Nick Cave has explained how he can feel “love” for his live audience, and explained why he thinks the song ‘Into My Arms’ is so impactful.
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The Bad Seeds frontman shared the update with fans on his own website, The Red Hand Files, and it came as a fan reached out to him and asked why he claims to “love” the people in the audience at his live shows.
The question, he explained, came as he is currently on his run of North American tour dates with the band, and the response was written while he was on a flight to a show in Chicago.
“When I tell the audience that I love them, the sentiment is entirely true. I feel an emotional transaction with the crowd that is powerful and profoundly intimate,” he wrote. “I stand before you all – strangers – witnessing you both individually and collectively, and sense an unbounded love. This love is true. It is not symbolic, metaphorical, or platitudinous.”
He continued, explaining how he recognises the intense emotions of the people looking back at him, and how it is in the renditions of his 1997 song ‘Into My Arms’ that he finds the response from the crowd particularly powerful.
“I see before me a group of human beings, precarious and vulnerable, granted a brief time on this earth, each filled with a shocking potential for beauty and terror, good and evil, and with the extraordinary capacity to give and receive love,” he added. “At that moment, love is the appropriate response.”
"I see before me a group of human beings, precarious and vulnerable, granted a brief time on this earth, each filled with a shocking potential for beauty and terror, good and evil, and with the extraordinary capacity to give and receive love,” he added. “At that moment, love is the appropriate response.”
“When the crowd joins me in singing ‘Into My Arms’, it feels like a mutual embrace, an act of conciliation, of comfort, and fellowship – an acknowledgement of our common fate, that we are, in that moment, both living and dying in concert – and it’s hard to keep my fucking shit together, to be honest.’
The song remains one of Cave’s most famous tracks, and was shared as part of his 10th studio album ‘The Boatman’s Call’ back in 1997. Cave has previously explained that he wrote with the song while in rehab.
