Thursday's Artist Portrait: Nick Cave

Thursday Artist Portrait is a weekly column that goes in-depth about an established or influential band, album, or song. Rather than simply discussing these on a simple aesthetic level, this section will attempt to provide unique, thoughtful insights to those things being examined.

Nick Cave first established himself as a member of Birthday Party, a pioneering post-punk group in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Around their breakup in 1983, Cave and fellow ex-Birthday Party member Mick Harvey formed the Bad Seeds. Gaining a reputation as one of post-punk's premier acts, Cave and the Bad Seeds became particularly notable for their darkly violent ballads, and exhibited lyrical displays of starkness and rawness in the vein of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. Nick Cave's deep, raw crooning adds further character to their thematic variety, including death, murder, sex, and religion, among others. As the band has matured over the past twenty-something years, they have delicately placed themselves between the open energy and emotion of their post-punk background, and their intricate songwriting and textured surreality within the Waits-Cohen melancholic mindset. Combining these two similar, yet strikingly different influences, Cave has struck gold throughout his career by finding a middle-ground that draws from both sides of the gun.











After 14 albums with the Bad Seeds, and countless side projects and solo endeavors, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds do not show any signs of slowing down. Now in his 50's, Cave continues to carve his iconic status as both an elder statesman of post-punk and a master of portraying the darker side of humanity.