“Once upon a time, a wild god zoomed…”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new song “Wild God” may be one of the more confounding in their forty-year run. Of course, there is no shortage of perplexing songs in the band’s extensive catalogue from the backbreaking labor of “Well of Misery” to the soupy stringed Portuguese singalong “Foi Na Cruz” to the do-da-do’s of “Jangling Jack”—or baffling lyrics, for that matter, including the mentions of Wikipedia binges and firey snatches on the much-loved Push the Sky Away. While the band’s last album (skipping Nick and Warren Ellis’s collaborative Carnage), 2019’s Ghosteen, features vast and wild imagery of burning horses, spirals of children going up to the sun, animals resurrected from their blood, and Baby Bear floating off to the moon in a boat, these fantastical visions don’t sit as strangely to me as “Wild God.”

After about ten seconds of tinny ambient noise, a sly joking fake-out aimed at fans ready to riot if the band released yet another synth-heavy album, a more conventional pop sound kicks in with—yes—actual drums and guitar. Beyond a return to a full band sound, leading to an unanticipated physical rush of glee that Nick and Warren remembered after about a decade that there were other members of the band, “Wild God” also marks a return to more narrative storytelling after albums of impressionistic dream songs (That is, until, a gospel choir and surging instrumentals send the song soaring into a joyful-to-the-level of maniacal flight). The song begins with the wild god reminiscing in a retirement village full of “rape and pillage” though “in his mind he was a man of great virtue and courage.” Zipping about his memories, he returns to Jubilee Street, a callback to that eponymous song on Push the Sky Away, only to find its subject dead for decades. After this, the wild god continues searching, flying, swimming, crying, dying, all the way to the cradle of Africa, Russia, China, the United States of America.

Beginning with rhyming zoomed with entombed, the lyrics have a notably basic rhyme scheme that teeters precariously on the edge of downright bad such as pairing room with “And make love with a kind of efficient gloom.” Somehow this children’s storybook rhyme feels purposeful, a direct contrast to the slippery narrative. Every time I listen to it, I hear something different that changes my interpretation of the song. I mean, what the fuck is Nick banging on about? Who the fuck is the wild god? Is he a magnetic aging rock star (who could that be) still able to harness a crowd, leading their spirits down? Certainly, the song sounds as if live performance was at the front of the band’s minds. Yet, what is with the references to tyranny and “rotten ideas”? Is the wild god some sort of equally charismatic authoritarian leader? Or is it just, you know, God god, swimming to the hymns and the prayers?

Or maybe it’s all of the above (plus the added twist of the lyrics “We are wild gods”). The only thing that gave me further entry into the song was finally pinpointing exactly what Bowie song I kept hearing in the last half of the track: “Rock n’ Roll Suicide.” Here, Nick trades Bowie’s “Gimme your hands!” and “Just turn on with me” for “Here we go,” a seeming toss-away line that is itself a reference to both “Ghosteen” and the beginning of Skeleton Tree’s  “Distant Sky” (“Let us go now…”). “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” is itself an ambivalent narrative—while tracing the death of Ziggy Stardust, our alien savior (a wild god of his own), it also is a moment of collective love and embrace with the audience. Though often overlooked for the Elvis, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen holy trinity, Bowie was a powerful influence on teenage Cave (just search for Nick’s ill-advised high school attempts at glam rock). Since “Wild God” plays as a return to this earlier inspiration, it seems like an opportune time to dive into two books by Adam Steiner that critically examine the works of Cave and Bowie respectively.

