Nick Cave has described receiving a complimentary tweet from Bob Dyan about a recent Bad Seeds show as “a lovely pulse of joy”.
The Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter attended the band’s concert at the Accor Arena in Paris on November 17, writing on X after the show that he had been “really struck by that song ‘Joy’ where he sings “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now it the time for joy”.
Dylan added, “I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.”
Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now it the time for joy.” I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.
— Bob Dylan (@bobdylan) November 19, 2024
Cave has written a reply to the comment on his website The Red Hand Files, noting: “I hadn’t known Bob was at the concert and his tweet was a lovely pulse of joy that penetrated my exhausted, zombied state.”
“I was happy to see Bob on X, just as many on the Left had performed a Twitterectomy and headed for Bluesky,” he continued. “It felt admirably perverse, in a Bob Dylan kind of way. I did indeed feel it was a time for joy rather than sorrow. There had been such an excess of despair and desperation around the election, and one couldn’t help but ask when it was that politics became everything.
“The world had grown thoroughly disenchanted, and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had thrown up so many palisades that had prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent – that holy place where joy resides. I felt proud to have been touring with The Bad Seeds and offering, in the form of a rock ‘n ’roll show, an antidote to this despair, one that transported people to a place beyond the dreadful drama of the political moment.”
“I was elated to think Bob Dylan had been in the audience, and since I doubt I’ll get an opportunity to thank him personally, I’ll thank him here. Thank you, Bob!”
‘Joy’ is a track from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ latest album ‘Wild God’, which arrived in late August and scored a four-star review from NME. The review read: “Bad Seeds records are infamously loaded with gothic doom and gloom. Of course, this ain’t a poptastic LOLfest, and still coloured with the many shades of a life so challenging and weathered.”
“But never has Cave been so freewheelin’ than on the giddy ‘Frogs’, “Jumping for love and the opening sky above” as “Kris Kristofferson walks by kicking a can in a shirt he hasn’t washed for years“. With a lust for life, the once-dark prince is letting the light in.”
In April, Cave wrote a blog post about the artists – Dylan included – that have “disappointed” him in some form: “They have often not travelled in the direction I would have hoped or wished for, instead following their own confounding paths (damn them!) to their own truths.
“In the course of this I have sometimes been discomforted by things they have done, disagreed with things they have said, or not liked a particular record they have made. Yet there is something about them that keeps me captivated, and forever alert to what they might do next.”
In September, Cave chose 1969’s ‘I Threw It All Away’ as his favourite Dylan song for a Mojo compilation. Cave said of the track: “The production is so clean, fluid and uncluttered, and there is an ease and innocence to Dylan’s voice in its phrasing, in its tone that is in no Dylan recording before or after. There is a perfectly measured emotional pull to the singing… I can put this song on first thing in the morning or the middle of a dark night and it will make me feel better, make me want to carry on. The song serves the listener as it should and that’s its genius.”