YMMV / Nick Cave

• Alternative Character Interpretation: "The Mercy Seat" from "Tender Prey" is narrated by a convicted killer, a man who shares his last ruminations on God, life in death row, and his own fate with us before being sent to the electric chair. Throughout the song, the narrator insists both that he is innocent and that he is “not afraid to die”, but drops several hints (making references to his “kill hand” and his “devil blood”, for instance) that he might not be as blameless as he claims, and his lurid obsession with the chair also seems to hint that he is truly horrified by the thought of his execution. But what truly ratchets the ambiguity of the song up to new levels is the song’s final line, which sees the chorus’s original ending—“And I’m not afraid to die”—replaced with something else: "But I’m afraid I told a lie." Which of the narrator's claims is the lie—his profession of innocence, or his insistence that he isn't scared of death? Is the narrator breaking down and confessing his guilt, or is he simply admitting that, for all his apparent bravado, he really is afraid of the chair? Is he a hard-bitten murderer grudgingly acknowledging his sins in the last moments of his life—or an innocent brought nearly to the point of madness by the thought of what is about to happen to him?
• Awesome Music: "The Mercy Seat", a very popular work by the The Bad Seeds, and with Nick Cave himself.
• Complete Monster: Murder Ballads' "The Curse of Millhaven": Loretta, better known as Lottie, is a psychopathic 14-year-old whose sadistic, prolific murders are mistaken for some sort of curse upon her hometown. First, she murders a young boy by bashing in his head, and hides his body in a creek. She then decapitates a handyman and leaves his head in a fountain, and stabs her neighbor to death. After getting caught, she happily describes the rest of her crimes in detail: on top of the murders, she had taken down warning signs around a lake in late winter, resulting in the deaths of 20 children, and committed arson around a slum, burning it and its inhabitants to the ground. When captured, her only regret is that she couldn't do more.
• Crosses the Line Twice: "Stagger Lee", "The Curse of Millhaven" and "O'Malley's Bar" from Murder Ballads are so blatant about their respective narrator's enjoyment of murder that they cross over into Black Comedy.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Ghosteen isn't a portmanteau of "ghost" and "teen". Its meaning is more along the lines of "little/benevolent ghost" or "spirit"^note By means of the Irish suffix "ín" or "een".
• Funny Moments: Even someone as dour as Nick has proven to have a sense of humor, particularly on his blog The Red Hand Files:
  • His brutal takedown of a "Nick Cave-style" song a fan generated on ChatGPT and sent to him.
    "I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster. It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction. Who can possibly say which? Judging by this song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ though, it doesn’t look good, Mark. The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks."
  • His all-too-accurate description of how much of a bitch it can be to write a song.
  • In response to one question about Nicolas Cage and another question about whether he ever adds an untrue component to a story to make it seem more interesting than it actually is, Cave weaves a probably-made-up yarn about visiting a zoo and purchasing a didgeridoo and happening to run into Cage on the way.
  • Cave is forced to admit that he and his wife, Susie, have accidentally adopted a squirrel and named it Chaos. Or rather, the squirrel has adopted them.
    "I hate to admit it, but it is unnerving. I speak to him in hushed tones. He climbs all over me. He has no boundaries. He is Chaos. He wasn’t our idea. He is never going away. We are not in control. We never were."
• Genius Bonus: Several of the verses in "More News from Nowhere" are direct references to The Odyssey.
• Ho Yay:
  • With Blixa Bargeld, in their duets of Where the Wild Roses Grow from Murder Ballads and The Weeping Song. Oh, and that time they made out on stage...
  • Nick. Mick. Banana.
  • The music video of "Stagger Lee" from Murder Ballads is just as badass cool as it has homosexual undertones. We see Cave and his band members dancing and prancing around to the beat. The lyrics themselves also fall into this trope as Stagger commits adultery with a woman called Nellie Brown and boasts that if her husband, Billy Dilly, would enter: "I'll fuck Billy in his motherfucking ass!" When her man does indeed walk in on them Stagger tells him to get down on his knees and suck his dick, "because if you don't you're gonna be dead." After Billy does so, Stagger murders him anyway.
• Ho Yay Shipping: The pairing of Cave and Blixa Bargeld has been named Nixa by fans. RPF exists.
• Magnificent Bastard: From Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Red Right Hand" from Let Love In: The titular man is a mysterious figure who emerges from the storm to those who have lost hope and faith in their dreams, helping to rekindle them with his charisma and charm, doing favors and helping to enrich them with whatever they need, bringing fame to his name all across the land, renowned as a "god, ghost, man and guru". Far from being benevolent however, everything he does is designed to lay the stages for a "catastrophic plan" of which all his beneficiaries are just small cogs from, with the song warning us that everything has been "designed and directed by his Red Right Hand".
• Narm Charm: "I don't believe in the existence of angels/but looking at you, I'm wondering if that's true" from Into My Arms. Such a line would sound unbearably hackneyed and cliched coming from basically any other singer but Nick's completely sincere delivery and and powerful vocals make it work.
• Signature Song: While The Mercy Seat remains the most consistent song in Cave's setlists, Red Right Hand has since overtaken it as his most well-known song due to its frequent use in film and television (most notably Peaky Blinders).
• Song Association: Any given YouTube upload of Red Right Hand will either have a comment section filled with Peaky Blinders references or outright bill it as being from the show's soundtrack. Likewise, O Children is near inexorably linked to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
• Tear Jerker: Some folks find Cave's work really pulls on their heartstrings.
  • The entirety of Skeleton Tree. Although the songs had already been written and largely recorded, Cave reworked many of them in the aftermath of his son's death. And then he lost another son in 2022...
  • As for specific tracks on Skeleton Tree, "Distant Sky" stands out as especially tear jerking. During one live performance of the song, Nick visibly tears up while singing the second verse:
  They told us our gods would outlive us
  They told us our dreams would outlive us
  They told us our gods would outlive us
  But they lied
  • The subsequent album Ghosteen was inspired by not only this event, but also former band member Conway Savage's death in October 2018.
  • The Boatman's Call and No More Shall We Part are also quite sad, lonely albums.

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