One More Time with Feeling Monologues

Explores the creative process of Nick Cave and his band as the singer struggles with an unspoken personal tragedy.

Things have been torn apart. And I'm desperately trying to find a way of making some kind of narrative sense out of it, if we're talking about songwriting, or at least some sense out of it where… I can do what it keeps saying in the books, or what people keep saying to me, where I can reduce this chaotic mess that's happened to me down into something that's more… you know, that I can reduce it, distill it down to a platitude that I can fit nicely into a kind of greeting card-sized platitude that means something to me, like 'He lives in my heart,' or something like that. People say it all the time to me, 'He lives in my heart,' and I go, 'Yeah, yeah, no, I know,' but he doesn't. I mean, he's in my heart, but he doesn't live at all. And there is no… I want to be able to sit here and… round this off in some kind of way, but to me it's just not, um… um…

All of this stuff I'm saying now, it just, it feels like a lot of bullshit to me. It may mean something, but in the end, there's something that happened… and there's a kind of ring around that event, or it's fenced off… and everything else is okay around it, but there's just something that happened in that short space of time that we can never get that far away from. You know, when I looked at the film back, there was something I was rattling on about time being elastic, and I think that's what I meant, that we're attached to this event, and that we move away, and we're like on a rubber band, and life can go on and on and on, but eventually it just keeps coming back to that thing. And that's… that's some kind of trauma, I guess.

Most of us don't want to change. What we do want is sort of modifications on the original model. We keep on being ourselves, but hopefully better versions of ourselves. But what happens when an event occurs that is so catastrophic that we just change from one day to the next? We change from the known person to an unknown person, so that when you look at yourself in the mirror, do you recognize the person that you were, but the person inside the skin is a different person? So that when you go outside, the world its the same, but now you are a different person, and you have to re-negotiate your position in the world. For instance, when you go into a shop to get cigarettes, because this new version of yourself smokes, and the shop owner says, 'How are you?' And you don't know how to answer. Or when you meet a friend on the street who says some kindness, and suddenly you are crying their arms for ages, and then you realize that person is not a friend at all, but someone else that you don't actually know very well. Or you go into a bakery to buy a loaf of bread, say, and you're standing in the queue, and someone grabs you by the arm says something with their kind eyes, but you can't work out what they've said because the new you can't hear very well. And so you say, 'What?' but too loudly, and angrily and he says, 'We are all with you, man,' and you look around and all the bakery is looking at you with kind eyes. And you think that people are really nice. But when did you become an object of pity?