Cave's lyrics often have an apocalyptic bent to them, and this record continues to hammer away on that theme -- only this time, the rest of the world seems to have caught up with him. Without Cave having changed much thematically, this record feels as if it's addressing the state of the world more directly than any of his past work. I asked him about the repeated mention of the "moral code disappearing." He replied: "I think anyone who looks around the world must feel that. And it disturbs me. There just seems to be less and less respect for the world. I guess I'm writing about that a lot." Cave seemed loath to talk politics, but not for lack of opinions. When I asked him what his thoughts were on the current U.S. administration, he answered bleakly, "Ugly. Wrong. There's two thoughts about it."

One of the most intriguing aspects of Cave's lyric writing is his use of Christian imagery. Modern pop rock songwriting is full of it, but it is usually used for its aesthetic, rather than religious, potency. Cave's use of Christian imagery is different in that he is a believer.

This would be clear, I think, to anyone who has followed his career, or paid close attention to his lyrics, but it was made more explicit in 1998, when Cave released a recording of two lectures. The first, "The Secret Life of the Love Song," is a discussion of the art of writing love songs, and it revolves around Cave's belief that "any true love song is a song to God." The second, "The Flesh Made Word," includes the extraordinary and revealing insight that Cave's progressive aesthetic mellowing is due to a change in his focus from the Old to the New Testament. Cave told me that he does not go to church, and that he is not affiliated with any particular branch of Christianity, but there is no question that his God is a Christian God. When I asked Cave if he had any interest in other religions, or in a broader, non-religious spirituality, he replied, "Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy."

Rock 'n' roll, which so prides itself on being anti-establishment, and Christianity, the ultimate establishment, make uncomfortable bedfellows -- is there genre of music more reliably atrocious than Christian rock? Dylan went electric and his fans revolted. Dylan went born again and they were so stunned and horrified that they went into denial and pretended he didn't exist -- at least until he distanced himself from Christianity a decade later. But with Dylan, there's always the niggling, in this case welcome, suspicion that he doesn't really mean it, that he's just toying with the world, having some fun, being cryptically ironic. With Cave, that interpretation does not work. He is a deeply, unsettlingly sincere artist. Fans and music critics alike seem to have settled on a policy of just ignoring Cave's religion.

Not that Cave's religion is preachy, or boring, or sanctimonious. In fact, it can often be downright frightening. Whatever he says about being only interested in the New Testament these days, Cave's writing about religion -- both in his songs and in his 1989 novel, "And the Ass Saw the Angel" -- retains a kind of Old Testament rage and sense of violence. This new record is peppered with lines like "The sky is on fire, the dead are heaped across the land," and references to "a war coming from above." When I mentioned that to Cave, he pointed out that "the New Testament is by no means anodyne." But Cave's entry point into Christianity was his fascination with the angry God of the Old Testament, and however many love songs he writes, there is still an undercurrent of violence and brutality in his work -- this is, after all, the man who just 10 years ago released an album consisting entirely of murder ballads, and whose most famous song, "The Mercy Seat," is from the perspective of someone who is about to be executed on the electric chair. If I'd had a little more courage, I might have asked him if he was, as William Blake famously said of Milton, "A true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

Cave seemed a bit surprised, and not entirely comfortable, that I wanted to talk to him about his religious beliefs. "I'm often happy not to talk about it. It sometimes seems inappropriate. Very often I have to defend my viewpoint. And I've sort of given up defending."

I asked him if he was surprised that his religious beliefs were so rarely mentioned in articles about him. "I know that the editors talk to the journalists before they go and say, 'Don't get him going on about God,'" he said. "The concept of God in America is very different than it is in England. Because we see the horrendous outcome of religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked by a gang of psychopaths and bullies and homophobes, and the name of God has been used for their own twisted agendas. So that if you mention God, or a belief in God, in England, it's almost automatically associated with that kind of thinking. Religion's gotten a really bad name."

Over the last few years, Cave has written a number of love songs in which it is ambiguous whether the figure being addressed is a woman, or God, where there appears to be a deliberate conflation of earthly and divine love. On "No More Shall We Part," the song "Love Letter," among the most memorable he has written, seems like a classic love song until near the end, when he sings:

Rain your kisses down upon me
Rain your kisses down in storms
And for all who'll come before me
In your slowly fading forms.

"Breathless," from "The Lyre of Orpheus," is ambiguous throughout:

The red-breasted robin beats his wings
His throat it trembles when his sings
For he is helpless before you
Still your hands, And still your heart
For still your face comes shining through
And all the morning glows anew
Still your mind, Still your soul
For still the fire of love is true
And I am breathless without you.

These songs remind me most of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson, in which religious ecstasy sometimes sounds decidedly romantic in nature. Cave agreed with me that there was a link to those poets, and pointed out that Van Morrison's "Have I Told You Lately" does something similar. He also told me that there's never any ambiguity in his mind about who is being addressed in his songs -- but declined to be any more specific than that.

Nearly three decades into a career that has seen his transformation from a rebellious preacher of anger into a thoughtful, widely respected intellectual powerhouse, Nick Cave continues to chronicle his potent blend of personal obsessions with a searching depth, profundity, and poetic surefootedness that is rare in popular music, and places him among the truly great songwriters of our time. And, at 47 years old, he may still be getting better.

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