To continue the conversation from twitter. I'm not very familiar with that song you mentioned.

There are some holes in my Nick Cave knowledge. But there are so many great lines in "There She Goes My Beautiful World" like "if you got a field that don't yield..." and I love the line about Dylan Thomas and all the other artists as he kind of traces their various inspirations. Sorta similar to his "walking through his library" on "Dig, Lazarus, Dig," as you mentioned in your write-up.

Tell me about "Darker with the Days."

(Basically, I've just been dying for a reason to try out Branch and this seemed like a good time to do it.)

Oh, man, "Darker With the Days." First discovered it in Grand Rapids, when I was feeling very far from the Lord. Song's basically about being overwhelmed by the darkness of a godless world, told in that same weird Cave diction that sits on just this side of rationality. Weirdly, it was on the soundtrack to The Passion of the Christ. I don't listen to it much, but it's essential listening.

Saw "Lazarus" on an apartment intercom recently and thought about tweeting a picture with a caption about Larry moving to Chicago. You never know where to stand with Cave, whether you're being heretical or irreverent or what.

Alas, "Darker With the Day" has been scrubbed from YouTube, else I'd send you a link.

(FYI, in case you aren't familiar with how this Branch thing works, others can see our conversation but can't join us unless we invite/allow them to join.)

Actually, I have heard the song because it's on "No More Shall We Part," which I own. But I just can't think of it. I'll try to dig that CD out here in a bit.

Love "Dig, Lazarus, Dig." I feel like Cave occupies the same territory as Tom Waits in that he's sort of Christ-haunted. Very much opposed to religious faith (Cave moreso than Waits, if you ask me), yet he can't stop writing songs about it.

How did the piece at Aquarium Drunkard come about? Did he ask you to write about that song or did you suggest it?

If I'm not mistaken, Cave self-identifies as a Christian. I have a distinct memory of someone asking him about it in an interview. Then they asked if he was interested in any other religions, and he replied, "Nope, I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy." Which is the most Nick Cave way to answer that question. Obviously his body of work makes his confession, uh, interesting, to say the least. We tried to get him to speak at Festival of Faith and Music in 2009, but his speaking fee was too high.

I'm a staff writer now, so I'm basically contracted to put up a few posts a month of whatever I'm into at the moment. The announcement of the new record has put me in an NC mood.

Wow, that's news to me (Cave's faith, not the new album). But like I said, I'm no Cave expert so that could totally be true.

Actually, I turned this up on his wikipedia page (I sure hope this is a somewhat recent addition because I know I've read this page before):

In the past, Cave identified as a Christian. In his recorded lectures on music and songwriting, he has claimed that any true love song is a song for God and has ascribed the mellowing of his music to a shift in focus from the Old to the New Testaments. He does not belong to a particular denomination and has distanced himself from "religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked."

(Continued) He said in a recent Los Angeles Times article: "I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god. It's kind of defending the indefensible, though; I'm critical of what religions are becoming, the more destructive they're becoming. But I think as an artist, particularly, it's a necessary part of what I do, that there is some divine element going on within my songs."

Interesting. The quote I'm thinking of comes from this Salon.com article, which, admittedly, is from 2004, and so maybe outdated at this point:

salon.com

"“The Flesh Made Word” includes the extraordinary and revealing insight that Cave’s progressive aesthetic mellowing is due to a change in his focus from the Old to the New Testament. Cave told me that he does not go to church, and that he is not affiliated with any particular branch of Christianity, but there is no question that his God is a Christian God. When I asked Cave if he had any interest in other religions, or in a broader, non-religious spirituality, he replied, “Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I’m a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.”

Whatever the case, he's able to articulate the feeling of true belief--replete with confusion, and horror, and guilt, all of the trappings of our awareness of our own weak and bad faith--in a really incredible way. I'd want to talk to him about it one day if I weren't terrified to be in the same room.

Weirdly, he also composed an intro for the Gospel of Mark. As did Barry Hannah.

That's true. By the way, I didn't realize you had this new blog until a week or so ago. I'm really enjoying it. The Beatles post today made me pull out my Beatles "#1" record at home and play it for AP a few times. Anyway, great idea. Keep it up.

Thanks! It's been a nice way to kill time while unemployed. Actually, it's been more than that. I'm working a temp gig from tomorrow until next Friday, and am anxious to figure out how I'm gonna make it work.

Ah, crap. Just remembered I was supposed to write the next post this evening. I'm gonna have to miss a day.

Wow. I'd love to read Cave's and Hannah's intros to Mark. Much to my shame, I only just starting reading my first Hannah book. That final collection of stories that compiles stories from his entire career and adds a couple unpublished ones from right before his death. I read the first story in the book "Trek" and it kind of blew my mind. Had to read it again immediately. Still not entirely sure I understood it.

Are you going through your records chronologically or alphabetically?

Yeah, I go back and forth on Hannah. I've got Airships, which I like about half the time, when I can kinda tell what's going on. It strikes me as being kinda perfectly southern, though, an artifact of daily life in the south that the new south didn't really raise up, economically speaking. I've also got a copy of Yonder Stands Your Orphan, which I need to read.

Here's his intro: g0spel0fj0hn.com

And Cave's:
mbird.com

I'm doing the records alphabetically by artist, then chronologically per artist, with a few minor kinks thrown in (technically, the Beatles record I did today should be last in the Beatles section, but it's the only thing I have with the early songs on it, so I put it first).

Now that we're kinda moving into book talk, weren't you the one who told me to read Jesus' Son?

Probably. That's an excellent book.

That's another book where I started reading and wasn't entirely sure what was going on. It kinda felt like Johnson intended that though, sort of a drug-y fever dream kinda thing. The opening story about the car crash nearly knocked the breath out of me. Really good.

Did you read his recent novella Train Dreams? It was stunningly simple and beautiful. Very different from Jesus' Son (at least what I've read).

Yeah, it sounds like you were reading Jesus' Son correctly, haha. There's a longer story in there in which the main character (Fuckhead, I believe his name is) and a friend go to a drive-in theatre that's just stunning. It's worth tracking down your copy right now and reading it. "Emergency," that's what it's called.

I haven't read Train Dreams, but I did read Tree of Smoke. It was probably the first literary novel I read once I really started becoming invested in reading. I need to re-read it, I might actually get it now.

I'll look that up.

My good wife is buying me a DFW book stack for Xmas: Oblivion, Brief Interviews, and Consider the Lobster. Looking forward to our trek through TPK starting in January. I can't remember if I told you, but I read the first 20 or so pages before our IJ read and I remember this first couple pages being really mesmerizing. I remember a listing of all the types of grass or something in this town and somehow it was wonderful.

Awesome! I'm impressed that Shalaine would put the burden of carrying you through DFW on herself. Forewarning: Oblivion is b-l-e-a-k. Really looking forward to TPK, too. I'm trying to get through The Fortress of Solitude as quickly as possible.

Yeah, I've read the Incantations of Burned Children from that book and it's one of the most difficult (and beautiful) things to come from DFW's pen, I think.

No worries, I've got plenty on my plate (actually, spent a bit of early Xmas money and got 7 used books in the mail today for something like $30 from BetterWorldBooks.com, really awesome site if you don't mind waiting 10 or so days for the books to come in-- free shipping!) so we can start whenever we're both ready to start something new.