul in the hole. If that isn’t there, I don’t see the point.
NICK CAVE