Nick Cave, Jesus alone

A love letter to an artist

Jul 06, 2025

I first discovered Nick Cave while living in Montreal in an artist's squat in the 1990s with my roommate and manager, Jake. I was a budding young singer at the time. Jake was completely in love with a dark-haired girl named Mary and they spent all hours of the day and night fucking like beasts to the Nick Cave album Henry’s Dream. I came to know the music through the paper-thin wall that separated our rooms. Mary and Jake were a doomed relationship, if ever I saw one, but they introduced me to St. Nick.

While I recognized the raw power of the music, back then, Nick was too goth for my sensibilities. I knew he was great—a better rock Antichrist than Jim Morrison, but I hadn’t suffered and sinned enough, perhaps, to fully appreciate him. I did, however, stand in awe of the intensity of Henry’s dream—of the pounding beats, the dark gospel, and the relentlessness of both the music and Jake and Mary’s lovemaking.

Thirty years later, I found myself at a solo concert by Nick Cave in Paris. The concert had sold out months before, and it felt like a miracle to get a last-minute ticket. The internet gods would only let me buy one ticket, so I couldn’t even bring my wife along. I might have purchased the last ticket and had a seat way up in the balcony.

The stage was bare and dark, devoid of television screens or hype, set up to create a sense of intimacy with Nick. It felt like just me and “Jesus alone”, to quote one of his later songs. Nick channels Jesus—in most of his songs.

Of course, Nick also has a thing for the devil, and all his songs are about this duality, in one way or another. One he played was from Henry’s Dream, called Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry. He described it as “litany of horrors,” in his own words, from when he lived in Brazil. Here is a taste:

I awoke so drunk and full of rage
That I could hardly speak
A fag in a whale-bone corset
Draping his dick across my cheek
Well it’s into the shame
And it’s into the guilt
And it’s into the fucking fray
And the walls ran red around me
A warm arterial spray

Papa won’t leave you, Henry
Papa won’t leave you, Boy
Papa won’t leave you, Henry
Papa won’t leave you, Boy
For the road is long
And the road is hard
And many fall by the side
But Papa won’t leave you, Henry
So there ain’t no need to cry

And I went on down the road
He went on down the road
And I went on down the road
He went on down the road

The song continues in this violent and relentless manner, a portrait gallery of hell. However, hearing Cave play it on a grand piano, without the band, 30 years later, was a different soundtrack than I heard within the groans of the paper-thin walls. A different man sang the song I heard in Paris—the words took on a different kind of meaning. Papa was a compassionate man rather than an outlaw carrying a sawed-off shotgun. I saw a man cradling his son from the storm, promising he wouldn’t leave. The menace was gone, the voice full of weeping.

In the original version, you get the sense that Papa—like the old Nick Cave—isn’t the most trustworthy man, but someone caught in a tunnel of mania. Down the road is horror and death. Watch the early documentaries of Nick and you'll find that Henry: an unsavoury, defensive, wounded, sarcastic, funny, and angry person—a bit of a bastard. Nick the devil was attractive in a deadly, poisonous sort of way. A literary Elvis. A monstrous talent. A vampire. A heroin addict. Pale. Hungry. Desperate for a fix. Destined for overdose.

It’s hard to square who he is today with who he was back then. Only the death of a precious son and steadfast love with his wife Suzie, could save such a man from his deep misanthropy. Of course, Nick Cave, like all of us, has always been both Jesus and the devil. But the man of cynical nihilism became a man of empathy and love. The alien became a citizen. Nick is a real mensch these days: kind, ethical, and fully human. Of course, he has always been both, but the devil has been tamed by love.

It’s hard to find an artist who loves his audience more than Nick Cave—and who shows it so openly. His Red Hand Files website is a repository for poetic, deeply felt and reasoned epistolary love letters and responses to his fans. And his later music has evolved into something beautiful, transcendental, rich, and deep. What a transformation!

In honoring his fallen boy, Arthur, Nick learned to love the world, he has said. Of course, this feels like an abrupt shift in personality, but if you examine his work, the change had been coming for a long time. His own symbolic crucifixion—his Christ alone on the Skeleton tree—meant resurrection. This something we are all destined to experience in one way or another. We all die, many times in a life, and are remade again.

