Nick Cave has debuted a brand new song at his recent concert in Chicago – watch the full video below.
On September 29 in Chicago, Cave performed an intimate piano ballad, and later responded to a fan who asked about the song in his newsletter. The Australian musician has slowly been releasing details about the new Bad Seeds album, revealing earlier this May to NME that the music was “just so instantly interesting” as well as “different all the time”.
In Issue 255 of The Red Hand Files, Cave elaborated on the process of writing ‘Euthanasia’, which he previously performed at Alexandra Palace for the 2020 ‘Idiot Prayer’ live album and concert film, and a new song which he called ‘To Be Found’.
“When I’m working on an album with The Bad Seeds, I occasionally record a song alone at the piano,” he wrote. “Stylistically, these songs usually sit outside the new record and they are generally fragmentary things, circular in shape, softly sung, unspectacular and unformed. There is little love for them from the band, and they aren’t strong enough to compete with the larger, more imposing songs – consequently they tend to fall by the wayside.”
“When I listen back to the recordings, I’ll come across one or two of these songs, languishing in some forgotten corner, and I will find myself secretly moved by their unassuming loveliness,” he continued. “As a result I become very attached to them. ‘Euthanasia’, which I played in Asheville and Cleveland, is a song that I wrote around the time of Skeleton Tree, and is a perfect example — dismissed at the time, it has now become one of my favourites.”
‘To Be Found’, Cave said, “is another such song”. Initially performed without a title, Cave continued: “The sentiment is simple and softly spoken, the song unable to even declare its name, but still it is a special song, full of unspecified emotional impact and a great pleasure to play. I think I’ll call the song “To Be Found”.”
The Bad Seeds last released music with 2019’s ‘Ghosteen‘; our five-star review asserted it was “one of the most devastatingly accurate accounts of grief that you’ll ever listen to. Yet it’s also, astoundingly, one of the most comforting.”
He and Bad Seeds collaborator Warren Ellis released the acclaimed album ‘CARNAGE‘ in 2021. Written and recorded during the pandemic, the album was hailed by NME for capturing the “abandon, along with all the heightened rushes of panic and mania that come with lockdown and recent world events, and those merciful moments of peace, serenity and hope for what’s to come”, adding: “Cave and Ellis have taken a bold leap into the COVID era’s dark night of the soul, and found a truth that we all share.”