Nick Cave and the cruelty of a destiny to which the rock poet responds with music and prayers

There are those who choose to live in the light of day, in an everyday life pervaded by bright colors, soft shades, flashes of sunshine that illuminate the storms of life. And there are those who sink their heads and bodies into the darkness of existence, into inner torments, into the most distressing shades of emotion.
There is Nick Cave, a spiritual and decadent poet who transforms that existential malaise into words and music that arises from a constant religious tension and from a dark gaze on the suffering of the world, a host of rock with an unmistakable, “cavernous” style, as he suggests. its own name, and that with its “bad seeds” welcomes and enchants the public by mixing gothic atmospheres and hieratic melodies.

Nick Cave’s son Jethro Lazenby dies. He was 31 years old

Another tragedy for the songwriter. Seven years ago he had already lost a son, Arthur, aged 15, who died when he fell off a cliff

But how comfortable can being familiar with death and its shadow be when you tragically lose a child (Arthur, 15) and, seven years later, lose another too (Jethro, 31)? Seven, a sacred symbolic number, which recalls the deadly sins but at the same time the completeness and perfection of God. Seven, like the Seven Psalmsseven psalms written and set to music during the pandemic and which, ironically, the 64-year-old Australian artist will publish next June 17th.
“While I was in lockdown I wrote a number of psalms, or little sacred songs, one a day for a week. The seven psalms are presented as a long meditation: on faith, anger, love, pain, mercy, sex and praise. A veiled, contemplative offering, born of an uncertain time. I hope you like it », Cave himself explains in the post announcing the release.

Confirming that Cave is by no means new to themes such as death and suffering, which emerge in his music from the very beginning, when he performed with the post punk band. The Birthday Partylater becoming the main elements of the gothic rock production with i Bad Seeds.

Not only that: the elaboration of mourning is precisely the leitmotif of the concert that Cave will hold in Verona on July 4th, on the only Italian date of his tour with the Bad Seeds, dominated by the last double album released in 2019, Ghosteena sort of rock opera about a ghost teenager, as well as the second chapter of the painful trilogy that began with Skeleton tree and inspired by the sudden loss of Arthur, their 15-year-old son, who fell off a cliff near their Brighton home in 2015.

An inauspicious fate that now repeats itself with the disappearance of a second child of the artist, the eldest son Jethro, 31 years old, from Cave’s first marriage with the Australian model and actress Beau Lazenby.

“Such a thing should never happen, but we die …”, Cave’s voice repeats in the psalm chosen to open the post dedicated to Seven Psalms. A truth, today, more painful than ever.