Nick is different from other singers of his age, singular. The religious commitment and longing were always there, unlike for Kurt Cobain or other lost souls of the nihilistic nineties. That's how he survived his nihilism, I’d wager: the practice of prayer, even with the needle and a rock star’s excesses. The new Nick Cave—the adult Nick Cave—found the world worth living in still, and even a wonderful life, with all it’s heartbreak and beauty.

We never really become human without a shock, in one way or another—without being laid low with the lowest of the low, our brains heated up and exploding in The Mercy Seat. The individual story becomes the universal story, which begins on our knees. The Mercy Seat, a song of the old Nick, was a song of defiance, however, not of acceptance. (Until Johnny Cash sang it, and it took on its full tragic dimensions.)

The arc of St. Nick tells us: In the beginning, we worship our art, our ego constructions, idols of all kinds—we worship the needle, the death mask, the oblivion, in one way or another. But if we can transform that worship—raise it up to meaning and love—we might finally free the junkie hunchback from the avalanche, to borrow an image from Nick Cave’s favourite Leonard Cohen song, which he sang last night

Some favorite lyrics from Ghosteen 2019:

Your body is an anchor
Never asked to be free
Just want to stay in the business
Of making you happy
Well, I’m just waiting for you
Waiting for you
Waiting for you

—

The three bears watch the TV
They age a lifetime, O Lord
Mama Bear holds the remote
Papa Bear he just floats
And Baby Bear he has gone
Gone to the moon in a boat
Oh in a boat

I’m speaking about love now
How the lights of love go down
You’re in the back room washing his clothes
Love’s like that you know

—-

The bright horses have broken free from the fields
They are horses of love, their manes full of fire
They are parting the cities, those bright burning horses
And everyone is hiding, no one makes a sound
And I’m by your side and I’m holding your hand
Bright horses of wonder springing from your burning hand

Listening to Ghosteen is almost unbearable. There, in that beautiful sonic and imaginal world, Nick found a place for his fallen son—among bright horses, galleon ships, and roaming cougars in the wildfires of Malibu. I don’t usually cry, but Ghosteen overwhelmed me, made me weep; its emotional depth knocked me flat. Nick learned to sing Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry again, but this time without irony, as a song of pure grief and longing.

Nick Cave’s art is redeemed, not as the bad boy romantic, but as the adult who takes full stock, full responsibility. The emotional background to Cave’s early work may have been related to the death of the father—both his biological father, and attendant the death of God, or a higher meaning. His early work is full of protest and pain, as if he’s screaming at a silent sky: “Why have you forsaken me?” But when the ultimate horror occurred—the death of his son—something broke open. Belief descended. Understanding and mercy came. Maybe it’s that Nick had to become the human father and was now called to be present for both the dead and the living.

Cave does not admit to being a Christian, but he has tried to imitate Christ in his own very human way. At the same time, he never abandoned his pagan roots or the wild parts of himself for some cheap spiritual wafer. And in his latest album, Wild God, that untamed deity returns. The Dionysian and the Christian are now united.

Who is the Wild God? He’s the ghost of the father, the one with big white sneakers and wild hair. He is the completion of the monomyth. The dead father returns, and with him, a renewed connection to the world.

The work of all great artists who survive youth, is the death and rebirth of the romantic. The golden boy, the romantic, is close to mother and violently reacts to the father of society, or pehaps his absence. The path to becoming a mature artist and reconcile with the father is through daily work, discipline, and attention to the task. Religious discipline is always something that Cave understood. Cave says he is religious, not spiritual. That is, he practices—he doesn’t just follow a personal muse. There is always a sacrifice of attention to be made.

Redemption lies in connecting to the communal suffering of all, in coming down from the arrogant heights. That’s what redeems us. That’s what Nick does in The Red Hand Files. They’re humorous, uplifting, poetic—always affirmative, but never fluffy.

The lesson. The death of the artist is the birth of the human being, who can now be an artist who serves something beyond himself. By renouncing the artist ego, the artist finally becomes a real artist, with greater powers—the powers of kindness and renunciation.

Dear Nick. Thank you. I'd like to write more posts about your work, something a bit longer, if you don’t mind. You are an artist I truly love, with whom I live with, die with, and dream of galleon ships. Your show last night was a dignified display of total beauty.

Of course, if you want the whole ecstatic Christ/Dionysian experience, go and see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds—I also saw him with the band last November and it was unforgettable in a different way. But these solo songs stand on their own—without the choir—naked before the Lord, albeit in a dark suit and Gucci shoes. Jesus has not yet lost his style, and the devil is given his due.