FEATURE:
Into My Arms
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ The Boatman's Call at Twenty-Five
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I know it is an album…
that Nick Cave has mixed feelings about. On 3rd March, 1997, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds released their tenth studio album, The Boatman’s Call. I shall come to an article in a minute where Cave voiced his ‘disgust’ regarding the album. It was definitely a marked shift for the band. The Australian legends shifted from the Post-Punk sound that people were used to and embraced a more piano-driven one. The music on The Boatman’s Call was sombre, romantic and tender. Since 1997, the band have released albums like this. In fact, their two most-recent albums, Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019) are as revealing, open and, at times, devastating as The Boatman’s Call. One can see how, in the years after their 1997 release, Cave distanced himself slightly. Last year, NME reported the fact that, at one stage, Nick Cave was not entirely proud of an album that many fans consider to be a highpoint for his band:
“Nick Cave has opened up on why he felt “disgusted” by his classic album ‘The Boatman’s Call’ and how, in time, he has developed a greater appreciation for the record.
The 1997 record is widely considered to be one of Cave’s greatest efforts with The Bad Seeds, featuring seminal tracks such as the seminal ‘Into My Arms’ and ‘(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?’
Writing in the latest edition of his Red Hand Files, Cave responded to a fan who asked why he opted to play tracks from the album during his recent livestream show at London’s Alexandra Palace.
“After ‘The Boatman’s Call’ came out I experienced a kind of embarrassment. I felt I had exposed too much. These hyper-personal songs suddenly seemed indulgent, self-serving amplifications of what was essentially an ordinary, commonplace ordeal. All the high drama, the tragedy and the hand wringing ‘disgusted’ me, and I said so in press interviews,” Cave explained.
“In time, however, I learned that the disgust was essentially the fear and shame experienced by someone who was swimming the uncertain waters between two boats — songs that were fictional and songs of an autobiographical or confessional nature. A radical change was occurring in my songwriting, despite myself, and such changes can leave one feeling extremely vulnerable, defensive and reactive.”
Cave added: “Of course, I no longer see ‘The Boatman’s Call’ in that way, and understand that the record was a necessary leap into a type of songwriting that would ultimately become exclusively autobiographical — ‘Skeleton Tree’ and ‘Ghosteen’, for example — but, conversely, less about myself and more about our collective ‘selves’. When I sang the ‘The Boatman’s Call’ songs for the Idiot Prayer film, they no longer felt like cries emanating from the small, yet cataclysmic, devastations of life”.
I will, as I do, get to reviews in a second. After 1996’s Murder Ballads – where the band performed new and old murder ballads; talking about crimes of passion -, I guess The Boatman’s Call was a chance to do something that was very different. Purer and more personal, I can understand why The Boatman’s Call is now considered a classic. Into My Arms, perhaps Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ best-known song, opens the album. A seemingly natural evolution for a masterful songwriter who adopted different personas and sonic avenues, The Boatman’s Call will get a lot of new focus on its anniversary come 3rd March. Spectrum Culture revisited the album in 2017.
“By 1997, Nick Cave had already traversed numerous guises. He’d been a noisy gutter poet with the Birthday Party, a gothic troubadour in his early solo work, a post-punk genius and, by the mid-1990s, a Springsteen-like figure whose own highway mythos sounded suited to a lane leading to Hell. Yet even by the artist’s own unpredictable standards, few could have anticipated him making a record like The Boatman’s Call. Prior to this, even Cave’s sweetest, most tranquil songs were infused with cynicism, irony and misery, but here is an album of rich, sonorous ballads, unvarnished and vulnerable. It added yet another wrinkle to Cave’s warped self-portrait, so naked as to be confounding in its clashing honesty.
The album opens with “Into My Arms,” which sports one of the greatest first lines to ever usher in an album: “I don’t believe in an interventionist God/ But I know, darling, that you do.” Cave’s wit is still present in the mouthful of a first line, but it nonetheless conveys a bracing sentiment, balancing twin impulses of apostasy and romantic longing that run through the album. “Into My Arms” mines Biblical imagery to make an agnostic’s prayer, a fervent plea to powers that may or may not exist to watch over a lover. It remains Cave’s most beautiful, stripped-down ballad, with nothing but a piano to shape the singer’s muted vocals as he intones to the heavens. Cave’s voice, heretofore filled with sinister menace, is now just somber, admitting weakness in the face of love.
This newfound warmth pervades much of the album. “Lime Tree Arbour” is a tranquil dedication of affection and trust in a partner that nakedly admits to reliance on someone else with lines like “There is a hand that protects me/ And I do love her so.” “Black Hair” is an ode to his lover’s raven locks, with “black hair” factoring into every line, the repetition oscillating between dedication to fixation as an accordion lends a moonlit swell to Cave’s intonations. “Green Eyes” homes in on another body part, with Cave plaintively begging, “So hold me and hold me, don’t tell me your name.” There’s a mournful, sea-shanty quality to the artist’s lovesick ballads, not entirely unlike Tom Waits’s own, and the unorthodox instrumentation that the Bad Seeds bring shows them evolving alongside Cave, modulating their intensity without sacrificing idiosyncrasy.
