walking upstream…
Nick Cave
photo: raph_ph · cc by 2.0 ↗Nick Cave
sourcesFar Out Magazine · Wikipedia23
Nick Cave grew up in rural Victoria, Australia, and moved to Melbourne to study art before fronting The Boys Next Door and then The Birthday Party, whose scabrous, confrontational post-punk helped invent the vocabulary of goth rock before the band splintered in Berlin in 1983. He immediately regrouped as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds with Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld, opening the debut album with a cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Avalanche' and never looking back: four decades of murder ballads, Old Testament imagery, tortured love songs, and increasingly stark reckonings with grief and faith have made him one of rock's most literary and theatrical frontmen. 'The Mercy Seat,' 'Red Right Hand,' and the more recent 'Ghosteen' and 'Wild God' show a songwriter equally at home in menace and tenderness.
the sound in question
1994
Red Right HandNick Cave
walk the tributaries ↓
Leonard Cohen1970s · Folk / Folk rock
Cave has called Cohen 'the greatest songwriter of them all' and written of first hearing him as a formative jolt — in his extended poem 'The Sick Bag Song,' he recalls 'Leonard Cohen will sing, and the boy will suddenly breathe as if for the first time.' The debt is literal as well as spiritual: the very first sound on the Bad Seeds' 1984 debut album is Cave's own cover of Cohen's 'Avalanche,' its fingerpicked incantation rebuilt into something harsher and more industrial.
listen: upstream & here
1971
AvalancheLeonard Cohen
1984
AvalancheNick Cave
listen forHear Cohen's original 'Avalanche' — spare guitar, a voice intoning the lyric almost like a curse — then the Bad Seeds' version, which keeps the words but replaces the folk austerity with clanging, tension-coiled menace, a preview of the band's entire aesthetic.
Johnny Cash1950s-60s · Country / Rockabilly / Gospel
Cave has said plainly, 'I lost my innocence with Johnny Cash,' recalling the Johnny Cash Show as a fixture of his childhood. The pull-through line is a plainspoken, doom-laden baritone that can carry a story-song without theatrics — a register 'Kicking Against the Pricks' (1986), the Bad Seeds' covers album, pays tribute to directly by including a version of Cash's 'The Folk Singer,' retitled 'The Singer.'
listen: upstream & here
1968
The Folk SingerJohnny Cash
1986
The SingerNick Cave
listen forCash's 'The Folk Singer' is dry, unhurried, almost conversational; Cave's 'The Singer' takes the same plainspoken narrative baritone and pushes it into a swaggering, harder-edged delivery, showing how directly Cash's authority as a storyteller fed Cave's own.
Bob Dylan1960s · Folk / Folk rock / Rock
Critics have long noted a direct kinship between Cave and Dylan — a shared taste for biblical imagery, outsized narrators, and songs that swell past ordinary pop scale. Cave paid the debt directly, gathering Kylie Minogue, PJ Harvey, Shane MacGowan, and the rest of the Bad Seeds for a hushed, multi-voiced cover of Dylan's 'Death Is Not the End' to close 1996's 'Murder Ballads.'
listen: upstream & here
1988
Death Is Not the EndBob Dylan
1996
Death Is Not the EndNick Cave
listen forDylan's original is a plain, hymn-like repetition of its title line over a simple folk backing; Cave's version keeps that repetition but passes the refrain between guest voices like a wake being sung around a table, turning private hymn into communal ritual.