Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave

Author:Nick Cave
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

That’s exactly what we are talking about: a man on the road with a woeful tale. In fact, I took that and turned it into ‘Song Of Joy’ on the Murder Ballads album. I made the nocturnal visitor a serial killer, moving remorselessly from house to house, but it is essentially the same lyric. These early songs you hear live in your bloodstream.

The thing I love about many of them is that there is a momentum in the actual storytelling – and it’s often the actual movement of the protagonist in the story itself. In the case of the Charlie Poole song, the lost, cuckolded man moving from house to house, retelling his tale of woe, generates a kind of narrative push to the song itself. Almost like the rhythm of the train tracks under a Johnny Cash song. It’s very beautiful.

Jimmy Webb’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ is an example of this par excellence. The three verses that move from Phoenix to Albuquerque to Oklahoma, as the man moves further and further away from the woman he has left behind, and as she simultaneously goes about her daily business – it is a piece of lyrical genius, really, the way that song is constructed.

Yes, and the same with ‘Wichita Lineman’, of course. It’s such sophisticated storytelling. Jimmy Webb took it to a whole other level.

He’s the absolute master. I love how, in ‘Wichita Lineman’, the narrator goes about his work but everything becomes a terrible metaphor for the one he may have lost. In my view, it’s one of the greatest lyrics ever written. Not to mention the actual song itself. The arrangement. My God! It’s just perfect. Do you know his song, ‘The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress’?

Yes. That’s a strange and beautiful song, but in a different way. Haunting, really.

I love how he sings the first two verses about the moon so eloquently and poetically, and then the song changes key and turns suddenly super-personal, where he is barely able to contain his broken heart, and it becomes almost clumsy and garbled with the repetition of the word ‘fell’ in the final verse.

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