Nick Cave
Australian musician, songwriter, poet, author and actor.
If you're involved with imagination and the creative process, it's not such a difficult thing to believe in a God. But I'm not involved in any religions, and I've never intended to make religious records or records that preach some kind of point of view.
The Captain's fore-arm like buncht-up rope,
With Anita wrigglin' free onto skull n' dagger,
And a portrait of Christ, nailed to an anchor,
Etched into the upper...
In heaven His throne is made of gold,
Where the ark of His testament is stowed,
A throne from which I'm told all history does unfold,
Down here it's made of wood and wire,
And my body is on fire,
And God is never far away.
A thousand Marys lured me,
To feathered beds and fields of glover,
Bird with crooked wing cast,
Its wicked shadow over,
A bauble moon did mock,
And trinket stars did smile,
Your funeral, my trial.
O ah hear her walkin',
Walkin' barefoot 'cross the floor-boards,
All thru this lonesome night,
And ah hear her crying too.
Hot-tears come splashin' down,
Leaking thru the cracks,
Down upon my face, ah catch'em in my mouth!
O You kings of halls and ends of halls,
You will die within these walls,
And I'll go, all down the row,
Knockin' on Joe.
O Warden, I surender to you,
Your fists cain't hurt me anymore,
You know, these hands will never wash,
These dirty Death Row floors.
The thing about being young is that you think you're the final product of evolution. You are invincible. And nothing can hurt you. And people don't count. Ah, the solipsism of youth.
Rats in paradise! Rats in paradise!
O poor heart, I was doomed from the start,
Doomed to play the villian's part,
I was the baddest Johnny in the apple cart,
My blood was blacker than the chambers of a dead nun's heart.
All of the great works of art, it seems to me, are the ones that have a total disregard for anything else; just a total egotistical self-indulgence.
Here is the hammer, that build the scaffold, and built the box...
The woods eats the woman and dumps her honey-body in the mud,
Her dress floats down the well and it assumes the shape of the body of a little girl,
Yeah, I recognize that girl,
She stumbled in some time last loneliness,
But I could not stand to touch her now,
My one and only onlyness.
Numbin' the runt of reputation they call rat frame,
Top-E as a tourniquet,
A low tune whistles across his grave,
Forever the slave of his Six Strings.
Well saturday gives what sunday steals,
And a child is born on his brother's heels,
Come sunday morn the first-born is dead,
In a shoebox tied with a ribbon of red.
Oh! Yer! What a wonderful life! Fats Domino on the radio!
And as the company passed from the valley, into a higher ground,
The rain beat on the ridge and on the meadow, and on the mound,
Until nothing was left, nothing at all except the body of Sorrow,
That rose in time, to float upon the surface of the eaten soil.
I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone's little finger and break it in three places.
If this is heaven ahm bailin' out!
He taught me to never veer too far from who I am, but to go further, try different things, and never lose sight of myself at the core.