Nick Cave

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.6 • 908 Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2023

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nick Cave is a musician, songwriter, author, and actor, best known as the frontman of the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, though is also beloved for his early group, The Birthday Party. Albums from The Boatman's Call (1997) to Skeleton Tree (2016) showcase Cave’s ability to craft emotionally charged and intellectually stimulating compositions filled with hauntingly poetic lyrics. Beyond music, Cave’s authored several books, including Faith, Hope and Carnage (2023), And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) and Stranger Than Kindness (2021). His collaborations with director John Hillcoat on movies like The Proposition (2005) and Lawless (2012) have received critical acclaim. And he maintains an open and engaging dialogue with his fans through his newsletter, The Red Hand Files. This podcast was recorded the day after the conclusion of Caves’s duo tour with Radiohead’s bassist, Colin Greenwood, in Los Angeles. A few days after recording this podcast, he used The Red Hand Files to write the following message to his fans: “After I stepped off stage at the final show, I changed from my grey suit into a blue suit, ate some seafood with Colin, and then headed to the aftershow, where I hung out with some old friends for an hour or so before going back to the hotel with Susie. We stayed up for a few hours and then tried to sleep, but I was hyped up, so I took a sleeping pill at 4 am — which was a dumb idea because I had an interview that morning with Rick Rubin for his podcast. Anyway, when I woke up, I put on a grey suit, jumped into the car with my driver to go to Malibu, did Rick’s podcast (which could turn out quite interesting as I’m not sure the sleeping pill had completely worn off), then started back to L.A. In the car, I began to feel a bit rough, so we parked up at Zuma Beach, where I threw off my clothes and jumped into the sea in an unsuccessful attempt to restore myself; then we carried on to the hotel, where I changed from my grey suit into a blue suit before heading to Book Soup for [a] signing . . . After the signing, I returned to the hotel feeling tired and weird, sat up with Susie for a while, went to bed, woke up about 2 am, threw up in the sink and collapsed unconscious on the bathroom floor. Susie found me there and hauled me back onto the bed; my assistant was called to the hotel, some extremely handsome emergency paramedics turned up, a lovely nurse arrived and fixed me to a drip, and later, I spoke to an eighty-nine-year-old saint of a doctor who diagnosed an acute gastro event.” ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------

Transcript

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0:00.0	Tetragrammaton
0:02.0	Tetracketam.
0:03.0	I think the red hand files began after my son died in a response essentially to the amount of
0:31.4	questions, no, not questions, amount of letters that came into me, not just in sympathy or
0:37.4	commiseration, but how people had gone through
0:40.3	the same things. This happened to me. I know what you're going through because this happened
0:45.2	to me. And it was a huge amount of letters and that they just kept on coming. And I think
0:51.6	I just wanted to be able to talk to those people. I found it gratifying for myself.
0:57.1	I found it a way of moving forward, a way of working out how to articulate things that were going on.
1:06.4	And it just sort of grew out of that. I mean, first of all, the red hand files, it was like an
1:11.4	ask me anything type of thing. And most of the questions that came my way were initially,
1:18.7	who's your favorite artists, what are your inspirations, all that kind of thing, you know,
1:24.0	music-related questions. But I just sort of gently expanded the range of what I was prepared to talk about,
1:31.3	and people responded by asking questions or writing in letters that sat outside what I do musically.
1:38.3	Until now, it's a massive thing.
1:41.3	Do you feel like in the wake of the tragedy that the strangers who reached out had a more
1:48.3	profound effect than the friends who reached out?
1:52.4	I have to say in these sorts of situations, you remember who reaches out and who doesn't
2:00.7	reach out. Now it's very who doesn't reach out.
2:01.6	Now it's very difficult actually to reach out to people with this sort of tragedy.
2:05.6	It's not, not everyone can do it.
2:08.6	And I understand that, but you do sort of, you remember acutely the small gestures from people.
	...

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