The Necessary Art of Conversation
The Conversation by Arnold Borisowich Lakhovsky (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).
Last Sunday, Sarah and I made a one day pilgrimage to the Bay Area to see Nick Cave. To this point I have had the opportunity to see him perform with the Bad Seeds on four different occasions, but this show was different. Based on the format displayed in his incredible Red Hand Files, he spent three hours in conversation with the audience, taking questions, asking questions, and interspersing words with solo, piano-driven versions of his music.
The whole experience was wonderful and has left me thinking a lot about the power of dialogue and communication between human beings. It is critical, but we are often so, so bad at it. And, I absolutely understand why. Entering into the shared space of a conversation involves risk. It involves exposure and vulnerability on both sides. It requires a good faith effort to listen. And, at its best, it requires a humility to take in alternate perspectives and a willingness to potentially reassess your assumptions and understandings. I say all of that knowing just how lacking it seems to be in our increasingly polarized and angry world. A few other thoughts/memories from the evening:
Songs I remember him playing include The Ship Song, The Weeping Song, Stagger Lee, The Mercy Seat, Into My Arms, Leonard Cohen’s Avalanche, and T-Rex’s Cosmic Dancer. The clear highlight however came in response to a question by a fan that was something along the lines of “how do you write songs that can simultaneously uplift and devastate the listener.” Nick asked what song he was referring to and then proceeded to play a completely off the cuff (and killer) version of 15 Feet of Pure White Snow. It was magical.
The concept of taking questions from the audience is a brave one. As you might imagine, it leads to a pretty mixed bag. Some of the questions were incredibly incisive, some were not incisive but led to terrific responses, and some were just…not great. In spite of the varying quality, the overall effect was mesmerizing for the majority of the time he was on stage.
One conversation that sticks out was Nick Cave talking about his love of the idea of marriage, and how you enter into it and learn that it is a tricky, evolving thing that requires full participation and commitment. It is never exactly what you expect, but when it’s working it is exactly what it needs to be. Sarah and I had a great followup conversation about it the next day at the Oakland Airport while waiting for our flight home.
He spent some time talking about the current state of things and how the internet has seemingly conditioned us to be hyper-aware of fault and hyper-unwilling to forgive or forget. People are no longer afforded the luxury of making mistakes and learning from them in the real-time space of the internet and that is to our collective detriment. It leaves us all as static points on a digital map, without the space or warmth to fail, examine, and improve. I thought it was a profound insight and has left me feeling a lot more charitable towards people and our shared human struggle to do the best we can with the mountains of doubt, guilt, and incomplete information we each carry.
A lot of the questions were geared towards Nick Cave’s creative process and how he creates his art. I definitely feel like I have a keener insight into him and it has had me listening to his music in a new light this week. He was very open about the loss of his son and how that has fundamentally fractured and changed his process. He described it as moving from a position of writing lyrics and stories with a grand narrative in mind to writing things that are more oblique. He acknowledged that this new work has more holes and requires a more sustained and directed engagement from the listener. I don’t know that there is a more apt way of framing what he has done on his latest album, Ghosteen.
A final memory is of a theme he hit more than once. Several questions that were fielded had to do with how you make the leap to being…something…a writer, a musician, whatever. His response, each and every time, was simply this: you decided that you are going to be it and you do the work. You do it for you and nobody else. If those around you aren’t in support, but you are committed, fuck ‘em and move on and just do it. This is profoundly good advice.