Published most recently by Rowman & Littlefield, Steiner’s Darker with the Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs of Love and Death can only be described as ambitious. Rather than tracing a basic chronology or whittling the interpretation down to a singular album as Steiner previously did with his Downward Spiral-centered Into the Never, Darker with the Dawn attempts the impossible, a staggering Sisyphean thematic overview of Cave’s entire career. This not only comprises Cave’s many bands—Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Grinderman—but also his novels, And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro and films, both written, scored, and starred. Hell, he even brings in Nick’s psychotic role as the bloodied prisoner Maynard in John Hillcoat’s Ghosts…of the Civil Dead. If that weren’t enough, Steiner puts Cave’s thematic obsessions into conversation with influences and references. Some are more predictable than others. While John Milton, Flannery O’Connor, and John Berryman were expected guests, I was pleasantly surprised by the appearance of Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Kanye West’s “I Am a God,” and William Morris’s More News from Nowhere. Even visual art is included such as Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron whose Venus Chiding Cupid and Depriving Him of His Wings features on the cover of And the Ass Saw the Angel.

This grand scope is both admirable and a probable miscalculation, making it so only well-seasoned Cave obsessives will be able to follow the many stray threads and winding roads that Steiner veers down without a real pathway for Cave beginners. He quotes Nick in a later chapter, “To get into one of my records, you have to enter my world, an alien, romantic, extreme world of my making. You don’t drag one of my records into your world.” Steiner certainly enters Cave’s world but perhaps a bit too much, jumping around in chronology from album to album, reference to reference, that in spots feels like the oft-reposted GIF of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie explaining the Pepe Silvia conspiracy. This is most apparent in a chapter on love and desire, which leaps from the heartbreak and “saudade” in 1997’s The Boatman’s Call to the absurdly biblically horny “Hard On for Love” from 1986’s Your Funeral…My Trial (and then on to 2004’s “Hiding All Away,” “Let Love In,” “From Her to Eternity,” “Watching Alice”…). All of which requires an expert familiarity with Cave’s world, so much so that I kept having to draw up songs from the Cave discography that takes up most of my brain in order to connect with Steiner’s analysis.

But I can do that. And for Cave fanatics, of which there is no shortage, Darker with the Dawn is a fascinating, if dense, read that touches on but thankfully surpasses some of the more well-worn Cave analysis on themes of love, religion, death, and bad motherfuckers. The best chapters concern some of the more unexpected themes like Nick’s often overlooked pitch-black sense of humor, the awe-inspiring vastness of the cosmos, and, my personal favorite, his wielding of natural imagery. Particularly the latter could not be more apparent yet I don’t think “Nature Boy” fits into the stereotypical image of the spider-limbed Black Crow King (itself a bird!) despite having a song of that title. However, nature is prominent in his songs, from the pleading and flaming trees of Push the Sky Away to the weeping willows in “Sad Waters” to all those damn references to gardens on 2001’s No More Shall We Part (from the top of my head: “Gates to the Garden,” “Darker with the Day” or “The Sorrowful Wife”).

More than sitting for a spell and pondering Cave’s natural metaphors, the real delight of Steiner’s book is his relatable enthusiasm for the songs. Granted, it’s not hard to suss out exactly what albums and songs are Steiner’s favorites like Push the Sky Away or the song “Anthrocene” off of 2016’s Skeleton Tree, which earns its own chapter. But who would fanatics be if we didn’t have favorites? Even so, his enthusiasm is infectious, which comes across most significantly in his vivid descriptions. Take his introduction to the throbbing bass line that opens “Tupleo,” heralding the coming of our King, Elvis:

“A raging storm draws a thick curtain of black rain down upon the crooked and cracked land. Sweeping in across the horizon, water keeps on falling, the darkness only cracked by crooked spears of lightning and thunderous handclaps. A howling wind whips all along the skyline, bound inside the cyclone of a storm shot through with raindrop bullets, stretching time like a melting clock, beating into the merciless earth.

In the stifled heartbeat of a repeating bass riff we hear a great rumbling terror move forward in its stuttering approach, every hiccupping second-third note breaking its terrible stride. The rivers have broken their banks, still waters are gathered to a rage, now nothing is here but the endless tide of the flood. Only Cave’s voice breaks through the haze to guide our eye, in both excitement and warning, to “looky, looky yonder” at the skyline folding into night.”