Yet for all the songs of devotion, there are just as many that drift through the sorrow of heartbreak, often invoking religion for both answers and distraction. “Brompton Oratory,” by contrast, finds Cave indulging his religious inclinations and doubt in equal measure, attending service in the cathedral but finding his mind drifting to the marble statues of apostles frozen away from the sin and temptation of the modern world. Far from feeling invigorated by religion, Cave confesses that he envies the stone images for their impassiveness, not only in terms of his spiritual need but in a hinted-at break-up that pervades the lonely searching of the LP. As Cave croons, an organ swells, a benediction to his doubting declamations. “People Ain’t No Good” puts a new face on Cave’s cynical humor, contrasting initially upbeat, romantic lyrics with the chorus containing the song’s title before drifting into breakup misery.
In retrospect, Cave’s balance of weariness and longing fits seamlessly within his overall body of work and the somber timbre of his voice. Having scored his most successful single in a collaboration with Kylie Minogue, he produced his most consistent LP in the wake of their breakup. It’s Cave’s version of Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely, a dejected affair that strips away usual modes to reveal the torn, ragged heart beneath. As far and wide as Cave and his crew had traveled sonically over the years, somehow it was the bare bones eclecticism and raw emotion of The Boatman’s Call that most clearly informed Cave’s career afterward, culminating in his recent, tragic return to bared-soul intensity for Skeleton Tree”.
I want to end with a couple of reviews. Even if Nick Cave has had changing and strange feelings with an album that many people adore, he must recognise that it is so important. The Boatman’s Call is among the greatest and most important albums of the 1990s. In 2011, to coincide with Mute reissuing albums from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Pitchfork gave their thoughts to The Boatman’s Call:
“The Boatman's Call is Cave's plea for redemption, an album every bit as dignified as its predecessor is deranged. After spending much of his career spinning yarns out of other people's misery, Cave-- emerging from a divorce and a highly publicized but short-lived affair with PJ Harvey-- comes clean about his own. On the stirring piano-based hymns "Into My Arms" and "There Is a Kingdom", he looks to religion less as a convenient dramatic device and more as the genuine refuge for the lonely soul. Cave had flirted with tender balladry many times before, but whereas previous turns like "Straight to You" and "The Ship Song" were shot through the Bad Seeds' widescreen lens, here, the atmosphere is so spare and intimate, you feel like you're curled up inside Cave's piano. More than any other album in this batch of reissues, The Boatman's Call is greatly enriched by a remaster that amplifies the magnitude of Cave's loneliness, from the burning-ember ambience of "Lime Tree Arbour" to Ellis' trembling violin lines on the absolutely devastating "Far From Me". But even though The Boatman's Call is Cave's most confessional, open-hearted album, its sense of sorrow and catharsis transcends a strictly personal interpretation. It speak volumes about the album's universality that its songs have soundtracked everything from Michael Hutchence's funeral to Shrek 2”.
Before closing, I want to bring in one more review. A very special and enormously beautiful album, the BBC provided their assessment of The Boatman’s Call in 2011. They acknowledged and saw and album that is undeniably a classic work from a band who, to this day, keep surprising fans with the quality and consistency of their albums:
“For their 10th album – and follow-up to the cheery Murder Ballads – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds explored more redemptive qualities. Originally released in 1997, gone were the menacing, troubled tunes of yore; instead, here was a selection of graceful, minimal, melancholic numbers that saw Cave reflect on spirituality, loves past and present, and almost atoning for past indiscretions. These are your actual songs of faith and devotion, and by Cave’s own admission his most personal album to date.
The opener is a modern-day classic. Into My Arms is a love song so perfect you wonder why any other composition of its kind bothers to go up against a ballad that all others should rightfully refer to as ‘Sir’. Cave opens his heart from the outset, the song beginning with the stunning line of "I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do". It’s such a gorgeous song that Peaches Geldof even has its lyrics tattooed on her (but don’t let that put you off). It’s also the only Bad Seeds tune you’re likely to hear at a wedding
His brief dalliance with Polly Harvey, whom he became infatuated with after their Henry Lee duet on Murder Ballads, is referenced on Green Eyes, Black Hair and the more direct West Country Girl. Comparisons with Dylan and – more on the money – Leonard Cohen are no bad things either. The religious motifs of Brompton Oratory, an album highlight, and There Is a Kingdom lend an air of a man coming to terms with his place in the world, with subtle churchy murmurs over drum machines. The Bad Seeds themselves play a blinder, with gentle and sympathetic elegance throughout.
It’s an audacious task trying to pin down the core essentials in The Bad Seeds’ catalogue, as there’s so much of it, but The Boatman’s Call would be labelled a classic in anyone’s canon. No band on their 10th album should have much more to say, but taking this turn for the reflective helped reignite The Bad Seeds and further secured their legacy. It is, in short, brilliant”.
I shall end here. Among the big album anniversaries this year, the twenty-fifth of The Boatman’s Call on 3rd March is very important. An album that was quite a change of direction for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, today it seems less open and emotional than some of their more recent work. With songs such as Into My Arms, People Ain’t No Good, (Are You) the One That I've Been Waiting For?, West Country Girl and Black Hair in the running order, The Boatman’s Call is very special. A quarter of a century after it was released into the world, its songs still have the power to…
STOP you in your tracks.