colossal cave quotthe cave is now closed

#Colossal cave quotthe cave is now closed series

“So, to apply that to songwriting, a song like ‘I Need You’ off the new album, time and space all seem to be rushing and colliding into a kind of big bang of despair. Everything is changing and vibrating and in flux.

#Colossal cave quotthe cave is now closed series

I feel that the events in our lives are like a series of bells being struck and the vibrations spread outwards, affecting everything, our present, and our futures, of course, but our past as well. The idea that we live life in a straight line, like a story, seems to me to be increasingly absurd and more than anything a kind of intellectual convenience. It has felt hugely restrictive for some time.

He nonetheless insists, “I haven’t much time for overtly narrative songs these days. It’s certainly interesting to hear Cave admit, “I can’t write a song that I can’t see.” They’re just more expressionistic, subconscious, dreamier and deeper, maybe, than before. Right now, I feel strange echoes of the same “black road long”, half inviting, half swallowing us of “tableaus of spiritual collapse”, as Cave has described ‘Higgs Boson Blues’, fleeting past the corners of our eyes in new ways this oppressively warm afternoon.įor all his recent talk of no longer writing narrative lyrics, the truth is Nick Cave is still telling us stories in songs like ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ and eerie, recent stunners like ‘Magneto’. A litany of historical and pop cultural images are mashed together in an imagistic contemplation of a universe being steadily emptied of all spiritual illusions. In the actual song, Cave fantasizes about “driving down to Geneva” where scientists anticipate an experiment that will isolate the Higgs boson or so-called ‘God particle’ that is the sub-atomic building block of all matter. I say we’re inside a song – as much as a car or a conversation – because the lyrics to ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ seem to define what the rock musician Nick Cave and I are passing through as we cruise on down a highway north of Sydney towards a show with his band the Bad Seeds in the coastal steel-town of Newcastle. I’m in a conversation inside a car inside a song.