Or this shorter explanation of the electrified death penalty classic, “The Mercy Seat”:

“…a sermon delivered from atop a jilted throne of blood-steeped gold, tangled wire, fierce heat and brittle chill—it becomes an affirmation of existence for a man held in the jaws of death.”

This same passion is not only legible in Steiner’s 2023 book Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), published by Backbeat Books, but it also lands much more successfully for those not furiously rabid for a particular musician due to its narrower concept. Silhouettes and Shadows is an in-depth look at Bowie’s post-Berlin trilogy album, 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), through a song-by-song breakdown of the record. This structure is much appreciated as, while I’m a Bowie fan, I am not as well-versed in Bowie as I am in Nick Cave and until reading Steiner’s book, hadn’t listened to a full spin of Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in years.

Notably, reading the book motivated a return to it (yes, even the latter half, which isn’t as well-loved). This is entirely due to Steiner’s engaging contextualization of the album as a transitional moment for both Bowie and his native England—both a glance back, like the return to now-junkie Major Tom still floating out there in space in “Ashes to Ashes,” and a look forward to the new conservativism embodied by Margaret Thatcher. As Steiner quotes Bowie, “Scary Monsters always felt like some kind of purge. It was this sense of: ‘Wow, you can borrow the luggage of the past; you can amalgamate it with things that you’ve conceived could be in the future and you can set it in the now.’” The now, for Scary Monsters, isn’t exactly optimistic—the album is imbued with a sense of instability, indifference, and, like many of Bowie’s albums, populated by alienated characters or as Steiner writes, “a fraction of the many thwarted and desperate individuals who inhabit our societies.” For Bowie, Scary Monsters is an “upside-down world…he can see that everything is wrong but doesn’t know how to make it right.”

Like Darker with the Dawn, Silhouettes and Shadows pulls from Bowie’s many inspirations and references: Hans Richter’s Dada: Art and Anti-Art (which Bowie quotes almost directly in the lyrics to “Up the Hill Backwards”), Nietzsche, his own stint in The Elephant Man,  the New Romantic and Blitz Kids scene, and the violent rupture of John Lennon’s murder. It also showcases an impressive knowledge of Bowie’s history and how Bowie’s “luggage of the past” was dragged onto the record. However, what this book contains that Darker with the Dawn sorely lacks is more focus on the music itself. Take, for example, Steiner on Robert Fripp’s guitar in the sartorial mob mentality of “Fashion”:

“Across Scary Monsters, Robert Fripp’s guitar adds thundering momentum. On “Fashion,” it is a hot rod from hell, all revving engine and furious honking horn, driving a wedge through the hordes of human traffic. Grinding bumper to bumper, bouncing over the broken bodies, fighting for space, the shrinking future is everyone pushing in their own direction and getting nowhere. Fripp’s playing is backed up by the muscular bounce of the bass, drums, and the backing vocals’ “beep beep” stroke–lifted from Bowie’s kooky obscurity ‘Rupert the Riley’—playful but urgent”

One of my favorite chapters is on Bowie’s howling interpretation of Tom Verlaine’s existential “Kingdom Come,” providing a surprising amount of attention to a cover of another artist’s song. Steiner not only examines the “terrestrial angst” heard in Bowie’s take but also its offering, if not optimism, of a possibility for connection. He writes, “There is a yearning cut through Bowie’s songs; his natural sense of isolation and outsiderdom perhaps pushes his need for connection even further. It was not something that could be repaired, like the damaged people who populate Scary Monsters and the fans drawn to Bowie’s music; there is a sense of finding the same loneliness in each other. This more positive edge of ‘Kingdom Come’ and ‘Wild Is the Wind’ (both covers) offers a certain kind of love.” So to with “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” and “Wild God,” for that matter, at least with its communal conclusion. In one of the final chapters, quoting Bowie’s advice, “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in…,” Steiner concludes, “Eventually finding a place beyond earthly gravity, beyond footsteps, David Bowie went further out than most—and inspired us to dream that maybe we could go there too.”

Maybe that is exactly what wild gods are for.