The Immense Grief of Nick Cave's 'Skeleton Tree'
On the remarkable "Skeleton Tree" and its accompanying film, Nick Cave plumbs the emotional dimensions of loss.
Nick Cave knows death. He’s traversed the subject with rich and disturbing familiarity. His father, a schoolteacher, died in a car crash when Cave was 19 and jailed for a petty crime. Years later, “The Mercy Seat,” a grim account of a condemned man awaiting the electric chair, became his trademark song. (Johnny Cash brought the song added resonance when he covered it a decade later, as he faced down his own declining health.) Cave’s best album climaxes with a feverish imagining of his demise and funeral titled “Lay Me Low.” His best-album, 1996’s , delights.
