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I 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 Cave

I suspect the older you get the more invisible you become.
NICK CAVE

Country Invisible People Suspects
We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, “Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?”
NICK CAVE

Artist Needs Social
In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.
NICK CAVE

Class Pants Sorrow
It’s always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they’re going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.
NICK CAVE

Business People Risky Trying
You write a scene, and it works or it doesn’t. It’s immediate.
NICK CAVE

Immediate Scene Writing
I write hate lyrics really well. It’s not every day you can use them, really.
NICK CAVE

Hate Use Writing
I 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 CAVE

Country Duty People Way World
I think there’s a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.
NICK CAVE

Numbness Thinking Violence
I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don’t like to get my knees dirty. I don’t have a garden.
NICK CAVE

Dirty Garden Knees
The singing tells everybody what to do musically.
NICK CAVE

Everybody Musically Singing
The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.
NICK CAVE

Body Cells Musical
The body becomes the carrier for the work. It’s not really about the physical body; it really becomes the apparatus that carries and moves the work. I don’t really consider the body as much; I look at it as a tool.
NICK CAVE

Apparatus Looks Moving Tools
When 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 CAVE

Comforting Lying Night
I’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 CAVE

Done Song Writing
We are still struggling with people who don’t feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.
NICK CAVE

Artists Museum Struggle
The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.
NICK CAVE

Artistic Labor Process

I 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.

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I 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Nick Cave Quotes