Happy 30th Anniversary to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ eighth studio album Let Love In, originally released April 18, 1994.
Here’s one that’s sure to hurt my music critic bona fides: In 2016, Nick Cave released Skeleton Tree, an album finished in the aftermath of the death of his son, Arthur, to an overwhelmingly positive reception. My reaction was: “Nick Cave? The guy with the song in the Harry Potter movie?”
Not my finest work, I’ll admit. But Skeleton Tree, and its follow-up, the tender and haunted Ghosteen (2019), as well as his sensitive online blog, gave me the impression that Nick Cave was a pretty chill older gentleman. A chill older gentleman who was obsessed with faith and mortality, sure, but he had solid reasons for such a pre-occupation. I had this guy pegged.
So, when I dug up the propulsive, maniacal Live Seeds (1993) and heard searing renditions of tunes like “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” and “The Mercy Seat,” and picked up Murder Ballads (1996), I thought, well, okay, maybe I was missing something. As I’ve retroactively pieced together Cave’s career as a relative newcomer, few records have felt as urgent as 1994’s Let Love In.
The lynchpin is the penultimate track, “Lay Me Low.” Over a loping, melodramatic halftime groove, Cave chronicles his future demise. What starts as a slurred accounting of what happens when Cave dies eventually turns into a full-throttle Bad Seeds rave-up. It unifies Cave’s sordid past as a depraved punk frontman to his future as a comfort to those facing grief. A premature swan song, “Lay Me Low” is nothing less than the drama and sanctity of any human life—not just Nick Cave’s remarkable one—in five minutes of ass-kicking, theatrical rock and roll.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about “Lay Me Low” is that it doesn’t close the album. Instead of doing the obvious thing and ending with the Big Dramatic Song About Death, Cave offers a spooky, sinister reprise of “Do You Love Me.” In its original form, “Do You Love Me” is a snarling love song, in which jangling wedding bells taunt the narrator with the threat of the heartbreak inherent in the relationship: the ways that we try and fail to understand our partners, and the despair that we feel when they finally leave us. All of the mourning from “Lay Me Low” is, ostensibly, from the perspective of the sort of person narrating “Do You Love Me”: someone who has loved and lost.
Listen to the Album:
Except (and this is the wild part), the reprise of “Do You Love Me” that ends Let Love In is an extremely different song from the opening version, with the narrator being sexually abused by an old man in a church. In asking the song’s titular question, Cave throws a light on the way other emotions—greed, lust, a desire for power—disguise themselves as love. When one considers the sinister tone of the wedding bells in the original “Do You Love Me,” it all folds back on itself: is that narrator making the same mistake? Is this the same story? Altogether, the swirling confusion of being a single person, and finding a place for oneself amidst big things like love, lust, mortality, selfhood, all unravel.
This is the heart of Cave’s work: understanding the simultaneity of vulnerability, darkness, and goodness inside of each person. While “Lay Me Low” sounds triumphant, it celebrates a life that is mired in shortcomings. It applies to the lovelorn narrator of “Nobody’s Baby Now” just as much as it does to the underworld boss in “Red Right Hand,” whose arrival is also announced with the sound of a bell.
The seeds of Cave’s later “Hallmark hippie” turn were laid long ago. Let Love In asks us to imagine every part of him – the malanderer, the badlander, the mourning father, the punk, the blogger—as part of one person’s story. While there’s some raunchy, vile stuff on this record(see “Jangling Jack”),the structure of the album reminds us that violence is not random. It is a symptom of a desire for love, understanding, an end to loneliness. On the title track, Cave admits that he turns to love even though he knows that it exposes him to despair. Let Love In asks us to remember that this progression—love to despair to desperation—is what we’re looking at when we see the darkness in the world.
Listen: