Nick Cave has hard-won wisdom. I’ve recommended his weekly Red Hand Files newsletter before, and it’s worth subscribing to for the thoughtful replies he gives to questions, including “What do you do when the lyrics just aren’t coming?”
Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #108 – What do you do when the lyrics just aren’t coming?
I haven’t dated in ten years, so naughtiness has been absent from my life, but I’ve just put my foot in it with Facebook.
To celebrate becoming a pensioner in July, I bought a copy of Nick Cave’s Push The Sky Away album on eBay. I love the title track, which is a song of hope. It kept playing in my mind, as I slogged through building a blog and a website devoted to my crime novel series.
The cover shows him ordering his ex-model wife Susie Bick from the room…she’s totally nude.
It was an impromptu shot snapped by the photographer between posed sessions, which they preferred for the cover.
I’d played the song on YouTube, so decided to post it on Facebook. I chose a full-length version, not thinking too much about the nudity, for the shot was taken from 30′ away and you can’t see anything much.
It’s a running joke that Mark Zuckerberg is terrified of nipples, as so many innocent pics featuring them have been banned.
https://www.genderit.org/es/node/4851
Apparently, he’s scared of pubic hair too, for though Susie Bick’s minge is barely discernible, it got my post shunted off into the sin bin for contravening Facebook’s Community Standards. A few pixels of pubes made me naughty again!
Now, where did I put my magnifying glass?
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nickcavethebadseeds/pushtheskyaway.html
There are several well-known songs written about writers and writing, including The Beatle’s Paperback Writer and Elvis Costello’s Everyday I Write the Book.
Songwriters like to include literary references in their lyrics. Jefferson Airplane sang about Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit, Iron Maiden bellowed of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Led Zeppelin injected Tolkien imagery into their songs, and Kate Bush gave an eerie interpretation of Wuthering Heights.
The Doors took their name from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which was written about his experiences on mescaline. Lead singer Jim Morrison was a voracious reader and wrote poetic lyrics referencing psychological issues. Several volumes of his poetry have been published.
Nick Cave wrote an angry song called We Call Upon The Author, in which he took swipes at various creative types including writers, politicians who’ve engineered social chaos and even God himself:
Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain
Down in my bolthole, I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“The waves, the waves were soldiers moving”. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain
Prolix! Prolix! There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!
When people ask me what I do for a job, and I reply ”I’m an author” the next question is usually “What do you write?” The glib answer is simply to say “Words”, but I like to go mystical on them by quoting Neil Young’s song title replying that I write‘Words (Between the Lines of Age)’ which appeared on his album Harvest.
It’s not that I’m going for immortality, more that what I write appears to immediately vanish into the ether of Time!
Do you have any favourite songs or lyrics about being a writer?
