Music for Sunday: Nick Cave

I promised red_satin_doll I'd post some Nick Cave songs for beginners. Which is tricky, because much like that other lot of artists he often gets lumped in with (Leonard, Bob, Patti, Tom, etc) he can be a bit of an acquired taste; at once a horrible and fantastic singer, a whiny dealer of manpain and violence, and a viciously funny or heartbreaking deconstructor of it... There's his band, the Bad Seeds, who can play just about anything in the space between folk and punk as if they just got out of bed after spending three days getting drunk and listening to old blues records. He is one of the best lyricists in rock music - one of the few whose lyrics can even hold up without the music. His lyrics read like short stories, or even complete novels condensed to 5 minutes, with character voices, context and backstory snuck in through subtle little references to everything from the Bible (much like with Cohen and Dylan, there's a LOT of biblical imagery in his songs without it being necessarily religious) to Miley Cyrus.

So here goes, ten songs from young punk to elder statesman of rock'n'roll.

( The beast it cometh, cometh down )

Also, a few thoughts on his 1996 album Murder Ballads as it relates to narratives about, to quote Johnny Cash, love, god and murder:
( So it's Rorschach and Prozac and everything is groovy! )