Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds “The Boatman’s Call”
“Murder Ballads” came first — in 1996. Widely considered an apex at the time, in retrospect it appears more like the end of something. Nick Cave had eked every drop of blood from the gothic, noise-lounge act he had been fronting for almost twenty years. Then, like a drenching storm, “The Boatman’s Call” arrived just one year later. And, after the biblical rain, everything was different. The band no longer sounded like it was playing in a back country Aussie church. No -- they sounded like they were playing in Nick Cave’s living room, on top of ancient, Persian rugs, not far from the ocean, singing directly to you.
“The Boatman’s Call” is the album where Cave ascends from art punk poet, writing about characters, to spiritual folk singer writing almost exclusively about his Love, his God and his Loss. It was a vein he would continue to tap for the next two decades (and counting). Where there were guitars, there was now piano and violin. Free of affect and exorcism, he would croon. He would nurse. And he would go to the edge only to then hold back what felt too private, which had the inverse effect of making it sound all the more honest. It wasn’t that he had turned forty. It wasn’t PJ Harvey. It wasn’t Flood. It was slightly all of those things. But, mostly, it was Warren Ellis, who grew from a stringed ingredient to his primary collaborator.
“Into My Arms” and “Far From Me” are the bookends of the album. They are both love songs. Love of Woman. Love of King. Love as living. Love as dying. The former is rightfully considered Cave’s most beautiful song, played frequently at hipster weddings and celebrity funerals and perpetually covered and name-checked by those in the club. But it has become a cliche for good reason. The song is so simple. The voice so deep and bare. The piano so true. It’s a treasure. The latter (“Far From Me”), about the distance between everything and nothing, is almost the equal of the opening track. This pair alone make “The Boatman’s Call” essential.
In between, there is very little tempo. These are mostly plaintive ballads where Cave simultaneously exalts his Love and his God while also flatly confirming that “People Ain’t No Good.” You hear him singing about Jesus, and yet you feel certain that there is nothing Christian about his words. These are Old Testament words delivered with post-New Testament perspective. Cave knows Jesus. He may love Jesus. It sounds more like meditation than certainty. Meanwhile, he is certain that we are always one and we are always separate. We are always dying as we are living and loving. That’s how he squares the contradiction of it all -- the love and distance, the living and dying and the good and the ain’t good.
“Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?” is one of the first songs that Ellis completely takes over. It’s a gorgeous track about how people miraculously, and necessarily, move forward while there is death right in front of them. In this one song, all of the album’s stories are revealed. We live, we love, we die. Our loved ones do the same. And it’s a fucking tragedy. And it’s beautiful. And we have no choice in the matter. So, it has to be both.
During the recording of this album, Cave was in a relationship with Polly Jean Harvey. In 1996, that was very topical. In 2020 it’s almost irrelevant. The PJ Harvey songs are typically beautiful but they are not the best songs on the record. On those tracks, you can feel the way Nick Cave is consumed. You can feel the way he waits for love’s arrival. But he sings that way about God every bit as convincingly as he does about his Green Eyed lover. One exception is “West Country Girl,” which stands out in both form and sound. It is a Waltz time, Country-noir number. The love in this song has the threat of great mystery, even violence. It’s visceral. It’s scary. It’s quick. There’s no chorus. And then it’s gone. Like a ghost. Of all the tracks on Boatman’s Call, this is the one that best bridges the spirit of “Murder Ballads” into his new sound.
Several years ago, the film “20,000 Days On Earth” artfully imagined a day in the life of Nick Cave as he approaches sixty. There is writing. There is singing. There is therapy. There is love. It’s not a documentary. It’s not a mockumentary. In this way it’s both all lies and extraordinarily true. Amazingly, everything he lays out on “The Boatman’s Call” — the themes, the tone, the style — is still there in that film, nearly 20 years later. This album apparently imprinted a template that would have been hard to conceive for Nick Cave, the punk or Nick Cave the goth. In middle age and beyond, he became the gentleman, sage poet.
It would be convenient to suggest that “The Boatman’s Call” was the album where we first meet Nick Cave, the man, rather than Nick Cave, the character. But that’s also a fallacy. He’s still a character. He’s still a projection. But this new character had a collaborator named Warren Ellis who would search for notes the way Cave searched for words and ideas. And this new character sounded much more like a man, singing his words directly to us, inches away. This was as close as we got. But we’ve not let him go since.