Nick Cave’s “I Need You” Is One of the Year’s Most Tender and Pained Songs
“I don’t believe in an interventionist god,” Nick Cave sang in the opening track of 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, “But I know, darling, that you do.” Until now, it was the starkest, saddest album of Cave’s career. On this song, “Into My Arms,” he employed the second person to counterbalance his own nihilistic tendencies, using another person as a conduit to a spirituality and purity he could not achieve himself. “Into My Arms” was a love song by an artist inherently skeptical of the form, praying to a God he didn’t necessarily believe in. But there was a palpable sense of faith in it, one that transcended Cave’s principles and logic and gave him peace. “I believe in love,” he sang firmly, “And I know you do, too.”
“I Need You” is the stirring core of the Bad Seeds’ devastating new album, Skeleton Tree. Here, Cave is at a loss for words. “Nothing really matters,” he repeats, leaning on the hard R of “matters,” as if to further pronounce the distinct lack of poetry in the phrase. The words bend and break the more he uses them; Cave continues saying more with less, the tenderness in his voice filling all the negative space. “Nothing really matters when the one you love is gone,” he sings at one point, honing in on the song’s gravitational pull: the void left when our love is no longer directed at a living thing but rather at a memory. Though just a moment later, Cave subverts that notion as well: “We love the ones we can/Because nothing really matters.”
In a sense, “I Need You” is a song about hopelessness—a meditation on the inescapable meaninglessness of a world defined by chaos and loss. But the song’s other central mantra challenges that with a simple plea for human connection. “I need you,” Cave sings over a sustained major chord, as his band’s wordless backing vocals sweep over him like a wave: “In my heart, I need you.” Cave drifts between half-recalled memories, placing them into a more fragmented mindset than his trademark, character-filled storytelling. He sees a red dress falling, a black car waiting. He’s standing in the doorway; he’s in line at the supermarket. The images never coalesce into a clear narrative, but they amount to something even greater: a lifetime flashing before your eyes, so sad and real that it could be your own.
Recent Comments